"Obscene" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weapons, and did loiter in wait on the front steps of the Legislative Assembly Building in the city of New Austin, Continent of Sam Houston, and did approach the decedent, addressing him in abusive, obscene, and indecent language, and did set upon and attack him with the machete aforesaid, causing the said decedent, S. Austin ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... moral and religious reformation. Pomps, vanities, and vices were to be abandoned. Immediately the women and the young men threw aside their silks and fine attire. The Carnival songs ceased. Hymns and processions took the place of obscene choruses and pagan triumphs. The laws were remodeled in the same severe and abrupt spirit. Usury was abolished. Whatever Savonarola ordained, Florence executed. By the magic of his influence the city ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and good-tempered, and he was preserved by his solitariness from all grossness and evil. It was a big school, and occasionally he perceived in the talk and behaviour of his companions the signs of some ugly and obscene mystery that he did not understand, and that he had no wish to penetrate. But the result, which in after days surprised him with a sense of deep gratitude and thankfulness, was, that though he spent two years at this school, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Luxembourg, condemned by the Revolutionary tribunal and executed on the 13th of April 1794. Chaumette's career had its brighter side. He was an ardent social reformer; he secured the abolition of corporal punishment in the schools, the suppression of lotteries, of houses of ill-fame and of obscene literature; he instituted reforms in the hospitals, and insisted on the honours of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Emmelia, was solemn; whilst that in comedy, Cordax, was frivolous, and the siccinis, or dance of Satyrs, was often obscene. They danced to the music of the pipes, the tambour, the harp, castanets, cymbals, ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... once a woman who had no equal in her day for beauty and loveliness and grace and perfection; and a certain lewd youth and an obscene setting eyes on her, fell in love with her and loved her with exceeding passion, but she was chaste and inclined not to adultery. It chanced one day that her husband went on a journey to a certain town, whereupon the young man fell to sending to her many times a day; but she made ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to recognise His providence in all matters human, notwithstanding that it is foolhardy and sometimes incongruous to follow Him too closely. Because being universal He is to be found in all sorts of encounters, sublime by the conduct which He keeps, but obscene or ridiculous for the part man takes in it and which is the only part where they appear to us. And therefore one must not shout, in the manner of Capuchin monks and goody-goody women, that God is to be seen in every trifle. Let us praise the Lord; pray to Him to enlighten ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... problem of labour without fail. His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... folk who meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their heels, carving with their imperceptible tools, the droll or odiously obscene ivory ornaments, marvelous cabinet curiosities which have made Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... dollars; he wore a diamond cluster-pin and he parted his hair behind. He had always been, regarded as the most elegant gentleman in his territory, and it was conceded by all that no man thereabouts was anywhere near his equal in the telling of an obscene story except the venerable white-haired governor himself. The Hon. Higgins had not come to serve his country in Washington for nothing. The appropriation which he had engineered through Congress for the maintenance, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... change and terrific upheaval. France and England particularly are the prey of the Demon of Realism,—and all the writers who SHOULD use their pens to inspire and elevate the people, assist in degrading them. When their books are not obscene, they are blasphemous. Russia, too, joins in the cry of Realism!—Realism! ... Let us have the filth of the gutters, the scourgings of dustholes, the corruption of graves, the odors of malaria, the howlings of drunkards, the revellings of sensualists, . . ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... devout Billy—Billy Preston. That pious man liked to have the talk mainly to himself, and he thought that anything not obscene was tame. By the way, these abrupt and insolent remarks are characteristic of public-house wit. A favourite joke is to ask a friend a serious question. When he fails to answer, then the joker shouts some totally irrelevant ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... continuous change of amusements, each noisier and duller than the one before. Now in the theatre, now in the open, they played a stupid but obscene vaudeville piece, and vicious topical songs were sung (a thunder of applause); an animated chansonnette-singer screeched and pulled about with her naked, excessively whitened shoulders, and winked with her exaggeratedly painted eyes; a woman acrobat, raising her legs, attired ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... her famous institution at Ecouen. This sensible precaution proved that she was no ordinary woman. There, her young ladies did not gaze upon the picture gallery of the streets, the huge and grotesque figures and the obscene words drawn by some evil-spirited pencil. They had not perpetually before their eyes the spectacle of human infirmities exhibited at every barrier in France, and treacherous book-stalls did not vomit ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... stops me and asks: Although it may be true that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could you allow such obscene details as those that have been ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... of the contests between the monkey and the turtle, is a Buddhist birth-story, the "Kacchapa-jataka," No. 273, which narrates how a monkey insulted a tortoise by thrusting his penis down the sleeping tortoise's throat, and how the monkey was punished. Although this particular obscene jest is not found in any of our versions, I think that there is a trace of it preserved in the Bagobo story. The passage runs thus (loc. cit. pp. 59-60): "At that all the monkeys were angry [incident D], and ran screaming ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... interested him pleasantly for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco and areas of Redcliffe Gardens. He looked down into the areas and saw therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows. All the obscene apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... bandages, is oftener to be met with than any other of the many animals thus preserved by the Egyptians. In spite of the great care bestowed on cats, there can have been no lack of mice in Egypt. In one nomos or province the shrew-mouse was sacred, and a satirical, obscene papyrus in Turin shows us a war between the cats and mice; the Papyrus Ebers contains poisons for mice. We ourselves possess a shrew-mouse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... strong for him. Presently the beast desisted from its play, and looking wickedly about it, came near to the Father's bed, and seemed to put up its hairy forelegs upon it; he could see its narrow and obscene eyes, which burned with a dull yellow light, and were fixed upon him. And now the Father thought that his end was near, for he could stir neither hand nor foot, and the sweat rained down his brow; but he made a mighty ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... own feelings on reading it, he observes, "that he was delighted beyond measure at the variety of the subjects and the elegance of the poetry; at the same time he wondered how things so improper and so obscene could be represented by his friend so gracefully and so neatly, and" he was of opinion that "the many excessive obscenities were expressed in such a manner that they seemed not only to be depicted but to have been actually committed; for ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... found that already a whole army of vultures had gathered about the carcass of the strange monstrous beast, and were busily engaged in devouring the malodorous flesh. The trio made a wide circuit so as not to disturb the obscene birds at their disgusting banquet, and in due time found their way back again to their camp, where, after a hearty meal, they set to work in earnest upon ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... young girls, and that although every one saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties, people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene orgies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... augers were being turned at once into his very skull; this done, they would fill his brain with bugs and worms to eat it out, when their gnawing would instantly commence. These spirits would pinch and pound him, twitch him up and throw him down, yell and blaspheme, and use the most obscene language that mortals can conceive; they would declare that they were Christ in one breath, and devils in the next; they would tie him head to foot for a long time together in a most excruciating posture; declare they would wring his neck off because ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... saints and martyrs,—it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... were, as Tanqueray owned, incomparably untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness in ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... given to few men to produce. But Paragot only smiled, and sipped his absinthe. It was against his principles, he said. The world would be a gentler habitat if there had never been written or graven record of a human action, and he refused to pander to the obscene curiosity of the multitude as to the thoughts and doings of an entire stranger. Besides, literary composition was beset with too many difficulties. One's method of expression had always to be in evening dress which he abhorred, and he could not abide the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... name of the Supreme Being, the creator of themselves and the universe. This word is Lacha, which with them is the corporeal chastity of the females; we say corporeal chastity, for no other do they hold in the slightest esteem; it is lawful among them, nay praiseworthy, to be obscene in look, gesture and discourse, to be accessories to vice, and to stand by and laugh at the worst abominations of the Busne (gorgios, or gentiles) provided their Lacha ye trupos, or corporeal chastity, remains unblemished. The gypsy child, from her earliest years, is ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... indignation, the glittering steel slumbered uneasily and showed its half-drawn menace from the subtle lines of poets and essayists who have been carrying weapons these twenty years; their souls thirsted for an opportunity to rescue fair Liberty from the obscene rout who had her in durance for their purposes, and to hail her accession to a lawful throne with the rich gifts of knowledge, use, and beauty, a homage that only free minds can pay, and only when freedom claims it. We do not forget the literary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stood looking down at Sir John and his little round stomach and his little round eyes with their obscene twinkle. And for the life of him he couldn't feel the indignation he would like to have felt. As his eyes encountered Sir John's something secret and primitive in Mr. Waddington responded to that obscene twinkle; ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... gave us pause. It was the horrible misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary position, the forging by his ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Belgium and Germany have all been suggested as the place of printing, and now the Pall Mall Gazette affirms that the work was done "north of the Tweed." There is, without doubt, on British soil, it says, "a press which year after year produces scores of obscene publications." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of the price of food. Fifty on one day, seventy on the next, passed under the hands of the overworked and devoted doctors. Fifteen hundred, and later two thousand, of the garrison were down. The air was poisoned by foul sewage and dark with obscene flies. They speckled the scanty food. Eggs were already a shilling each, cigarettes sixpence, whisky five pounds a bottle: a city more free from gluttony and drunkenness ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... guile, and some wise and simple reasoning, the Italian prevailed. Together, without objection from the captain of the yard, with many unavailing protests from Richling, who would now do it alone, and with Ristofalo smiling like a Chinaman at the obscene ribaldry of the spectators in the yard, they scrubbed the cell. Then came the tank. They had to stand in it with the water up to their knees, and rub its sides with brickbats. Richling fell down twice in the water, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... named, the critic asks: "What can be said against Cephalus and Procris?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told by Antoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his Metamorphoses ([Greek: metamorphoseon synagogae]) it is one of the most abominable and obscene stories ever penned even by a Greek. Some of the disgusting details are omitted in the versions of Ovid and Hyginus, but in the least offensive version that can be ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... instructor, made progress. He sat hours and hours laughing at his stories—sometimes obscene, sometimes profane, but always so full of life, drollery, and mimicry that a more steady head than Fred's was needed to withstand the contagion. Dick had been to the theatre—knew it all like a book, and would take Fred there as soon ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... phases, he was always silent while chewing the cud of his reflections. Bridget was thinking, too. She had an uneasy sense of startlement, without exactly knowing why she felt startled in that inward way. It was as though some great obscene bird of flight had brushed her with its wings, and brought vaguely to her consciousness unpleasant possibilities. But presently she became interested in watching Colin's handling of the team. She had often sat behind such a team, but never ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... been here six months, and, in justice to truth, I must state the facts even if they show that my previous opinions were incorrect. To those who study the people closely in regard to sex matters, I can say truthfully that sexual excitement has fallen fifty per cent., and that obscene pictures and stories have no attraction for the people. The low places of amusement, that used to be run under the name of 'Variety Theaters,' and other such names, are closed up, for the reason, as a former proprietor of one of these resorts expressed it, 'A leg and bosom show has no attraction ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... table, where red lights burn, and incense-sticks smoulder, all of which, as shall be explained later, are precautions to thwart the machinations of the peculiarly malevolent local devils. In food shops, hideous and obscene entrails of unknown animals gape repellently on the stranger, together with strings and strings of dried rats, and other horrible comestibles; in every street the yellow population seems denser and denser, the colour more brilliant and the smells ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... well," the scientist replied stonily, "but, unlike you, I am not a fool. These walls, this very atmosphere, are fields of force that will transmit no rays directed by you. You weak-minded scion of a depraved and obscene house—arrogant, overbearing, rapacious, ignorant—your brain is too feeble to realize that you are clutching at the Universe hundreds of years before the time has come. You by your overweening pride and folly ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... himself now under the whiplashing woman's tongue. Finally he spoke, in English. He called Dor a puddle-snake. That wasn't all of what he said, by any means; the name was preceded by several adjectives and followed by an obscene command. Dor blanched slightly. ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... she made a wicked, obscene eye at him, and simpered: "Oh, nothing, Tom—only you see ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... noble character is always inspiring. It appeals to the better side of our nature, and strengthens our confidence in humanity. No literary art can confer immortality on what is ignoble. The fiction that is devoted to obscene realism, whatever may be the prestige of its authors or its current vogue, is surely doomed. Only that which is morally good is destined to live through the ages. The genial Dickens will always be more ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Dullness offers "yon Juno of majestic size" as the chief prize in the booksellers' games. "Chetwood and Curll accept this glorious strife," the latter, as always, wins the obscene contest, "and the pleas'd dame soft-smiling leads away." Nearly all of this account is impudent slander, but Mr. Pope's imputations may have had enough truth in them to sting. His description of Eliza is a savage caricature of her portrait by Kirkall prefixed to the first edition of ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... came the slanting rays of the morning sun. It was time for such as she to hide themselves, with the other obscene things of night, from the glorious light of day, which was only for the happy. So she turned her steps towards town, still holding the paper. But in getting over the hedge it encumbered her to hold ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... interrupt. I maintain "unfortunately"! For the last four years, I have been persistently following obscene literature, and to-day I have gotten together a collection of it, which I dare say is pretty complete. So I am speaking of matters about which I am thoroughly informed. [With importance.] The degree of vulgarity our people have reached ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... with him. Maybe he had a bottle and Purdy needed a drink. The man was idly twirling the end of his rope and singing a song as he rode. He seemed care-free, even gay. The song that he sang was a popular one on the cattle range, grossly obscene, having to do with the love intrigues of one ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... Christian writers, of the age immediately succeeding that of the early martyrs, showed themselves more than half pagans in their tastes and productions. Ausonius in the West, the preceptor of St. Paulinus, is so obscene in some of his poems, so thoroughly pagan in others, that critics have for a long time hesitated to pronounce him a Christian. How many of his contemporaries hovered like him on the confines of Christianity and paganism! When Julian the apostate restored idolatry, many, who had only disgraced ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the ghastly harvest of the war Came all the beasts of earth whose facile sense Of odour tracks the bodies of the slain. Sped from his northern home the Thracian wolf; Bears left their dens and lions from afar Scenting the carnage; dogs obscene and foul Their homes deserted: all the air was full Of gathering fowl, who in their flight had long Pursued the armies. Cranes (29) who yearly change The frosts of Thracia for the banks of Nile, This year ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... day he would leave for Stanton College. And it was thus that Mrs Norton's temper scarred with deep wounds a nature so pale and delicate, so exposed that it seemed as if wanting an outer skin; and as Thornby Place appeared to him little more than a comprehensive symbol of what he held mean, even obscene in life, his visits had grown shorter and fewer, until now his absence extended to the verge of the second year, and besieged by the belief that he was contemplating priesthood, Mrs Norton had written to her old friend, saying that she wanted to speak to him on matters of ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... all unresisting, I was dragged amidships beneath the main yard where a noose was for my destruction; and though hanging had seemed a clean death by contrast with that I had so lately escaped at the obscene hands of this loathly blackamoor, yet none the less a sick trembling took me as I felt the rope about my neck, insomuch that I sank to my knees and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Steevens's lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... I shudder even now at the recollection of the poissardes, or rather furies, who wore white aprons, which they screamed out were intended to receive the bowels of Marie Antoinette, and that they would make cockades of them, mixing the most obscene ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Susan Brundon, with her Academy; all she has, all her labour, destroyed, ruined, pulled to pieces by slanderous tongues! By God, Jasper, what a beast you look! The most delicate woman, alive, the one farthest from just this sort of muck, being sworn in the Mayor's office, testifying in an obscene murder case, before the Sheriff and Constable, and heaven knows what police ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... variant, "Open candle baudery," in verse 7, is an additional argument against Dr. Grosart's explanation: "Obscene words and figures made with candle-smoke," the allusion being merely to the blackened ceilings produced by cheap candles without ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... for acting, and did not present themselves, should be imprisoned as suspects. And it is notorious, that this same Deputy once insulted all the women present at the theatre, and, after using the most obscene language for some time, concluded by stripping himself entirely in presence of the spectators. Report of the Committee of Legislation, 13th Prairial (1st ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... submerged her like bathing in sweet waters; she fumbled at buttons and hooks and stays, let things lie where they fell—and of all that luxury nothing was more pleasant than the knowledge that she did not have to take precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene little brothers which—on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had been young and foolish—she seemed to remember having found in her own room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored foam, sinking ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the authorities that was not accorded to other forms of the drama. We find, for example, that when theatrical representations were interdicted, an exception was made in their favour. [3] Though coarse and often obscene, they were considered as consistent with gentlemanly behaviour; thus Cicero, in a well-known passage in one of his letters, [4] contrasts them with the Mimes, secundum Oenomaum Accii non, ut olim solebat, Atellanam, sed, ut nunc fit, mimum introduxisti; and Valerius Maximus implies ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... panic that was gripping the nation—the whole world. These great machines were sinister. Wherever they appeared came the sense of being watched, of a menace being calmly withheld. And at thought of the obscene monsters inside those spheres, Thurston's lips were compressed and his eyes hardened. He threw the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... carrion crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene[129] bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... full of days: Illustrious youth, Attend (though partly thou hast guess'd) the truth. For had the martial Menelaus found The ruffian breathing yet on Argive ground; Nor earth had bid his carcase from the skies, Nor Grecian virgins shriek'd his obsequies, But fowls obscene dismember'd his remains, And dogs had torn him on the naked plains. While us the works of bloody Mars employ'd, The wanton youth inglorious peace enjoy'd: He stretch'd at ease in Argos' calm recess (Whose stately steeds luxuriant pastures bless), With flattery's insinuating art ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's. You may as well tell me what he said to you ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... deep-inform'd. 20 His son had with Ulysses, godlike Chief, On board his fleet to steed-fam'd Ilium gone, The warrior Antiphus, whom in his cave The savage Cyclops slew, and on his flesh At ev'ning made obscene his last regale. Three sons he had beside, a suitor one, Eurynomus; the other two, employ Found constant managing their Sire's concerns. Yet he forgat not, father as he was Of these, his absent eldest, whom he mourn'd 30 Ceaseless, and thus his ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless parturition. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... and why bad Writers are at present the most proper Objects of Satire. The True Causes of bad Writers. Characters of several Sorts of them now abounding; Envious Critics, Furious Pedants, Secret Libellers, Obscene Poetesses, Advocates for Corruption, Scoffers at Religion, Writers for Deism, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Eternal pagans, Beautiful and obscene, Leaping through the street With a flicker of hoofs, And ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... bolted. Its stout oaken panels were soon dashed in, and the door driven from its hinges. A crowd of miserable women, abandoned to the lowest depths of degradation and vulgarity, rushed into the apartment, assailing her ears with the most obscene and loathsome epithets the language could afford. The queen stood in the recess of a window, with queenly pride curbing her mortal apprehension. A few friends had gathered around her, and placed a table before her as a partial protection. Her daughter, an ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... been the rout obscene Was an army straight with pride, A hundred thousand marching men, Of squadrons twenty score, And after them all the guns, the guns, But She ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... How the woods did ring with song! There were patriotic songs, romantic and love songs, sarcastic, comic, and war songs, pirates' glees, plantation melodies, lullabies, good old hymn tunes, anthems, Sunday-school songs, and everything but vulgar and obscene songs; these were scarcely ever heard, and were nowhere in the ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... fact that the obscene and the impure have in many ways been fostered by that faith, and that the government has thus far been unable to find courage to apply to religious temples, symbols and rites that legislation which ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... The twenty-third rank of canters, who carry pins, tape, ballads, and obscene books to sell, but ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... when I saw him next, says he: "Come up and dine with me. We'll buy a beefsteak on the way, a bottle and some brie." And so I had a merry night within his humble home, And laughed with Angeline the gosse and Gigolette the mome. And every time that Julot used a word the least obscene, How Gigolette would frown at him and point to Angeline: Oh, such a little innocent, with hair of silken floss, I do not wonder they were proud of Angeline the gosse. And when her arms were round his neck, then Julot says to me: "I must work harder now, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... worship among aboriginal tribes are not particularly numerous or striking. Secondly, linga worship, though prevalent in the south, is not confined to it, but flourishes in all parts of India, even in Assam and Nepal. Thirdly, it is not connected with low castes, with orgies, with obscene or bloodthirsty rites or with anything which can be called un-Aryan. It forms part of the private devotions of the strictest Brahmans, and despite the significance of the emblem, the worship offered to it is perfectly decorous.[349] The evidence ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... appear in due time," replied the aged one. "In the meanwhile I have her message to declare. Three times foiled in his malignant scheme the now obscene Ming-shu sets all the Axioms at naught. Distrusting you and those about your path, it is his sinister intention to call up for judgment Kai-moo, who lies within the women's cell beyond the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the immortal Sancho. The book is a series of stories, rather than Sterne's subtle amalgam of pathos, gentle irony, and frank buffoonery; and the stories themselves are for the most part either insipid or obscene. There is perhaps one exception. The longest and the most elaborate of them, that which Schiller translated, is more like one of the modern French novels of a certain kind, than any other production of the eighteenth century. The adventure of Madame ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... tapping his gold snuffbox and holding it out to Bellecour, for all the world with the air of one who was discussing the latest fashion in wigs, "I can understand your repugnance at coming to blows with this obscene canaille. It is doing them an honour of which they are not worthy. But we have these ladies to think of, Messieurs, and—" he paused to apply the rappee to his nostrils—"and we must exert ourselves ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... on girls began crying out in the carriage next us, and I could hear the words of obscene songs when the train stopped at ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight: Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in - A jargon so truly adapted, in fact, To each thievish, obscene, and ferocious act, So fit for the brute with the human shape, Savage Baboon, or libidinous Ape, From their ugly mouths it will certainly come Should they ever get weary ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... but it must be admitted that the literature supplied there is not always of a very wholesome kind, seeing that it includes 'realism' of the most daring description, with illustrations to match, and obscene Parisian comic papers. Every member of the corps also belongs to one of the minor clubs of which it is made up, and which are apparently nothing more than messes, very often with only a ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... o'er the pier they turn'd; but each Had first between his teeth prest close the tongue, Toward their leader for a signal looking, Which he with sound obscene ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... farther, in the way of speculation or of action, you may mean to do. Old Abbot Hugo's budget, as we saw, had become empty, filled with deficit and wind. To see his account-books clear, be delivered from those ravening flights of Jew and Christian creditors, pouncing on him like obscene harpies wherever he showed face, was a ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Fanatical, where the Bible is burned in the public plaza whenever introduced, yet, where the most obscene prints are publicly offered for sale in the stores. Where it is a "mortal sin" to listen to the Protestant missionary, and not a sin to break the whole Decalogue. Backward—where the villagers are tied to a post and whipped by the priest when they do not please him. Progressive—in the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... who were as polite as if they had been with fashionable ladies, rather intimidated their neighbors, but Baron von Kelweinstein gave the reins to all his vicious propensities, beamed, made obscene remarks, and seemed on fire with his crown of red hair. He paid them compliments in French from the other side of the Rhine, and sputtered out gallant remarks, only fit for a low pot-house, from between ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... son through many centuries. The name of father had not been venerable, nor that of mother a synonym of sanctity. To the civilized man marriage does not mean, as Dr. Maxwell seems to imagine, simply license for obscene riot, but a solemn covenant that he and the object of his adoration have forsaken all else to cleave each unto the other through weal and through woe, through life unto death. Desire may be the basic principle of the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook's and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official back-stairs—would to heaven they HAD departed!—are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... aspiration or that woman's destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature is first, man is second." But not a mute, a docile second! He may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... palaces. She is of so exquisite a nature that he who knows how to treat her will convert her into gold of the most inestimable value. He who possesses her should guard her with vigilance; neither suffering her to be polluted by obscene, nor degraded by dull and frivolous works. Although she must be in no wise venal, she is not, therefore, to despise the fair reward of honorable labors, either in heroic or dramatic composition. Buffoons must not come ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of interest in connection with the above facts is that the old religions, however much of force, beauty, and truth we may concede to them, have never made warfare against these obscene forms of worship, nor against the notorious immorality of their devotees. Whatever may be said of the profound philosophy of life involved in phallic worship, for many hundreds of years it has been a source of outrageous immorality. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... stage: no, no, a thousand times no! I do not recognize the right to that. If the reader does not draw from a book the moral that should be found there, the reader is an imbecile or the book is false from the point of view of accuracy. For, the moment that a thing is true, it is good. Obscene books likewise are immoral only because they lack truth. Things are ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... at food like wolves. Others darted into dark corners of the square to hide their prizes. A man appeared dressed in a woman's wrapper and hat, and capered around the fire to the accompaniment of shrieks of obscene laughter. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... obvious allusion to Ferdinand's seizure of property, he named the statute-book "The Rapacious Defraudment of the Land." He saw the lords oppressing the poor, sitting long at table, and discussing lewd and obscene matters. He saw the rich idlers with bloated faces, with bleary eyes, with swollen limbs, with bodies covered with sores. He saw the moral world turned upside down. No longer, said Comenius, did men in Bohemia call things by their right names. They ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... permission to copy the title and a few of the sonnets, which were such as we could not imagine would have given pleasure to the chaste mind of Milton; each of them containing, as the title indicates, an equivoque, which would bear an obscene sense, yet very ingeniously wrapped up. The first ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... But as for the others, from Chaucer down to Churchill, they are 'voces et praeterea nihil;'—sometimes spoken of, rarely read, and never with advantage. Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible:—he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune. English living poets I have avoided mentioning;—we have none who will not survive their productions. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... others. Of righteous practices they have none. Their women, intoxicated with drink and divested of robes, laugh and dance outside the walls of the houses in cities, without garlands and unguents, singing while drunk obscene songs of diverse kinds that are as musical as the bray of the ass or the bleat of the camel. In intercourse they are absolutely without any restraint, and in all other matters they act as they like. Maddened with drink, they call upon one another, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... contact with the men—who, in fact, virtually hold the power of life and death over them—whose influence is of an elevating or reforming kind. Indeed, I have heard many of them telling or exchanging obscene stories with prisoners, and using the vilest language and bandying thieves' slang, in which they become proficient. I am bold to say that at least one-half of all I have known are in morals on a level with the average prisoner, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... (1492-1557), called "the scourge of Princes." His prose is fiercely satirical, and his poetry as strongly obscene. His works were condemned for their indecency and impiety. He received numerous and valuable gifts from those who were afraid of his criticisms. His sonnets, written to accompany engravings by Marc Antonio, from designs by Giulio Romano ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has a sharp eye for human frailty. He depicts the universal weakness of human nature and the corruption of his time with great vivacity and not without a certain pleasure in the obscene; and besides folly and passion, complains above all of the fact that so few understand the art of enjoyment, of which he, a true man of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... rising, this constant risk of falling, that gives a barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of what is called fashionable society in America. The chief character of that society is to be found in its shameless self-assertion, its almost obscene display of its importance and of the shadowy privileges and acceptances on which that importance is based. It is assertive for the simple reason that, immediately it ceased to be assertive, it would ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... like a farce. The King affected not to see him, let him kneel on. Richard did kneel on, as stiff as a rod. The King talked with obscene jocosity, every snap betraying his humour, to Prince John; he scandalised even his bishops, he abashed even his barons. He infinitely degraded himself, yet seemed to wallow in disgrace. So Richard's ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... The elder of the two boys, who was the son of a dragoman, and hoped one day to develop into as resplendent a being as his father, was in his way a great reader. He had just finished an Arabic translation of a French novel and he was picturing to his friends Margaret as the heroine of the obscene romance. Poor Margaret! ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... that sits next to you. If any Body drinks to you merrily, thank him, and drink moderately. If you don't care to drink, however, kiss the Cup. Look pleasantly upon him that speaks to you; and be sure not to speak till you are spoken to. If any Thing that is obscene be said, don't laugh at it, but keep your Countenance, as though you did not understand it; don't reflect on any Body, nor take place of any Body, nor boast of any Thing of your own, nor undervalue any Thing of another Bodies. Be courteous to your Companions that are your Inferiors; traduce ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Taking advantage of his popularity, when he found publishers averse to the hazard of publishing his works, he established a printing-press in his own house, where he struck off copies of the proceedings against him, which were sold at one guinea each; a blasphemous and obscene poem entitled, "An Essay on Woman," with annotations; and the forty-five first numbers of the "North Briton," with notes and emendations. His pen was seconded by hundreds of newspaper writers and pamphleteers who wrote on his behalf, and John Wilkes thereby became one of the most popular men in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Pitre, in his edition of Sicilian Volkslieder, expressly alludes to the coarseness of a whole class which he had omitted. The MSS. of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions. Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct. When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness. At home, among the fields and on the mountains, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... not stand aloof—the call to arms was too imperious. We saw our Leader contending single-handed with "the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial," and we longed to be at his side in the thick of the fight. To a man born and circumstanced as I was the call came with peculiar power. I had the love of Freedom in my blood. I had been trained to believe in and to serve the Liberal ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large and unmistakably Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking and muttering to himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him O'Sullivan. But O'Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the heels of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth, followed by another youth so tall and emaciated ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard, and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... incorrect, but the intimacy is confirmed by Bruno's dedication to the English poet of two of his works, the one being entitled Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfaute, a book which is admittedly blasphemous and obscene, where it is not so obscure as to be unintelligible, the other the no less notorious ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Thracian people; it was a term commonly used in Athens to describe coarse men, obscene debauchees ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... of ideas, he has enjoyed none, except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.—Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as puberty comes on and deliverance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... beautiful, To the earth, yet dim and dull, They the gladsome tidings bring Of the sunlight's hastening: Never can these hills of bliss 169 Be o'erclimbed by feet like his! But enough! Oh, do not dare From the next the veil to tear, Woven of station, trade, or dress, More obscene than nakedness, Wherewith plausible culture drapes Fallen Nature's myriad shapes! Let us rather love to mark How the unextingnished spark Still gleams through the thin disguise 179 Of our customs, pomps, and lies, And, not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... loafed and gossiped in the evenings; all the time he was there the conversation had been made up of sly digs and hints about graveyard trysts, each thrust causing the kind of laughter that is the wake of the prurient and the obscene. Yes, she was right. There could be "nothing in it" for her in Sutherland. He was filled with pity for her. "Poor child! What a shame!" There must be something wrong with a world ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... fifty francs, which he counted out to her in twelve-sou pieces and copper money. On the evening of her return to Caen Mme. Acquet faithfully made over the money to Vannier, reserving only fifteen francs for her trouble; moreover, she was obliged to submit to her host's obscene allusions as to the means she had employed to extort this ridiculous sum from Buquet. She bore everything unmoved; her indifference resembled stupefaction; she no longer appeared conscious of the horrors of her situation or the dangers to which she was exposed. ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called "Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a villa on Twickenham Common, where ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to labor and sweat; in these were the pains of travail." They were compelled to make a thousand gesticulations and signs that greatly amused their savage instructors who sometimes palmed off on them words that were ridiculous and even obscene, so that the Jesuits labored with indifferent success in the preparation of their catechism. Their work was still in the experimental stage when the destruction of Port Royal by Argal in 1613, and the capture and removal of the missionaries brought everything to a stand and put ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... applause. In the midst of the uproar, Juno, the house servant, ventured to come in by way of the library, with Harman. The child ran to his mother where she stood in the centre of the room. A saucy corporal broke out with obscene speech and plucked at the dress of the negro girl, imitating the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... stink salutes his nose! Where are the honest toilers? Where The gravid mistress of their care? A busy scene, indeed, he sees, But not a sign or sound of bees. Worms of the riper grave unhid By any kindly coffin lid, Obscene and shameless to the light, Seethe in insatiate appetite, Through putrid offal; while above The hissing blow-fly seeks his love, Whose offspring, supping where they supt, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... tendency to obsessive ideas and doubts; that is, ideas and doubts that persist in coming against the will of the patient, such as the obscene word or phrase that continually obtrudes itself on a chaste woman, or the doubt whether one has shut the door or properly turned off the gas. Of course, everybody has such obsessions and doubts occasionally, but to be psychasthenic about it is to have them continually and to have ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... sweetheart, who are always the worst of all. Such men really have a lasting affection only for those girls who are fitting companions for clubmen—girls who have a habit of telling doubtful stories and bestowing depraved kisses. It seems to me that to attract and to hold such people, the nude and obscene are necessary both in word and in body—unless—unless—it is true that men are incapable of loving any woman for a length ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... with abhorrence from its banquets and gayeties. The cultivated classes looked down upon the Christians with a disdain which would hardly even mention them without an apology. The canaille of pagan cities insulted them with obscene inscriptions and blasphemous pictures on the very walls of the places where they met.[34] Nay, they were popularly known by nicknames, like Sarmenticii and Semaxii—untranslatable terms of opprobrium derived from the fagots with which they were burned and the stakes to which they ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... decorous and the sober. But from the low and rude evidences of vice around her she was saved by her misfortune. And at that hour the streets were quiet and silent, nor was her youthful ear shocked by the sounds which too often broke along the obscene and obscure haunts she ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... time of day to her, and the time of day meant some obscene remark unfit for women's ears. The young girl wore a simple grey dress, with fine lawn kerchief neatly folded across her bosom, a large hat with flowing ribbons sat above the fairest face that ever gladdened men's ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently play ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and bequeaths him his portion of renown. But the portion of renown which belonged to a young thief, distinguished (if, at the period when he wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at all) for having written some more or less obscene and scurrilous ballads, must have been little fitted to gratify the self-respect or increase the reputation of a benevolent ecclesiastic. The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy of the poet's library, with specification of one work which was plainly neither ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lesson to the primitive tribes for which it was written. To this, our guest counters with the remark that if this be a parable of manners and morals, then, from what he observes on the earth, we, Earthlings, have certainly outgrown the need for such coarse and obscene statements made some 2000 years ago; and that on Mars, although the inhabitants are not blessed with such divine revelations, common sense and reason have taught their most primitive men the same lessons in morality while they were yet ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... masters, as lofty self-abnegation. And wherever you get men smitten with such, or with anything like it, you will find all the low-aimed people gathering round them like bats round a torch in a cavern, flapping their obscene wings and uttering their harsh croaks, and only desiring to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; and to this day, it is said, they sometimes ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... herself cast upon men so bestial an enchantment. Among these faces convulsed with utter animalism I scarcely recognised my various acquaintances. The transformation produced by the planton's shout was not merely amazing; it was uncanny, and not a little thrilling. These eyes bubbling with lust, obscene grins sprouting from contorted lips, bodies unclenching and clenching in unctuous gestures of complete savagery, convinced me by a certain insane beauty. Before the arbiter of their destinies some thirty ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... does not strip him of his happiness, why should blindness, which resembles night, have that effect? For the reply of Antipater the Cyrenaic, to some women who bewailed his being blind, though it is a little too obscene, is not without its significance. "What do you mean?" saith he; "do you think the night can furnish no pleasure?" And we find by his magistracies and his actions, that old Appius(119) too, who was blind for many years, was not prevented ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... consciousness of their infallible might, and the bright scarlet sentries walking smartly to and fro before the Mint. He envied them their places in the scheme of world's labour. And he envied also the miserable sallow, thin-faced loafers blinking their obscene eyes and rubbing their greasy shoulders against the doorjambs of the Black Horse pub, because they were too far gone to ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... itself, there is abundant evidence to show that the subjects chosen were often highly lascivious, while the movements of the dancers—not seldom men of the vilest character—were frequently to the last degree obscene.[110] Inadequate as this substitute for the drama must seem to us, we must remember that southern peoples were—and indeed are—far more sensitive to the language of signs, to expressive gesticulation and the sensuous movements of the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... have made him the most distinguished man in France at the time he lived. Those who hated him have tried to cover his memory with shame, and have represented him as merely a buffoon, but such was not the truth. He did often descend to buffooneries and to almost obscene sayings, and these things have had their influence upon France, and have contributed to make the French people what they are to-day—a nation of professed Catholics, but really a nation of infidels and atheists. But Rabelais was more than a wit. He was a public benefactor. He ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... and two or three of the Vigilance officers or guards followed. A strong guard under arms was stationed about the foot of the gallows. Permission was given the two to say anything they wished. Brace broke forth in a loud rant, profane and obscene, and danced about like one demented. The clergyman felt obliged to stop his blasphemous harangue by cramming his handkerchief over his mouth. He broke away, nevertheless, and again poured forth a tirade, declaring that he was being murdered. At length he became exhausted and ceased speaking. ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... towards Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... For us to live together any longer would be an obscene joke. Let's end it while we still have ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... American-Germans. You did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before women, kicks his children about, has coarse or vulgar ideas on female chastity, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the case when we go outside the sphere of science into its penumbra in literature and conversation. There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power to cast them out. It combines the occult with the obscene; the sensuality of materialism with the insanity of spiritualism. In the story of Gadara we have left out nothing except the Redeemer, we have kept ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... these glorious arms, that shine With matchless art, confess the hand divine. Now to the bloody battle let me bend: But ah! the relics of my slaughter'd friend! In those wide wounds through which his spirit fled, Shall flies, and worms obscene, pollute the dead?" ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... continued to look up, an object attracted my attention. Against the sky I distinguished the outlines of a large bird. I knew it to be the obscene bird of the plains, the buzzard vulture. Whence had it come? Who knows? Far beyond the reach of human eye it had seen or scented the slaughtered antelopes, and on broad, silent wing was now descending to the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... At the time it was simply amusing; it was not till years after that the lad realized by its effect on himself, its insight, and its hold on his memory, that Si Sylvanne's talk was real wisdom. Parts of it would not look well in print; but the rugged words, the uncouth Saxonism, the obscene phrase, were the mere oaken bucket in which the pure and precious waters were hauled ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... listen to in the way of Jocularity, and there is a difference between the Jocularity of the Gentleman and that of the Vulgarian; and again, between that of the educated and uneducated man. This you may see from a comparison of the Old and New Comedy: in the former obscene talk made the fun; in the latter it is rather innuendo: and this is no slight ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... who were as polite as if they had been with fashionable ladies, rather intimidated their guests, but Baron von Kelweinstein beamed, made obscene remarks and seemed on fire with his crown of red hair. He paid the women compliments in French of the Rhine, and sputtered out gallant remarks, only fit for a low pothouse, from between ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of "polite taste." The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious—and useful—parlor games among academics. Modern readers ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... edition of this book, which was published in the following year, the editor states, that either 'through hurry or inattention some obscene jests had unluckily found a place in the first edition.' See post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill |
