|
|
|
More "Obtuseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied Spriggs, amazed at his pretended obtuseness: "and, I say, landlord, you can let us have plenty o' ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... notice of this remark of Rebecca's; but Shanty gave the old servant a piercing look, whilst all others present, with the exception of Salmon, felt almost fainting with impatience; but Salmon's mind seemed for the moment in such a state of obtuseness, as disabled him from catching hold of the link which was leading to that which was to interest him as much as, or even more than, any one present. The gipsy went on to say, that her cupidity was so much ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... of the blanket, and he therefore naturally enough inferred that his bed was something suitable to his digestive organs. It is certain that he committed an error of judgment, but that error may be traceable to the subtilty of his taste rather than to its obtuseness. We throw out this suggestion as a specimen, if nothing better, of what contradictory inferences may be drawn from a single fact, and as a hint of how much caution is necessary in arriving at absolute opinions, even when the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... continual wear; and when Mike whispers to her, in a sly way, that he is trying to get a home to offer a certain fine girl that he wants for a wife, Nannie shakes her finger witchingly at Biddy, as if to say, "I've found you out now." Mike does not relish her obtuseness, but she seems so timid and shrinking, that he is backward about speaking his sentiments plainly. Besides, he has a real affection for her, and that always brings a certain reserve with it. What in the world ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... is the conviction of any human mind. Rather I would think that despair at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with those who pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of everything beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception which seems obtuseness. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... puzzled as well as pained by her obtuseness, "you see clearly that it must be so. True love, as I conceive it, must be something passing all knowledge, irresistible; something not to be resented for its power, but worshipped for it; something not to fight against, but to glory in. And such is ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... almost as if he had received a blow—so sudden was the check to his mental rambling. For the eyes of the man opposite, deep set and gleaming, were the eyes of greatness, and they triumphed so completely over their indifferent setting that Vane marvelled at his previous obtuseness. Martyrs have had such eyes, and the great pioneers of the world—men who have deemed everything well lost for a cause, be that cause right or wrong. And almost as if he were standing there in the flesh, there came ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... countenances. Every projection in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the aspect of affairs. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... their own, having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who said, "I have written you several letters, but ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... race for preferment which were prevalent in his day. But more curious still is the impression which the memoirs convey that the writer himself had not the faintest conception that there was anything in the least degree unseemly in what he relates. There appears to be a sort of moral obtuseness in him in reference to these subjects, but to these subjects only.[676] The memoir closes with a beautiful expression of resignation to the Divine will, and of hopeful confidence about the future, in which he was no doubt perfectly sincere. And ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... for this Chinese obtuseness, or, as some would have it, opacity, in much the same way. Under the head of Natural Phenomena, he writes: "It is a question of more than ordinary interest to those who regard the Chinese people ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... many years to come. I had gathered that he was comparatively young, and although I had argued otherwise with the Hare, had concluded therefore that he would continue to live his happy earth life until old age brought him to a natural end. Hence my obtuseness. ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... not increase in favour with the Father of the Marshalsea in the ratio of his increasing visits. His obtuseness on the great Testimonial question was not calculated to awaken admiration in the paternal breast, but had rather a tendency to give offence in that sensitive quarter, and to be regarded as a positive shortcoming in point of gentlemanly feeling. An impression of disappointment, occasioned ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... to tolerate stupidity and lack of comprehension when they are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... opinion generally that the plaintiff had been illegally arrested. This vague answer did not satisfy his Lordship, and he repeated his question. He could not, however, obtain a more satisfactory reply. Evidently vexed at what he deemed the obtuseness or partiality of the jury, he turned to the bar, and said, that a spirit of a mischievous and destructive nature was abroad, which, if not repressed, threatened awful consequences. The country would ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... gazed at her bewildered. In the next, I cursed myself for a fool—I blushed for my suspicions, my obtuseness—I sought dizzily the words, the prescribed ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... green gloom of the impenetrable woods. One of these huge cascades would make the fortune of a Swiss valley, and we need no further efforts of our willing bearers in the cause of sight-seeing, but as neither words nor gestures prove intelligible to Western obtuseness, a brown coolie seizes each arm, and rushes us up a grassy hill to a huge cavern, hung with myriad bats, and containing a pool of crystal water. The simple minds of these kindly mountaineers shirk no trouble for the benefit of the stranger, who, though regarded as a madman, must be humoured as ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of 'vantage to their masters," continued the other, well entrenched, in a coarse, unconscious obtuseness, from the contempt of his opponent; "what's the use o' talents and them things, if you can't get the use on 'em yourself? Why, all the use they make on 't is to get round you. I've had one or two of these fellers, and I jest sold 'em down ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was nice," Beryl felt that she showed much patience with Robin's obtuseness, "but didn't you see anything different in that room? Books and magazines! Country people don't sit and read magazines and knit on rose wool in the middle of the afternoon! Robin, that woman's a lady! And you notice she didn't tell us who she ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... a word to say in reply. As if anyone could be more suffering than himself! He was full of a dumb ache. He marvelled at Keith's obtuseness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... consciously and consistently. He experimented with each play, watched its effect on his audiences, asked himself seriously whether their apparent want of interest in this or that portion was due to some defect in his work or to their own obtuseness. He had failures, but remarkably few, and they did not discourage him; nor did momentary success in one field prevent him from abandoning it for another in which he hoped to accomplish greater things. He is his own severest critic, and in his autobiography speaks ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... is the epithet we affix to modesty, but modesty often makes men act otherwise than ingenuously: you, for example, now. You are angry at the servility of people, and disgusted at their obtuseness and indifference, on matters of most import to their welfare. If they were equal to you, this anger would cease; but the fire would break out somewhere else, on ground which appears at present sound and level. Voltaire, for instance, is less eloquent than you: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... an hour later, Jane watched him drive away, thinking to herself: "Deryck was right. But what a queer mixture of shrewdness and obtuseness, and how marvellously it worked out to the ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... would see it, a sudden confiding little nestle closer to the giver—these are her only signs of pleasure; and if no notice is taken of her, she sits in silent patience. Sometimes, if politeness be mistaken for indifference, a shadow creeps into her eyes, a sort of pained surprise at the obtuseness of the great; but she rarely makes any remark, and never points or asks, as the irrepressible Chellalu does in spite of all our admonitions. If, however, Seela is being attended to and fed at judicious intervals, and she knows the intention ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... equivalent to ee uttered feebly, as in the word diversity. This is the most common sound of i and of y. The vulgar are apt to let it fall into the more obscure sound of short u. As elegance of utterance depends much upon the preservation of this sound from such obtuseness, perhaps Walker and others have done well to mark it as e in me; though some suppose it to be peculiar, and others identify it with the short i in fit. Thirdly, a distinction is made by some writers, between the vowel sounds heard in hate and bear, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... moment, wrung from him a reluctant admiration. While her parents went about dissembling their emotions, she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed neither eagerness nor surprise; so complete was her unconcern that there were moments when Lethbury feared it was obtuseness, when he could hardly help whispering to her that now was the moment ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... mere benefit of the novelist, what right had these bits of last-century Europe here? Even the virtues of the South were some of them anachronisms; and even those that were not existed side by side with an obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero of Semmes, and a barbarism that could starve prisoners ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... soon landed him in the lucrative office of Superintendent of Market Fees and Rents, under Connolly. In 1873 he was elected coroner and ten years later was appointed fire commissioner. His career as boss was marked by much political cleverness and caution and by an equal degree of moral obtuseness. ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... with plans for his retirement—for he had come to that grim conclusion. To go on seeing all those people who had known him as a 'long-headed chap,' an astute adviser—after that—no! The fastidiousness and pride which was so strangely, so inextricably blended in him with possessive obtuseness, revolted against the thought. He would retire, live privately, go on buying pictures, make a great name as a collector—after all, his heart was more in that than it had ever been in Law. In pursuance of this now fixed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is more obstructive to science than the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he. "If Lord ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... then," said Dr. Wycherley, waxing impatient at their abominable obtuseness, "it is the premonitory stage of the precursory condition of an organic ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... you were listening! (The obtuseness of MABEL is very strange to her.) Mabel, don't you see ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... happen in the best regulated families," said Walker, with vulgar, good-humoured obtuseness that filled Corey with indignation. Nothing, perhaps, removed his matter-of-fact nature further from the commonplace than a certain generosity of instinct, which I should not be ready to say ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre's feelings were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man's animated obtuseness to everything other than himself ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world—and all under it, too, when ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... men. What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored them has changed. All that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is the excess of his excentricity, or his deviation from that resultant of forces to which he must conform. To us, however, ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... wrote wittily), "I have no desire to exult over you, yet I should show a lamentable obtuseness to the irony of things were I not to dedicate this little work to you. For its inception was yours, and in your more ambitious days you thought to write the tale of the little white bird yourself. ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... insolent fashion, to show them what a great person he was, and to speak of things beyond their ken. Playing this part, he would have enjoyed himself tolerably—nor the less because now and again he let his contempt for the company peep from under his complaisance—but for the obtuseness, or the malice of his friend; who, as if he had only one man and one idea in his head, let fall with every moment some mention of Colonel John. Now, it was the happy certainty of the Colonel's return next day that inspired his eloquence; now, the pleasure with which ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... her, something bordering upon enthusiasm in the way she repelled an attempted incursion upon the forbidden ground. And withal she was so tender and sympathetic toward all mankind, that her wilful obtuseness on the subject of love bore to him the appearance of wanton cruelty. It did not occur to him that she might be acting in self-defence, fearing to give the slightest rein to a feeling which might, on very slight provocation, run away with her. She was the kind ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... religion, by education, and by the reception of those principles of self- reliance, without which they have not the moral perception requisite to enable them to appreciate the blessings of freedom; and this very ignorance and obtuseness is one of the most telling arguments against the system which produces it. The want of this previous preparation has been frequently shown, particularly in Kentucky, where whole bodies of emancipated slaves, after a few days' experience of their ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... shrinks from injuring them. It may be called selfishness, which is another term for thoughtlessness or want of consideration or perception, but it is not deliberate selfishness. This last is often found with fine perceptions and intuitive tact. It is rather a natural obtuseness, a want of thought on the subject. Such persons remember and connect their own sensations with the object, thinking little or nothing of the feelings they may themselves excite by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... of persons, in shunning this evil, go to the other extreme, and are very strict and pertinacious in regard to every requisition. With them, fault-finding and penalties abound, until the children are either hardened into indifference of feeling, and obtuseness of conscience, or else become excessively ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... see you were only joking. He's so devoted to Cicely, isn't he?" Mrs. Dressel rejoined, with her bright obtuseness. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... statue, head uplifted, peering on every side to catch sight of the mate whose voice had so resistlessly summoned him. Only his wide ears moved, waving inquisitively. His nostrils, ordinarily his chief source of information, were dulled almost to obtuseness by that subtly acrid ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Ainslee's Magazine ("inconsequent and rambling ... rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of the adjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose, in connection with any rewards except such as accrue to the possessors of a certain obtuseness, who always and infallibly reap at least the reward of not being hurt by what they do not know—or, for that matter, by what they do know. He who writes such a book as THE CORDS OF VANITY is committing ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness—to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness—of something fresh and cool despite her passion—which had caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the sufferer, as much for his moral as his mental obtuseness, and fearful that his indignation might get the better of his pity, he left the room. His uncle threatened him with all the terrors of the courts and the prisons as he withdrew. In the kitchen he found Dock ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... being, whose vivacity and intelligence hourly encreased, and whose frame was endowed with an intense, and I fondly thought, a strong and permanent spirit of life. Who, after a great disaster, has not looked back with wonder at his inconceivable obtuseness of understanding, that could not perceive the many minute threads with which fate weaves the inextricable net of our destinies, until he is inmeshed completely ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... wish I had gone to Stoneborough before coming out here, now that I see what a gratification it would have been if I could have brought a fresh report of old Dr. May. (Somehow, I think there has been a numbness or obtuseness about me all these last two years which hindered me from perceiving or doing much that I now regret, since either the change or the wholesome atmosphere of this house has wakened me as it were. Among these ungracious omissions is what I now ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vowing that he would never return; and yet now the barest pretext, by which no one could have been deceived except willingly, was sufficient to turn his footsteps thither again. He explained to his mother—with a vagueness which she found somewhat puzzling, but ascribed to her own feminine obtuseness in matters of business—the reasons that imperatively demanded his presence in Patesville. With an early start he could drive there in one day,—he had an excellent roadster, a light buggy, and a recent rain had left the road in good condition,—a ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... of this national obtuseness of mind on a question of interest, is to be found in the system of taxing the land. A Greek really views land somewhat as English labourers view game. The owner of the soil is absolute proprietor only during those months in which he is engaged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... saw her each day for longer intervals, and realized very quickly that she had no intention of shunning him or punishing him before the world, as he had feared that she would do. She was so quiet, so gentle to him, that, with all a man's obtuseness where women are concerned, he congratulated himself on being let off so easily, and thought that the matter was to be buried in oblivion. He even wondered a little at Nan's savoir-faire, and felt a vague sense of disappointment mingling with his relief. ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... "Snowflakes and rain." Or "I saw a corpse sitting on a corpse, a blind one riding on a lifeless steed?" to which the reply was "A dead horse on an ice-floe." Biorn never guessed any of the riddles, but the cleverness of them he thought miraculous, and the others roared with glee at their own obtuseness. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... committee held its first sitting. On Sir Matthew's right sat Lord Milford, a wealthy peer of independent political opinions and great obtuseness, by whose social prestige Sir Matthew was greatly impressed; on his left Mr. Doubleday, the leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons. Ranged on either side, according to their importance, sat the various other members ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... passions they may be molded by genius to make the many serve the few and to build up an autocracy. Nor are the lessons to be learned from history applicable only to individuals. The faults of an emperor are felt in every household of the community, and injure the State. Indifference and obtuseness at the capital entailed weakness on the frontier and in the provincial capitals. The barbarians grew defiant and aggressive, and defeated the imperial forces. The provincial governors asserted their independence, and founded ruling families. The ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... boasts, Nick's instinct had told him after the first words exchanged that the man was not only a cad, but a rank pretender. Still, in his desire for social knowledge, he had refused at first to listen to the voice of instinct and had been punished for obtuseness. The very thought of the little drawling outsider who had delighted in his sobriquet of "the Dook" made Hilliard feel sick, and he opened wide all the windows and doors when the contemptible creature went out of the house. "Wanted ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the doctor, inattentively; and his blindness to Sarah's charms and her powers made her almost pity such obtuseness. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... hitherto been sustained by no effort of volition of her own. From the moment when, discovering a friend in Oucanasta, she had yielded herself unresistingly to the guidance of that generous creature, her feelings had been characterised by an obtuseness strongly in contrast with the high excitement that had distinguished her previous manner. A dreamy recollection of some past horror, it is true, pursued her during her rapid and speechless flight; but any analysis of the causes conducing to that horror, her subjugated faculties were unable ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... before by his bride's sister. The more his life changed, the more it was the same thing—the same plunging without forethought, the same disregard for all that is conventionally deemed necessary. His courage is often praised, and rightly, though we ought not to forget that ignorance, and even obtuseness, were large ingredients in it. As far as they had any plan, it was to reach Switzerland and settle on the banks of some lake, amid sublime mountain scenery, "for ever." In fact, the tour lasted but six weeks. Their difficulties ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... by the merest chances, and yet reputations control the fashions. That is a little prologue that would fit the case of all sorts of people. Everywhere around one sees prejudices, scheming, and obtuseness; but little or no justice. Nothing can be done to stem this torrent of evil. It must run its course. It always has been and ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... see in his reign any principle of "initiation," save that which the Ruler of the universe has implanted in every system and in every government. Yet we concede the right of others to think differently on these points, without being suspected of moral obtuseness or obliquity. Especially can we comprehend how a patriotic Frenchman should choose to accept all the conditions of his epoch, and embrace every opportunity of aiding in the task of correction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... sums up the highest product of Greek thought, and that represents a civilization which from the purely intellectual side has had no successor. Yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage of the masses. "The people," as spoken of by their historians and philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which owned at least one slave. The slaves themselves, the real "masses," ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... the High Sheriff sententiously, and sipped his wine. His own obtuseness on the Bench was notorious, and had kept adding for thirty years to the Duchy's stock of ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... also postulate that all humorous men laugh at every joke. There is a line in the hand which he calls the linea jecoraria, and the triangle formed by this and the linea vitae and the linea cerebri, rules the disposition of the subject, due consideration being given to the acuteness or obtuseness of the angles of this triangle. Cardan seems to have based his treatise on one written by a certain Ruffus Ephesius, and it is without doubt one of the dullest portions of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... touching with the finger, a certain degree of obtuseness is noted. By using an apparatus invented by Du Bois-Reymond and adopted by my father, the degree of sensibility obtained was 49.6 mm. in criminals as against 64.2 mm. in normal individuals. Criminals are more sensitive ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... collection of modern art was a fine one—not large, but very perfect in its way, and he was delighted to see her appreciation of his treasures. Here at least was a point upon which they might sympathise. He had been a good deal worried by Sophia's obtuseness upon ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... least, if not for our beloved country—these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels. Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers Whenever such a mischance occurred—when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses—nothing could ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast. The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... difficulty in tolerating him, then?—you have a respect for a political platitudinarian as insensible as an ox to everything he can't turn into political capital. You think his monumental obtuseness suited to the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... small, pathetic laugh, which expressed a certain physical faintness, and reproached him with insupportable gentleness for his selfish obtuseness. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... disease, some of the more prominent traits of national character have shown themselves lately. Among other things, the artists have taken to caricaturing the cholera! One gets to be so hardened by exposure, as to be able to laugh at even these proofs of moral obtuseness. Odd enough traits of character are developed by seeing men under such trying circumstances. During one of the worst periods of the disease, I met a countryman in the street, who, though otherwise a clever man, has ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... brilliant, enigmatic, and—to her—all too fugitive presence. Harriet had never really appreciated Charles—though she was dazzled by his fame at intervals—didn't really appreciate him to this day. Well, the loss was hers and the gain indubitably Felicia's, since the elder sister's obtuseness had left the younger sister a free field.—At thought of which ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... her out to Howth, relying on the influence of time and place to help him in methods more primitive. It was incredible to him that she shouldn't—or perhaps wouldn't—realise what he was driving at. Apparently she didn't understand the first conventions of the game, and when her obtuseness forced him to a sudden and passionate declaration she laughed ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Masefield, come into it not from any aesthetic obtuseness, but because these uglinesses are full of the zest of drama, of things being done or made, of life being lived. When Masefield sounded his ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... had from the outset accepted his ties with an exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized her most delicate pleasures; and her husband's sensitiveness to it in great measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any mere sensibility to ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... originate in a physical or a moral cause, from an obtuseness in their corporeal formation or a perfection in their intellectual one, I do not pretend to decide; but whatever be the cause, the effect is enjoyed with great modesty. So little do the French pique themselves on this valuable stoicism, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... both body and mind, which, if the cause is continued, becomes hereditary, and is transmitted from generation to generation; occasioning a diminution of size, strength, and energy, a feebleness of vision, a feebleness and imbecility of purpose, an obtuseness of intellect, a depravation of moral taste, a premature old age, and a general deterioration of the whole character. This is the case in every ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... are neither harsh nor hard in manner, nor yet unloving in nature, the habitual first impulse seems to be to refuse: they appear to have a singular obtuseness to the fact that it is, or can be, of any consequence to a child whether it does or does not do the thing it desires. Often the refusal is withdrawn on the first symptom of grief or disappointment on the child's part; a thing which is fatal to all real control of a child, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Sleek hair, brisk glance, fleshy and yet alert, Red, full, and satisfied, Cased in obtuseness confident not ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... indeed?" repeated Fitz, amazed at her obtuseness. "Don't you see that, if the child died, the block of stores belongs to my mother? But it makes no difference now," sighed Mr. Wittleworth, "for my mother, contrary to my advice, contrary to my solemn protest, sold out all her right in the premises ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... is at length informed of the progress of the inquiries, but shows a provoking obtuseness and indifference ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... least as entertaining, as instructive, as able as the best literary efforts of our most popular writers. One of the Duke's most recent contributions, which appeared in the Contemporary Review for January last, on "Hibernicisms in Philosophy," shows that to Sidney Smith's stale joke about the obtuseness of Scotchmen there is at least one illustrious exception. It is one of the best things of its kind that has ever appeared in a magazine that can command the greatest literary talent ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... expression of the climate in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void. His obtuseness to things dynamic—to the material order—leaves his whole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... was conducted with the most perfect propriety in all respects. Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take upon herself a large share of the conversation. The minister, on the other hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss Susan, but, with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good woman drew his fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly any of his insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they were aimed. It is probable that his features or ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... constitution" holds its own gallantly against the inroads of hardish living, and Dick looks the picture of rude health. Men endowed with an invincible obtuseness of intellect and feeling, have no mental wear and tear, and if the machine starts in good order, it seems as if it might last out indefinitely; so it would, I dare say, if it were not for a propensity to drink, and otherwise to abuse their bodily advantages, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... own obtuseness and to the fact that here was a real man, in spite of the significance of a crest ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... and just appreciation of external conditions. That laws are silent amid the clash of arms, seems in his apprehension transformed to the conviction that at no time are they more noisy and compulsive. Upon this political obtuseness there fell a kind of poetical retribution, which gradually worked the Administration round to the position of substantially supporting Napoleon, when putting forth all his power to oppress the liberties of Spain, and of embarrassing Great ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... sewing-machine handed in to her to take the place of the old worn-out treadle which tried her rheumatic joints. The pale-faced schoolmaster, who had spent years with hardly a break in struggling with the juvenile obtuseness of Tamfield, received through the post a circular ticket for a two months' tour through Southern Europe, with hotel coupons and all complete. John Hackett, the farmer, after five long years of bad ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the thing in her own way. She wouldn't see at first the various little good turns which the other did her in her quiet, considerate way; but they were acknowledged at last with a look that made amends for all her former obtuseness; and in spite of their different natures and unequal social position, these two women soon came to feel, if not exactly drawn to one another, mutually interested in each other. At the same time, as Elizabeth ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... to be gone, out into the sunshine, out over the water to my glorious boat. But all hands lingered. Even Spider, my crew, lingered. No hint broke through my obtuseness of why they lingered. I have often thought since of how they must have regarded me, the newcomer being welcomed into their company standing at bar with them, and not standing for a single round ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour, "that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or something at home." If that sentiment, that obtuseness to the massive horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook is dark. One fears that it is not ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being enacted every day before his very eyes—in his own garden and dooryard and apple-orchard and vineyard. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... that happened to the hundreds of human beings it was carrying. They have digested the whole affair and almost forgotten it. That ability of theirs, enviable though it may be, insults my general humanitarian instincts. It is loathsome to me. And their clumsy phrases revealing the indifference, the obtuseness of their souls make me shudder. In their eyes I see that calm selfish sense of their own security to the damage of another person's security which is at the bottom of a murderous madness that I myself experienced. Those men are cold men, they are murderous men. And a brutal ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... sleep-compelling chant from sundown until precisely half past four in the morning, when it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens everybody it has lulled into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "For thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of the West India islands furnishing such satanic entomological ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... destruction, in every sense of the word, of human creatures, is so constantly obvious, as mingled and spread throughout the whole system, that the mind has been insensibly wrought to that protective obtuseness which (like the thickness of the natural clothing of animals in rigorous climates) we acquire in defence of our own ease, against the aggrievance of things which inevitably continue in our presence. An instinctive policy to avoid feeling with respect to this prevailing destruction, has so effectually ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the two or twenty thousand miles over sea is the smallest part of the difficulty and expense of getting anything to people living inland; as it is, I think I have done some good in the matter; their meaning was good but their discretion small. But the obtuseness of English in general about anything out of the immediate circle of their ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... any way or remind him that she was "different." In her happiness and sincere desire to please she succeeded remarkably well in making herself superficially at least very much like Ted's own "kind of girl" and though with true masculine obtuseness he was entirely unaware of the conscious effort she was putting into the performance nevertheless he enjoyed the results in full and played up to her undeniable charms with his usual debonair and heedless grace ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... pen-knives, contributed greatly to the income of the parental household. It is said that even at a very early age, his quick perception and his acute nervous organisation enabled him to produce much finer work than others of far greater experience in the same trade, whose obtuseness had kept them in a state of comparative ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... directed. A mind hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and it remained clear and bright enough so long as passion was in me; but as it died, so the mind clouded, and recoiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't and wouldn't were in my case curiously involved; nor have I in this respect ever been able to correct my natural temperament. I have always remained powerless to do anything unless moved by a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose Adam Bede he pronounced "simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Kenyon, with a glance of friendly commiseration at my obtuseness, "that Miriam had utterly disappeared, leaving no trace by which her whereabouts could be known. In the meantime, the municipal authorities had become aware of the murder of the Capuchin; and from many preceding circumstances, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Willamette still rode the pretty little pony whose ears and tail he had so barbarously mutilated. It reeled under him from sheer weakness, so young was it and so worn by the journey of the day before. In vain did Cecil expostulate. With true Indian obtuseness and brutality, the Willamette refused to see why he should be merciful ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... in workmanlike disgust for his own obtuseness. "I'm going back to the Tech when your railroad is finished and learn a few things. I couldn't think of anything but the old Erie Railroad scheme, when it was narrowed down from the six-foot gauge. They did it in one night; but they had a man to every second cross-tie ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... such records of vice. "It may be expected," he writes, "that the Editor should convey to his readers the intellectual impressions which the execution of his task has produced on his mind. He confesses that they are mournful." Sir Richard was either a master of irony, or a man of singular obtuseness. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... gone to Mass, and the fool had taken shelter in the porch of the gallery, that there he might vent some of his ill-humour—or indeed indulge it—in pondering the obtuseness of woman and the insidiousness of Gonzaga, to whom he never doubted that this miserable state of ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... think that he ascribed a dodecahedron to the globe, when he says that God made use of it in delineating the universe? For upon account of the multitude of its bases and the obtuseness of its angles, avoiding all rectitude, it is flexible, and by circumtension, like globes made of twelve skins, it becomes circular and comprehensive. For it has twenty solid angles, each of which is contained by three obtuse planes, and each of these contains ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... a former chapter, 'that he was a man of courage:'—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;—nor did this arise from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts;—for he felt this insult of my father's as feelingly as a man could do;—but he was of a peaceful, placid nature,—no jarring element in it,—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... last Robert, by main force, as it were, got Wardlaw off into politics, but the new Irish Coercion Bill was hardly introduced before the irrepressible being turned to Catherine, and said to her with smiling obtuseness— ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... willing to dispense with thought during the intervening space of time before a not overly agreeable ending; and under the auspices of an honoured hostess fee'd by the glitter of coin into a consenting obtuseness. With the night they set forth in the rain. The river bank was not far off, but such vulgar plunge from the edge of the coarse promiscuity of Hanagawado[u] was not to the taste of either. Then, as now, a ferry not far from the Adzuma bridge crossed to the pretty sounding ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... The crass obtuseness of most of the nobility made it a relief to return to the usual habits of the Sorel household when the court had left Ulm. Friedmund, anxious to prove that his new honours were not to alter his ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... using the characteristics and the disturbances of the time for the mere purpose of providing incident and adventure, and a strong local colour for his puppets—in a word, for the most ordinary and conventional purposes of the romantic novelist. Nor is this the only instance of such psychological obtuseness in his work. That, in spite of this initial and damning defect, he does succeed in producing a fine novel, is but one more proof of the amazing fecundity of his genius. None the less does the fact remain that it is a novel, so to speak, without a soul—that, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... old as woman—to give the offender a piece of her mind. She also indulged in a few general remarks concerning the obtuseness of people who were unable to see when they were not wanted, by which her father understood her to ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... the Second, just one hundred years before George the Third ascended the throne, the English colonies in America struggled manfully for prosperity against the unjust and illiberal commercial policy of Great Britain. With a strange obtuseness of perception in regard to the elements of national prosperity, which the truths of modern political economy now clearly illustrate to the common mind, the British government sought to fill its coffers from the products of colonial industry, by imposing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... breathe when they are in the room, as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable obtuseness of such people." ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... was unfit for any office of trust and respectability. "I have, indeed," urged the mayor, "observed a natural obtuseness in this man; nevertheless, when he is allowed time to think, he ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... A constitutional obtuseness renders me delightfully insensible to one fruitful source of provocation among inanimate things. I am so dull as to regard all distinctions between "rights" and "lefts" as invidious; but I have witnessed the agonized struggles of many a victim of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a great man and it had no eyes to see. It was ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... returned Ezekiel, with patronizing recognition of his obtuseness. "I guess ez heow you ain't much on American. You folks orter learn the language if you kalkilate to keep ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... a man's obtuseness, "that you would have a daughter as well as a son to love you and take care ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... not the hour in which I ever looked for the ridiculous. It has always been forced upon me, and is the accident of my existence. I would not want the sense of it when it comes, for that would show an obtuseness of mental organization; but, on peril of my soul, I would not move an eyelash ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... from me to join in the thoughtless generalizations about the obtuseness of the Alpine peasant which have disfigured some of the literature of climbing. These climbers have shown infinitely greater obtuseness before Alpine realities than the peasants derided by them. True, a star may compete in vain with a cheese in suggesting visions of joy, but our supercilious ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Warburton, again rejected by Steevens and Johnson, once more replaced by Knight and Collier, with one of his usual happy notes by the former of the two, without comment by the latter, finally left unnoticed by Dyce. My Query then is this. What amount of obtuseness will disqualify a criticaster who itches to be tinkering and cobbling the noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness, as not ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... sane writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "To say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. Such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. Children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. The imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it feeds upon, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... things,—for these she craved. "I need them, mother," she would say,—"my soul has need of them. If there are no flowers, get green leaves, or a picture of Christ, or of some saint, or little child." And sometimes I would dream, for a moment, that even I, with all my obtuseness, my earthiness, could have some faint perception of the way in which, in the midst of suffering, any form of beauty was ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the occupation she had pretended to be engaged in, and said to him in a low voice, which yet not only vibrated itself, but made its hearers thrill through all their obtuseness: ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A Puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... had brought her to this by his cruelty, his obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not want to pour himself out in self-accusation—that seemed too easy a way of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give him one more chance—and then to show her! And all the while he ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... acts of ratiocination are of daily, of hourly, occurrence in the lives of countless myriads of the lower animals, and escape our observation because of the obtuseness of our senses. Every now and then, however, the observer is able to chronicle such an act of reason, and thus adduce the proposition that if the creature or creatures were continually placed in surroundings requiring a ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... too reserved, and I am too candid. It would be a dangerous experiment. I should inevitably say something rude. Mabel adores Shelley and Browning; she reads Greek, too. Her poetry is sure to be unintelligible, and I should expose my obtuseness of intellect. I couldn't even look ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... reviewer, displays the weakness of the translator, but gives no idea of the nature of the book itself, not even a glimpse of the critic's own estimate of the book, save the implication that he himself had understood the original, though many Englishmen even were staggered by its obtuseness and failed to comprehend the subtlety of its allusion. It is criticism in the narrowest, most arrogant sense of the word, destructive instead of informing, blinding instead of illuminating. It is noteworthy that Sterne's name is nowhere mentioned in the review, nor is there ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... stood pondering the Earl's words and angrily wondering at his obtuseness. Then suddenly he knew he had been mocked, and he turned and ran after his enemy; but Leicester had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... King's lot to be handsome; but now the approaches of age were giving to his countenance a dignity which in youth it had lacked. This was part and parcel of a certain mental obtuseness or obstinacy: when his Majesty did not understand, majesty became sedentary in his face. Often when it was the duty, or the device, of his ministerial advisers to confuse his mind with explanatory details about things which ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... hall door sounded. Imagine my surprise on opening the door to discover the slight figure of what appeared to be a most fascinating young lady who was heavily veiled. She was in a state almost bordering on hysteria, as even I, in spite of my usual obtuseness, noticed. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... remarks even in the course of his defense. He demonstrated the general accuracy of his speeches, ridiculed the indictment against himself, and showed how it arose partly from political prejudices, partly from the mental obtuseness and anger of his opponents. A portion of his speech recalled the things the Conservatives attacking him said about Joseph Chamberlain, now one of their idols. They were remarks made during Chamberlain's ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... herself as much as Mrs. Cameron wondered at her, trying to decide whether it were ignorance, conceit, obtuseness, or what, which made her so self-possessed when she was expected to appear ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... obtuseness and inconvincibility of man and went to read the leader in The Daily Telegraph to Mrs. Ware. Austin, with a smile on his lips, wandered out into the sunshine in ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... highly cryptic smile. For a man as brilliant and as penetrant in every other respect ... but after all, if the big dope didn't realize that half the women aboard, including Sandy, had been making passes at him, she certainly wouldn't enlighten him. Besides, that one particular area of obtuseness was a real part of his charm. Wherefore she said merely: "I'm not sure whether I'm a bit catty or you're a bit stupid. Anyway, it's Alex she's really in love with. And you already know about ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... importation of the slaves it liberated. Locally called 'Cruits,' many of these savages were war-captives; others were criminals condemned to death, whom the wise chief preferred to sell than to slay. With a marvellous obtuseness and want of common sense our Government made Englishmen by wholesale of these wretches, with eligibility to sit on juries, to hold office, and to exercise all the precious rights of Englishmen. Instead of being apprenticed or bound ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the whole—with a certain moral obtuseness, seemed inconceivable. For to Jurgen it now appeared that Guenevere was behaving with not quite the decorum which might fairly be expected of a princess. Contrition, at least, one might have looked for, over this hole and corner business: whereas it worried him to note that Guenevere was coming ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... him for a second or two, in a kind of wondering despair at his obtuseness. But she controlled ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... in, smiling, to tell him that breakfast was ready, and he began to question her about when his brother was taken ill. But either from obtuseness or obstinacy, he could get nothing from the woman, and he was about to let her go while he ate his breakfast of mealie cake and hot milk; but a sudden thought occurred to him. Had those ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... from me to do either Mr. WHITE or the reader the disservice of saying what it is. Suffice that we are introduced to some quite charming people, as well as two extremely unpleasant ones, and if the web of mystery is held together in places by a somewhat generous share of obtuseness on the part of the persons concerned it is not for us to complain, since we become aware of the defect only after the affair ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... should think you were going out for a walking advertisement of a flower-store!'—Observations of this kind between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or intimate friends, do not indicate sincerity, but obtuseness; and the person who remarks on the pimple on your nose is in many cases just as apt to deceive you as the most accomplished Frenchwoman who avoids ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Greech had provided Comus with this job that he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money for the necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to cling to some people like a garment throughout their life had caused Mr. Greech to accept the invitation. When Comus heard of the circumstance he laughed long and boisterously; his spirits, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... His wife's armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up at the large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph represented a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... years. Such remarks are for the most part made by men who, in good faith, have not the least idea that they are making themselves disagreeable. There is no malicious intention. It is a matter of pure obtuseness, stupidity, selfishness, and vulgarity. But an obtuse, stupid, selfish, and vulgar person is disagreeable. And your right course will be to carefully avoid all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... placed in front of the case," Challoner persisted, and Mrs. Keith found it hard to forgive him for his obtuseness. ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... however, taken into account the obtuseness of a barbaric despot. When the commissioner of the executive, who accompanied the expedition, sent next day a flag of truce into the Abyssinian headquarters, announcing to John that Freeland was still prepared to treat with him for the restoration of the captured fortresses ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... matter, Miss Heron?" he asked, anxiously, and with all a man's obtuseness. "You didn't happen to come to grief in any way? I didn't ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... The unlawful demons invoked by certain of the barbarians; their power and the manner of their suppression. Suppression. The incredible obtuseness of those who attend within tea-houses. The harmonious attitude of a person ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... probably, other than conscientious men. What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored them has changed. All that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is the excess of his excentricity, or his deviation from that resultant of forces to ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... tolerating him, then?—you have a respect for a political platitudinarian as insensible as an ox to everything he can't turn into political capital. You think his monumental obtuseness suited to the dignity ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... smiled indulgently at her son's masculine obtuseness. The subtleties of women were so far beyond his comprehension that it was hardly worth while to endeavor to make him understand. She made the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... side to catch sight of the mate whose voice had so resistlessly summoned him. Only his wide ears moved, waving inquisitively. His nostrils, ordinarily his chief source of information, were dulled almost to obtuseness by that subtly acrid ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... soothing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until precisely half past four in the morning, when it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens everybody it has lulled into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "For thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of the West India islands furnishing such satanic entomological specimens will ever be ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... unaccented, which is equivalent to ee uttered feebly, as in the word diversity. This is the most common sound of i and of y. The vulgar are apt to let it fall into the more obscure sound of short u. As elegance of utterance depends much upon the preservation of this sound from such obtuseness, perhaps Walker and others have done well to mark it as e in me; though some suppose it to be peculiar, and others identify it with the short i in fit. Thirdly, a distinction is made by some writers, between the vowel ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... about her, something bordering upon enthusiasm in the way she repelled an attempted incursion upon the forbidden ground. And withal she was so tender and sympathetic toward all mankind, that her wilful obtuseness on the subject of love bore to him the appearance of wanton cruelty. It did not occur to him that she might be acting in self-defence, fearing to give the slightest rein to a feeling which might, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... misinterpreting the gratitude of the audience that it was over for a desire for more, had followed it with 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy.' His sister—these things run in families—had sung 'My Little Gray Home in the West'—rather sombrely, for she had wanted to sing the 'Rosary,' and, with the same obtuseness which characterised her brother, had come back and rendered two plantation songs. The audience was now examining its programmes in the interval of silence in order to ascertain the duration of the sentence ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... role of a prosecutor, and to argue was to tread on dangerous ground. I had done what I believed right. I had kept my promise. So I rose to go. I must have given Rufus Blight a strange look as I held out my hand. I was furious at him for his obtuseness or his cunning, and I must have shown it, for he returned my gaze with a puzzled stare. Then a gleam of light filtered into that brain, so competent to deal with steel-works, so ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed, persistently, to realise any profound and poignant thing that touched him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... that the visit was conducted with the most perfect propriety in all respects. Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take upon herself a large share of the conversation. The minister, on the other hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss Susan, but, with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good woman drew his fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly any of his insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they were aimed. It is probable that his features or tones betrayed some impatience at having thus been foiled of his purpose, for ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said the doctor, inattentively; and his blindness to Sarah's charms and her powers made her almost pity such obtuseness. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... wear that pair of old shoes?'—'Holloa, Bess! is that your party-rig? I should think you were going out for a walking advertisement of a flower-store!'—Observations of this kind between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or intimate friends, do not indicate sincerity, but obtuseness; and the person who remarks on the pimple on your nose is in many cases just as apt to deceive you as the most accomplished Frenchwoman who avoids disagreeable topics in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... that she did not care for her old comrade as much as when they were children and was taking this tactful way of showing him the fact. Mrs. Cameron was in a state of mingled indignation and despair over such masculine obtuseness, and vowed that if young MacDonald were not politely requested to discontinue his attentions to Captain Herbert's niece, she would feel it her duty to send ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... storyteller. He was an atrocious liar, but this fact would not have been evident to his enthralled listeners if his cowboy comrades, in base jealousy, had not betrayed him. The truth about his remarkable fabrications, however, had not become known to Castleton, solely because of the Englishman's obtuseness. And there was another thing much stranger than this and quite as amusing. Dorothy Coombs knew Monty was a liar; but she was so fascinated by the glittering, basilisk eyes he riveted upon her, so taken in by his horrible tales of blood, that despite her knowledge ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... improvements; we fail to see in his reign any principle of "initiation," save that which the Ruler of the universe has implanted in every system and in every government. Yet we concede the right of others to think differently on these points, without being suspected of moral obtuseness or obliquity. Especially can we comprehend how a patriotic Frenchman should choose to accept all the conditions of his epoch, and embrace every opportunity of aiding in the task ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the lower orders it means crime; with the higher civilisation a legion of imps shrieking in a man's soul. I will not say that my particular band have been silent since I came here, for that would mean moral obtuseness; but they are placated, and have consented to fix a generous eye on the future. I believe, firmly believe, that my future will atone for my past,—morally, I mean; I want you to understand that I have wronged no man but myself, that I have been guilty of no act unbecoming a gentleman. Now look at ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... have been very comic; "like a dying duck," as Edith Gervase said. Edith was really very pretty, and he would have liked to talk to her, even about fox-terriers, if she would have listened. One afternoon at the Dixons' he really forced himself upon her, and with all the obtuseness of an enthusiastic boy tried to discuss the Lotus Eaters of Tennyson. It was too absurd. Captain Kempton was making signals to Edith all the time, and Lieutenant Gatwick had gone off in disgust, and he had promised to bring her ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... was given, not to Great Britain only, but to the world; and we to-day see, in the contrasted colonial systems of the two states, the results, on the one hand of political aptitude, on the other of political obtuseness and backwardness, which cannot struggle from the past into the present until the present in turn has become ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... so greatly that pastime. I discovered that he was terrified of his brother, Alexei, and at that I was not surprised. His weakness was that he was inpenetrably stupid, and it was quite impossible to make him understand anything that was not immediately in line with his own experiences—unusual obtuseness in a Russian. He was vain about his clothes, especially about his shoes, which he had always made in London; he was sentimental and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... quantitative, that is to say, purely exterior (having regard to the wealth of life), and not qualitative (the goodness of life). Always the same tendency to take the appearance for the thing, the form for the substance, the law for the essence, always the same absence of moral personality, the same obtuseness of conscience, which has never recognized sin present in the will, which places evil outside of man, moralizes from outside, and transforms to its own liking the whole lesson of history! What is at fault is the philosophic superficiality of France, which ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sometimes didn't understand what was meant, and would do the thing in her own way. She wouldn't see at first the various little good turns which the other did her in her quiet, considerate way; but they were acknowledged at last with a look that made amends for all her former obtuseness; and in spite of their different natures and unequal social position, these two women soon came to feel, if not exactly drawn to one another, mutually interested in each other. At the same time, as Elizabeth was not blind to the diplomacy of the house, she had ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... impression which the memoirs convey that the writer himself had not the faintest conception that there was anything in the least degree unseemly in what he relates. There appears to be a sort of moral obtuseness in him in reference to these subjects, but to these subjects only.[676] The memoir closes with a beautiful expression of resignation to the Divine will, and of hopeful confidence about the future, in which he was no doubt perfectly sincere. And yet he openly avows a laxity of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... joke as well as any man in New York, and was not at all averse from chaffing some of his less gifted colleagues when their obtuseness or faithful adherence to the letter of instructions permitted a criminal to befool them; but he resented the levity of Curtis's tone now, though, deep in his heart, he felt ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... were listening! (The obtuseness of MABEL is very strange to her.) Mabel, don't you ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... and coral to her. Of course, much is to be said in excuse of man, brute though he be. Consider the multiplicity of his occupations, the practical nature of his cares. But granting the validity of all such excuse, there is in man an original obtuseness of fibre as regards sentiment in comparison with the delicacy of woman's. It comes, perhaps, from the same hardness of constitution which forbids us the luxury of ready tears. Thus it is very difficult for the wisest man to understand ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unable to distinguish the strident noise of the tram-car wheels, or the deafening crash of ill-tuned instruments from the harmonies of Bellini or Wagner; that each of us would blush for such insensibility, and would conceal it—how is it we do not perceive that such obtuseness is habitual to us in moral matters? We see that we are capable of confusing virtuous persons and criminals, without any foreboding. How is it that so often in the case of judicial errors, the voice of the innocent did not resound in our ears, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... both parties. Not to admit that the text of this Edition is in many places improved, from the suggestions of my Translators, by corrections of "Names of Persons, Places, and Things," would be to betray a stubbornness or obtuseness of feeling which certainly does not enter into ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... them in an indolent, insolent fashion, to show them what a great person he was, and to speak of things beyond their ken. Playing this part, he would have enjoyed himself tolerably—nor the less because now and again he let his contempt for the company peep from under his complaisance—but for the obtuseness, or the malice of his friend; who, as if he had only one man and one idea in his head, let fall with every moment some mention of Colonel John. Now, it was the happy certainty of the Colonel's return next ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... to say in reply. As if anyone could be more suffering than himself! He was full of a dumb ache. He marvelled at Keith's obtuseness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to lose itself in the green gloom of the impenetrable woods. One of these huge cascades would make the fortune of a Swiss valley, and we need no further efforts of our willing bearers in the cause of sight-seeing, but as neither words nor gestures prove intelligible to Western obtuseness, a brown coolie seizes each arm, and rushes us up a grassy hill to a huge cavern, hung with myriad bats, and containing a pool of crystal water. The simple minds of these kindly mountaineers shirk no trouble for the benefit of the stranger, who, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... whimsically complains that even intelligent and sympathetic critics confounded the ideal passion described in "Epipsychidion" with the love affairs of "a servant-girl and her sweetheart." This almost incomprehensible obtuseness on the part of men who ought to have known better, combined with the coarse abuse of vulgar scribblers, was enough to make a man so sincerely modest as Shelley doubt his powers, or shrink from the severe labour of developing them. (See Medwin, volume 2 page ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... at the obtuseness and inconvincibility of man and went to read the leader in The Daily Telegraph to Mrs. Ware. Austin, with a smile on his lips, wandered out into the sunshine ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... looked at her with a kind of despair for her feminine obtuseness. "That is quite out of the question," he said, "and Charteris knows it. If he went on, ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... one puzzled as well as pained by her obtuseness, "you see clearly that it must be so. True love, as I conceive it, must be something passing all knowledge, irresistible; something not to be resented for its power, but worshipped for it; something not to fight against, but to glory in. And such is your love; but you give the proof ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... visit, he saw her each day for longer intervals, and realized very quickly that she had no intention of shunning him or punishing him before the world, as he had feared that she would do. She was so quiet, so gentle to him, that, with all a man's obtuseness where women are concerned, he congratulated himself on being let off so easily, and thought that the matter was to be buried in oblivion. He even wondered a little at Nan's savoir-faire, and felt a vague sense of disappointment mingling ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... just a little too sure of their superiority to the English in point of humour, and indeed they often carry their witticisms on the supposed English "obtuseness" to a point at which exaggeration ceases to be funny. It is certainly not every American who scoffs at English wit that is entitled to do so. There are dullards in the United States as well as elsewhere; and nothing can well be more ghastly than American humour run ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... nothing escaped his intelligence. To Hilda, shocked by the coarseness and the obtuseness which evidently characterized his attitude, now as on other occasions, this self-confidence was desolating; it was ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... made rapid strides in that branch of knowledge to which my attention was directed. A mind hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and it remained clear and bright enough so long as passion was in me; but as it died, so the mind clouded, and recoiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't, with wouldn't, was in my case curiously involved; nor have I in this respect ever been able to correct my natural temperament. I have always remained powerless to do anything unless ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... excited,—then I made rapid strides in that branch of knowledge to which my attention was directed. A mind hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and it remained clear and bright enough so long as passion was in me; but as it died, so the mind clouded, and recoiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't and wouldn't were in my case curiously involved; nor have I in this respect ever been able to correct my natural temperament. I have always remained powerless to do anything unless moved by a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... line in the hand which he calls the linea jecoraria, and the triangle formed by this and the linea vitae and the linea cerebri, rules the disposition of the subject, due consideration being given to the acuteness or obtuseness of the angles of this triangle. Cardan seems to have based his treatise on one written by a certain Ruffus Ephesius, and it is without doubt one of the dullest portions ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... with a glance of friendly commiseration at my obtuseness, "that Miriam had utterly disappeared, leaving no trace by which her whereabouts could be known. In the meantime, the municipal authorities had become aware of the murder of the Capuchin; and from many preceding ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a great man and it had no eyes to see. It was destined ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Howth, relying on the influence of time and place to help him in methods more primitive. It was incredible to him that she shouldn't—or perhaps wouldn't—realise what he was driving at. Apparently she didn't understand the first conventions of the game, and when her obtuseness forced him to a sudden and passionate declaration ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... "scientific authority" with a feeling akin to that of the savage for his family fetich. They are well deserved, nevertheless, as a few examples will show. To such intellects as Prof. Weber's—whom we take as the leader of the German Orientalists of the type of Christophiles—certainly the word "obtuseness" cannot be applied. Upon seeing how chronology is deliberately and maliciously perverted in favour of "Greek influence," Christian interests and his own predetermined theories—another, and even a stronger term should be applied. What expression is too severe to signify one's ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... were all of opinion generally that the plaintiff had been illegally arrested. This vague answer did not satisfy his Lordship, and he repeated his question. He could not, however, obtain a more satisfactory reply. Evidently vexed at what he deemed the obtuseness or partiality of the jury, he turned to the bar, and said, that a spirit of a mischievous and destructive nature was abroad, which, if not repressed, threatened awful consequences. The country would be lost, he said, and the government overturned, if such a spirit were encouraged; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... system. But little good will my preaching or that of any one else do them, while they disregard the first and plainest principles of honesty. There is no lack of ability to give a minister the support he needs; and the withholding of that support, or the supplying of it by constraint, shows a moral obtuseness that argues but poorly for their love of any thing but themselves. I believe that the labourer is worthy of his hire; that when men build a church and call a minister for their own spiritual good, they are bound to supply his natural wants; and that, ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... he? Why, indeed?" repeated Fitz, amazed at her obtuseness. "Don't you see that, if the child died, the block of stores belongs to my mother? But it makes no difference now," sighed Mr. Wittleworth, "for my mother, contrary to my advice, contrary to my solemn protest, sold out all her right in the premises ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley's arrest. She marveled at the obtuseness of older people—to have stood at the red-hot center of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she were following each word of the discussion. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... tyranny; but also a winning sweetness, a ready and discriminating love for the beautiful, and a delicacy in the sympathies, the absence of which always made me sick in our own country. Here, at least, one does not suffer from obtuseness or indifference. They take pleasure, too, in acts of kindness; they are bountiful, but it is useless to hope the least honor in affairs of business. I cannot persuade those who serve me, however attached, that they should not deceive me, and plunder me. They think ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... later, Jane watched him drive away, thinking to herself: "Deryck was right. But what a queer mixture of shrewdness and obtuseness, and how marvellously it worked out to the furtherance of ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness—to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness—of something fresh and cool despite her passion—which had caused him to think ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... national character have shown themselves lately. Among other things, the artists have taken to caricaturing the cholera! One gets to be so hardened by exposure, as to be able to laugh at even these proofs of moral obtuseness. Odd enough traits of character are developed by seeing men under such trying circumstances. During one of the worst periods of the disease, I met a countryman in the street, who, though otherwise a clever man, has the weakness ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ill-prepared to meet it.... It also causes muscular and mental debility, loss of spirit and manliness, and occasional insanity, suicide and homicide. Moreover it leads to further uncontrollable passions in early manhood.... Further, this vice enfeebles the intellectual powers, inducing lethargy and obtuseness, and incapacity for hard mental work. And last, and most of all, it is an immorality which stains the whole character and undermines ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... sorry for Dicky. He caught the tension in the atmosphere, and looked from his mother to me with a helpless caught-between-two-fires-expression. With masculine obtuseness he put his foot in it in his ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... and her maid came with her candle and her walking-stick: it was her habit of late to go to her room as soon as dinner was over, for she had no one to sit up with. Rickie was impressed by her loneliness, and also by the mixture in her of insight and obtuseness. She was so quick, so clear-headed, so imaginative even. But all the same, she had forgotten what people were like. Finding life dull, she had dropped lies into it, as a chemist drops a new element into a solution, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Paintings, I cannot say that my expectations were fully realized. Ill health may in part account for this; my recent acquaintance with the immense and multiform treasures of Art at Rome may also help explain my obtuseness at Florence. And yet I saw nothing in Rome with greater pleasure or profit than I derived from the hour I spent in the studio of our countryman POWERS, whose fame is already world-wide, and who I trust is now rapidly ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... performance the applause which it plainly deserves. The self-evolution of England, as it may perhaps be called, in its economic, political, and literary life, offers an admirable model of concentration and energy. Even where it is a case of obtuseness to other civilisations, at least as high but of a different type, the verdict cannot be wholly unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct vital value. A man, too sensitive to the rights ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... as if nothing had happened. I may have been rather absent, reflecting pensively. I mean to say, I had at times considered this alliance as a dawning possibility, but never had I meant to be sudden. Only for the woman's remarkably stubborn obtuseness I dare say the understanding might have been deferred to a more suitable moment and arranged in a calm and orderly manner. But the die was cast. Like his lordship, I had chosen an American bride—taken her by storm and carried her off ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a man as brilliant and as penetrant in every other respect ... but after all, if the big dope didn't realize that half the women aboard, including Sandy, had been making passes at him, she certainly wouldn't enlighten him. Besides, that one particular area of obtuseness was a real part of his charm. Wherefore she said merely: "I'm not sure whether I'm a bit catty or you're a bit stupid. Anyway, it's Alex she's really in love with. And you already ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... Father Beret and never openly sanctioned by Captain Farnsworth. The talk was insinuating on the part of the former, while the latter slipped evasively from every proposition, as if not able to consider it on account of a curious obtuseness of perception. Still, when they separated they shook hands and exchanged a searching look perfectly satisfactory ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... for granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably PAINFUL, that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form of which "faith" comes to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross". Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... eked out her small annuity by needlework, had a brand new first-class sewing-machine handed in to her to take the place of the old worn-out treadle which tried her rheumatic joints. The pale-faced schoolmaster, who had spent years with hardly a break in struggling with the juvenile obtuseness of Tamfield, received through the post a circular ticket for a two months' tour through Southern Europe, with hotel coupons and all complete. John Hackett, the farmer, after five long years of bad seasons, borne with ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... still looked provokingly innocent. So her mother took a long step forward, for in truth she grew impatient with all this obtuseness in which, for reasons of her own, she did ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... are of daily, of hourly, occurrence in the lives of countless myriads of the lower animals, and escape our observation because of the obtuseness of our senses. Every now and then, however, the observer is able to chronicle such an act of reason, and thus adduce the proposition that if the creature or creatures were continually placed in surroundings requiring a like act of reason, ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... workmanlike disgust for his own obtuseness. "I'm going back to the Tech when your railroad is finished and learn a few things. I couldn't think of anything but the old Erie Railroad scheme, when it was narrowed down from the six-foot gauge. They did it in one night; but they had a man to every second ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... he asked, anxiously, and with all a man's obtuseness. "You didn't happen to come to grief in any way? I didn't fall on ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... anxious to be gone, out into the sunshine, out over the water to my glorious boat. But all hands lingered. Even Spider, my crew, lingered. No hint broke through my obtuseness of why they lingered. I have often thought since of how they must have regarded me, the newcomer being welcomed into their company standing at bar with them, and not standing for a ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... reason, just as you would in vain exhibit a curious piece of limning to the blind, or endeavour to bribe, as scripture saith, a sow by the offer of a precious stone. The fault is not, in such case, in the accuracy of your sacred reasoning, but in the obtuseness and perverseness of the barbarians to whom it ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... education, and by the reception of those principles of self- reliance, without which they have not the moral perception requisite to enable them to appreciate the blessings of freedom; and this very ignorance and obtuseness is one of the most telling arguments against the system which produces it. The want of this previous preparation has been frequently shown, particularly in Kentucky, where whole bodies of emancipated slaves, after ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... a book is often obscurity; and an author whose meaning is got at only by severe mental exertion, and a straining of the mind's eye, is generally weak in the backbone of him. Occasionally it is the dullness of the reader, but oftener the obtuseness of the writer. ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... about the obtuseness," he commented, "because she is really rather nice to look at. She has improved so ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... Realizing the obtuseness of the Japanese in all matters relating to religion, it seems strange that the national government permits our missionaries, and those from other Christian countries, such free scope, even employing them to educate ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... in utter impatience of the brutality and ignorance which Bartoline had contrived to amalgamate into one sentence. But Saddletree, like other prosers, was blessed with a happy obtuseness of perception concerning the unfavourable impression which he sometimes made on his auditors. He proceeded to deal forth his scraps of legal knowledge without mercy, and concluded by asking Butler, with great self-complacency, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... said Hazel emphatically, with a passing thought of wonder at his obtuseness, though at the moment she was deep in her ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... to Mass, and the fool had taken shelter in the porch of the gallery, that there he might vent some of his ill-humour—or indeed indulge it—in pondering the obtuseness of woman and the insidiousness of Gonzaga, to whom he never doubted that this miserable state of ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... wonderful skill. As for the various anachronisms, and the confusion of names, dates, and manners, over which Dr. Johnson exults in no measured terms, the confusion is nowhere but in his own heavy obtuseness of sentiment and perception, and his want of poetical faith. Look into the old Italian poets, whom we read continually with still increasing pleasure; does any one think of sitting down to disprove the existence ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... has grown quite rusty from such continual wear; and when Mike whispers to her, in a sly way, that he is trying to get a home to offer a certain fine girl that he wants for a wife, Nannie shakes her finger witchingly at Biddy, as if to say, "I've found you out now." Mike does not relish her obtuseness, but she seems so timid and shrinking, that he is backward about speaking his sentiments plainly. Besides, he has a real affection for her, and that always brings a certain reserve with it. What in the ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... civilizations. Unless life is arranged for the mere benefit of the novelist, what right had these bits of last-century Europe here? Even the virtues of the South were some of them anachronisms; and even those that were not existed side by side with an obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero of Semmes, and a barbarism that could starve prisoners by ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and roses under bonnet, going forth to visit her sick poor. The incongruity struck the mind painfully—not merely as an incongruity, but as an impropriety—like a soldier going to the trenches in an opera hat and laced ruffles. Such follies, arising from individual obtuseness, must be met by regulation dictated by good sense, and submitted to as a ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... emphatically alone, and of the people there was none with Him. Even the disciples whom He had drawn nearest to Him, and to whom He had tried to communicate most of His thought and spirit, were so behind that He often had to reprove them, and lament their obtuseness and want of sympathy. In the greatness of His love He had to go forward into the darkness of Gethsemane. He was alone while they slept, and then through ribaldry, scorn, and sarcasm, to the cross. Alas! alas! almost alone, except a few—to their everlasting honor—poor ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... met with all obtuseness the flying rumors of the country. His worst enemies said that he had fallen from grace while in Washington, and "bucked" with all his bonds against a faro bank. His best friends obtained no explanation of his ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... employed,—in their own behalf, at least, if not for our beloved country,—these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office. Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels! Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever such a mischance occurred,—when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses,—nothing could exceed the vigilance ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indifference originate in a physical or a moral cause, from an obtuseness in their corporeal formation or a perfection in their intellectual one, I do not pretend to decide; but whatever be the cause, the effect is enjoyed with great modesty. So little do the French pique themselves on this valuable stoicism, that they acknowledge ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... happiness by making it a source of fresh obligations, had from the outset accepted his ties with an exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized her most delicate pleasures; and her husband's sensitiveness to it in great measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... girl leered at the Rector so unguardedly, in saying this, that Pascualo, in spite of his corpulent obtuseness, caught the glimmer of an allusion and studied her face enquiringly. But his immense faith, at bottom, in people and in things stood him in good stead against any dangerous inference. And he protested, mildly, at her exaggeration. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... tales the Evil One is depicted as an agent in the destruction of his own kingdom. He thus shows his obtuseness, or his subordination to a higher power. In the story that follows, he is outwitted by a Welshman. Many variants of this tale are found in many countries. It is evident from this and like stories, that it was believed the Spirit of Evil could easily be circumvented by an intelligent ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... morality to which the modern stage is tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A Puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of life, perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... armed in his splendid masculine obtuseness, stooped to kiss his wife's hot cheek, and said, as was inevitable, the last thing he should have ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... other species now included in the genus. There are three species, occurring only in European waters, which form this genus and agree in the following characters. The outline of the body is more nearly rectangular than in other Flat-fishes from the obtuseness of the snout and caudal end, and the somewhat uniform breadth of the body. The surface is rough from the presence of long slender spines on the scales. There is a large perforation in the septum between the gill cavities, but ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... conversation, in a train, of a wealthy, refined, and cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour, "that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or something at home." If that sentiment, that obtuseness to the massive horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook is dark. One fears that it is ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... he excited little attention during his lifetime, except amongst the sharers of his own religious persuasions; and, when noticed after his death, the praise of his intellectual acuteness has generally been accompanied with an expression of abhorrence for his supposed moral obtuseness. Mr. Lecky, for example, whilst speaking of Edwards as 'probably the ablest defender of Calvinism,' mentions his treatise on Original Sin as 'one of the most revolting books that have ever proceeded from the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... increase in favour with the Father of the Marshalsea in the ratio of his increasing visits. His obtuseness on the great Testimonial question was not calculated to awaken admiration in the paternal breast, but had rather a tendency to give offence in that sensitive quarter, and to be regarded as a positive shortcoming in point of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Charles the Second, just one hundred years before George the Third ascended the throne, the English colonies in America struggled manfully for prosperity against the unjust and illiberal commercial policy of Great Britain. With a strange obtuseness of perception in regard to the elements of national prosperity, which the truths of modern political economy now clearly illustrate to the common mind, the British government sought to fill its coffers from the products of colonial industry, by imposing upon their commerce such severe ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus. Gannett's nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all costs, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... said Miss Abbott, and closed her eyes wearily. Each moment her difficulties were increasing. She wished that she was not so tired, so open to contradictory impressions. She longed for Harriet's burly obtuseness or for the soulless diplomacy of ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... running noose and satisfying himself that it could not possibly give way or anyhow fail. He was also slow in making a stop-knot at the part of the rope that he proposed to attach to the tree, and he felt an extraordinary obtuseness of intelligence while making the calculations that he had so many times thought out during the night. "Yes," he said to himself, "twice the length of my arms. That's quite right. Six feet is twice the length of my arms—but I'll try it again. Yes—quite ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... library and museum just before his death, six years before—the town from which his family had originally come. Her memory worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... providing incident and adventure, and a strong local colour for his puppets—in a word, for the most ordinary and conventional purposes of the romantic novelist. Nor is this the only instance of such psychological obtuseness in his work. That, in spite of this initial and damning defect, he does succeed in producing a fine novel, is but one more proof of the amazing fecundity of his genius. None the less does the fact remain ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... in several years. Such remarks are for the most part made by men who, in good faith, have not the least idea that they are making themselves disagreeable. There is no malicious intention. It is a matter of pure obtuseness, stupidity, selfishness, and vulgarity. But an obtuse, stupid, selfish, and vulgar person is disagreeable. And your right course will be to carefully avoid all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... that moment, she loved Harry Lacy. For Harry Lacy was he about whom the difference began. Rhett Sempland, confident of his own affection and hopeful as to hers, had attempted, with masculine futility and obtuseness, to prohibit the further attentions ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such nonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's record of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain's obtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new method came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially important person in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world—and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... politics tersely Death within which welcomed a death without Dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man Grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth He lost the art of observing himself Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us Infallibility of our august mother Inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him Love's a selfish business one has work in hand No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it Silence and such signs are like revelations in black night The defensive ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to realize that their capital wasn't increasing as time passed. Sometimes impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Magna with his brilliant, enigmatic, and—to her—all too fugitive presence. Harriet had never really appreciated Charles—though she was dazzled by his fame at intervals—didn't really appreciate him to this day. Well, the loss was hers and the gain indubitably Felicia's, since the elder sister's obtuseness had left the younger sister a free field.—At thought of which ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... its brisk, impersonal talk of socialism, and politics, and small home events, and music. As it happened, the quartet had the lack of intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home attitude towards life. She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt. But one evening he came in, unheard, listened ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and nervous under the Reverend's firing, like the good Samaritan, I tried to pour oil and wine on their wounded spirits, by exalting intuition, and with a pitiful and patronizing tone deploring the slowness, the obtuseness, the materialism of most of the sons of Adam. It had its effect. They soon dried their tears, and with returning self-respect, told me of all the wonderful things women were doing in that town. From the scintillations ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the merest chances, and yet reputations control the fashions. That is a little prologue that would fit the case of all sorts of people. Everywhere around one sees prejudices, scheming, and obtuseness; but little or no justice. Nothing can be done to stem this torrent of evil. It must run its course. It always has been ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... herself as possible, to do nothing, which could jar on Ted in any way or remind him that she was "different." In her happiness and sincere desire to please she succeeded remarkably well in making herself superficially at least very much like Ted's own "kind of girl" and though with true masculine obtuseness he was entirely unaware of the conscious effort she was putting into the performance nevertheless he enjoyed the results in full and played up to her undeniable charms with his usual debonair ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... It's his work, and he'll help me to teach them, and by winter there'll be something accomplished." And of his help he had great need, for patience and courage were often sorely tried in the days which followed, and it was not always his pupils' obtuseness which brought the greatest strain to bear upon them. One old fish-wife, the oldest woman in the village, had regarded the whole plan of teaching the children ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... unessential forms of Christian truth. Some of us of the West are seeing increasingly the serious incongruity which exists between our way of thinking and of putting our thought into living form, and the way of the people about us. And we are not convinced, as we perhaps once were, that it is the obtuseness, or the religious perversity, of the Indian mind which is the cause of this. The sooner the better we realize that between the people of the East and of the West there is a wide mental gulf which may, indeed, by our associating ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
