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More "Obscene" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wounded at the end he is perfectly unmoved. As Mr. Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I do?' Roderigo whimpers ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... horrible state of conscious annihilation filled him with frenzy. He would have dashed his fetters against his brow, but the chain restrained him. He flung himself upon the damp and rugged ground. His fall disturbed a thousand obscene things. He heard the quick glide of a serpent, the creeping retreat of the clustering scorpions, and the swift escape of the dashing rats. His mighty calamities seemed slight when compared with these petty miseries. His great soul could ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... Night and Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pile surround, And things obscene bestrew the ground; Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie, All ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; and to this day, it is said, they sometimes pass, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... laugh at the expense of Mackintosh. He would say ridiculous things about him to the natives, and Mackintosh, his knowledge of Samoan still imperfect, would see their unrestrained mirth when Walker had made an obscene reference ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... now fallen into sore decay, behind iron-bound doors secured by mighty wooden locks, and barred with balks of timber, sheltered beneath the frowning muzzles of half a dozen futile carronades, they reveled in obscene orgies and committed their barbaric atrocities under the name of Justice and Commerce. Here they amassed wealth for the parent companies in distant lands, and ruthlessly despoiled the wild of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... yawped applause. In the midst of the uproar, Juno, the house servant, ventured to come in by way of the library, with Harman. The child ran to his mother where she stood in the centre of the room. A saucy corporal broke out with obscene speech and plucked at the dress of the negro girl, ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... also a tendency to obsessive ideas and doubts; that is, ideas and doubts that persist in coming against the will of the patient, such as the obscene word or phrase that continually obtrudes itself on a chaste woman, or the doubt whether one has shut the door or properly turned off the gas. Of course, everybody has such obsessions and doubts occasionally, but to be psychasthenic ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of these was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was on a subject not fit even ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... name they had never heard, and a performance which they could not understand; for they were resolved to judge for themselves, and would not suffer the town to be imposed upon by scribblers. In the pit, they exerted themselves with great spirit and vivacity; called out for the tunes of obscene songs, talked loudly at intervals of Shakespeare and Jonson, played on their catcalls a short prelude of terrour, clamoured vehemently for a prologue, and clapped with great dexterity at the first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... a mark of his gratitude for the food, and I accepted his offer. It was in this way that the stranger returned to the hut with me. As soon as I came in I saw a note on the table, a sort of thanks for the bread; it was an extremely ill-mannered epistle, full of obscene expressions. When Solem saw what I was reading, his iron face broke into a smile. I pretended not to understand the note and threw it back on the table; he picked it up ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... though there was my Lord Arlington and his company there. So I out, and met my wife in a coach, and stopped her going thither to meet me; and took her, and Mercer, and Deb., to Bartholomew Fair, and there did see a ridiculous, obscene little stage-play, called "Marry Andrey;" a foolish thing, but seen by every body; and so to Jacob Hall's dancing of the ropes; a thing worth seeing, and mightily followed, and so home and to the office, and then to bed. Writing to my father to-night not to unfurnish our house in the country for ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the time of day to her, and the time of day meant some obscene remark unfit for women's ears. The young girl wore a simple grey dress, with fine lawn kerchief neatly folded across her bosom, a large hat with flowing ribbons sat above the fairest face that ever gladdened men's ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... bull-frogs, night-owls, ahingas, herons, whose dwellings were in the mud of the swamp, or on its leafy roof, now lifted up their voices, bellowing, hooting, shrieking, and groaning. Bursting forth from the obscene retreat in which they had hitherto lain hidden, the alligators raised their hideous snouts out of the green coating of the swamp, gnashing their teeth, and straining towards us, while the owls and other birds circled round our heads, flapping and striking us with their wings as they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate, and the obscene intimations of the foregoing have brought the writer to the very outermost limit of public patience. We hope ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... upon his head like the two tops of Parnassus. Mrs. Macaulay, the historianess, married his brother. Lady Hamilton is said to have first enacted his Goddess of Health, being at this time a fille de joie of great celebrity.[60] The Temple of Health dwindled into a sort of obscene hell, or gambling house. In a quarrel which took place there, a poor young man was run into the bowels with a red-hot poker, of which injury he died. The mob vented their fury on the house, and the Magistrates, somewhat of the latest, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... to Dixie to marry niggers, have ye?' and scores of taunts more insulting and obscene. Our men never answered. They were worn and dusty. They had no weapons, of course, for the first thing the rebels did was to search every man, take his money, watch, studs, even his coat and shoes, when they were better than their own. Hundreds of our men were in their stocking-feet, or, rather, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... it all the trenches are now sometimes half full of water, for the summer rains, which have held back for so long, are beginning to fall. The stenches are so bad from rotting carcases and obscene droppings that an already weakened stomach becomes so rebellious that it is hard to swallow any food ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... me break the thread of my story for a moment to speak an earnest word of kindly caution to my youthful readers. Avoid the use of foul, obscene, or blasphemous language, my lads, as you would avoid the most deadly pestilence. I am grieved to notice that it is sometimes the fashion among lads, ay, even in some cases those of respectable parentage, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... concealed his face; a clergyman, and two or three of the Vigilance officers or guards followed. A strong guard under arms was stationed about the foot of the gallows. Permission was given the two to say anything they wished. Brace broke forth in a loud rant, profane and obscene, and danced about like one demented. The clergyman felt obliged to stop his blasphemous harangue by cramming his handkerchief over his mouth. He broke away, nevertheless, and again poured forth a tirade, declaring that he was being murdered. At ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... things too sadly betray their character. The man is coarse and vulgar in speech and in manners; untidy, careless, and uncleanly in person and dress; ignorant, lazy, and perhaps intemperate, with no thought beyond the gratification of his bodily wants and desires. Slang words and obscene are his daily vocabulary; selfishness his best-developed trait, and want the only incentive for his labor. His partner is like unto him, or worse, either by nature or association. Without taste, modesty, good sense, or natural refinement, she accompanies her dear Silas in his round of life, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... marriage, and family names proudly handed down from sire to son through many centuries. The name of father had not been venerable, nor that of mother a synonym of sanctity. To the civilized man marriage does not mean, as Dr. Maxwell seems to imagine, simply license for obscene riot, but a solemn covenant that he and the object of his adoration have forsaken all else to cleave each unto the other through weal and through woe, through life unto death. Desire may be the basic principle of the union, but ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... twinge of remorse or a sigh of regret. You have submitted to the insolent demands of Southern politicians with such prompt and easy acquiescence, that many of your oldest friends have mourned over your lost manhood, and sadly abandoned you to the worship of your ugly and obscene idol. A Northern man, descended from the best Puritan stock, surrounded from childhood by institutions really free, breathing the atmosphere of free thought, enjoying the luxury of free speech, you have deliberately allied yourself to a party which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... commerce, or phrases of an affectionate nature addressed to them. A pederast and forger examined by Professor Filippi was tattooed on his forearm with a sentimental declaration addressed to the object of his unnatural desires; a criminal convicted of rape was covered with pictorial representations of his obscene adventures. From these few instances, it is apparent that these personal decorations are of the utmost value as evidence ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... rather theatrical austerity which the initiated of the sect made such a great parade of. Among other turpitudes, he saw one day in one of the busiest parts of Carthage "three of the Elect whinny after some women or other who were passing, and begin making such obscene signs that they surpassed the coarsest people for impudence and shamelessness." He was scandalized at that; but, after all, it was a small thing. He himself was not so very virtuous then. Generally your intellectual worries very little about squaring his conduct with his principles, and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... lamentations and rejoicings of the worshipers.[1990] In Mexico we find a parallel pantomime of the nature process at a religious harvest festival, the pantomime being used for occult magic, in order to get good crops in the next season. Obscene figures and rites were used. There is a maize goddess who is the "Mother of the Gods." The union of the sun god with the earth gives fertility, so that the food supply is at stake in these rites and notions.[1991] This most absorbing interest of mankind ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... seemed to her ages, Plutina waited for his return, dreading a new, obscene mood. But the time dragged on, and there was no sign of his coming. The candle flared and smoked, went out. The girl huddled in the dark, listening now, for her eyes could not pierce the blackness. The roar of the waterfall filled her ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... good feeling became less and less frequent as years went on. That they ever were permitted to deform the splendid advocacy of great causes is due to the fact that, when Sydney Smith began to write, the influence of Smollett and his imitators was still powerful. Burke's obscene diatribes against the French Revolution were still quoted and admired. Nobody had yet made any emphatic protest against the beastliness of Swift ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... ways Of doctors now, and those of ancient days! Theirs taught the truth in academic shades, Ours in lewd hops and midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... title-pages, frontispieces, illustrations, and book-plates. He prowls furtively among public and private libraries, inserting wetted threads, which slowly eat away the illustrations he covets; and he broods, like the obscene demon of Arabian superstitions, over the fragments of the mighty dead. His disgusting tastes vary. He prepares books for the American market. Christmas books are sold in the States stuffed with pictures cut out of honest volumes. Here is ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... years ago, or be interested in a model of that catboat the boy Joshua had sailed on a bay which glittered in summers now forgotten—but even the theoretically absolute power of a fleet captain had its limits. At least the men nowadays were not making this room obscene with naked women. Though in all honesty, he wasn't sure he wouldn't rather have that than ... brush-strokes on rice paper, the suggestion of a tree, and a classic ideogram. He did ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... Luxembourg, condemned by the Revolutionary tribunal and executed on the 13th of April 1794. Chaumette's career had its brighter side. He was an ardent social reformer; he secured the abolition of corporal punishment in the schools, the suppression of lotteries, of houses of ill-fame and of obscene literature; he instituted reforms in the hospitals, and insisted on the honours of public burial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... say and listen to in the way of Jocularity, and there is a difference between the Jocularity of the Gentleman and that of the Vulgarian; and again, between that of the educated and uneducated man. This you may see from a comparison of the Old and New Comedy: in the former obscene talk made the fun; in the latter it is rather innuendo: and this is no ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... of the eternal truth. And when all false faiths, and their priests who have oppressed men and traduced God, have vanished; and when kings that have prostituted their great and godlike office to personal advancement and dynastic ambition are forgotten; and when every shrine reared for obscene and bloody rites, or for superficial and formal worship, has been cast to the ground, then from out of the confusion and desolation shall gleam the temple of God, which is the refuge of men, and on the one throne of the universe shall sit the Eternal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... such serious affair to negotiate with him; but what may very safely be turn'd upon thy trust. It is in the general behalf of this fair society here that I am to speak; at least the more judicious part of it: which seems much distasted with the immodest and obscene writing of many in their plays. Besides, they could wish your poets would leave to be promoters of other men's jests, and to way-lay all the stale apothegms, or old books they can hear of, in print or otherwise, to farce their scenes ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... seductiveness and affectations. . . . One of them had been greeted with roars of enthusiasm upon presenting himself with no other clothing than a "combination" of Mademoiselle Chichi's. Many were taking obscene delight in soiling the rugs and filling the sideboard drawers with indescribable filth, using the finest linens that they could ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their heels, carving with their imperceptible tools, the droll or odiously obscene ivory ornaments, marvelous cabinet curiosities which have made Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learnt ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the growth of good manners from sound institutions, he set about a moral and religious reformation. Pomps, vanities, and vices were to be abandoned. Immediately the women and the young men threw aside their silks and fine attire. The Carnival songs ceased. Hymns and processions took the place of obscene choruses and pagan triumphs. The laws were remodeled in the same severe and abrupt spirit. Usury was abolished. Whatever Savonarola ordained, Florence executed. By the magic of his influence the city for a moment assumed a new aspect. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against every ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Reading had become a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library. The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical treatise, in his hands. Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens read "from the threshold to the closet." The Parthian vizier was not far ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... her invasions, had never failed to destroy the temples and insult the fanes of the bestial gods. The impunity with which these sacrileges had been perpetrated had made a profound impression, and did no little to undermine Hellenic faith. But now the worshiper of the vile Olympian divinities, whose obscene lives must have been shocking to every pious man, was brought in contact with a grand, a solemn, a consistent religious system having its foundation on a philosophical basis. Persia, as is the case with all empires of long duration, had passed through ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... moments later he was at the club, and surrounded by a host of the most abandoned profligates he joined in the ribaldry and obscene jests with a zeal that betrayed the utter depravity of his habits, and also shewed that he had taken a headlong plunge into the vortex and must soon become a hopeless wreck. And yet a short time ago, so fair to look upon, Hubert Tracy had been indeed prepossessing in appearance. His neat, well ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... saints and martyrs,—it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Pamphleteerings, that were once very copious in the world; and, in particular, to set at rest the Herr Dr. Zimmermann, and his poor puddle of calumnies and credulities, got together in that weak pursuit of physiology under obscene circumstances;— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... worship of Egypt was held in more mortal abhorrence by the Christians, than the other and more rational kinds of heathen devotion; that is, if any at all had a right to be termed so. The brutal worship of Apis and Cybele was regarded, not only as a pretext for obscene and profligate pleasures, but as having a direct tendency to open and encourage a dangerous commerce with evil spirits, who were supposed to take upon themselves, at these unhallowed altars, the names and characters of these foul deities. Not only, therefore, the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and now declare that I will abstain from the use of all low or profane language; from the taking of the name of God in vain; and from all impurity, or from taking part in any unclean conversation, or the reading of any obscene book or paper at any time, in any company, ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... girls began crying out in the carriage next us, and I could hear the words of obscene songs when the train ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... which cannot be reproduced] but not [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. Perhaps they might be used in the solemn part of their ceremonies; and the Fescennine, which were invented after them, in their afternoons' debauchery, because they were scoffing and obscene. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... if a fire had suddenly been kindled in them by the sight of money. He pounced at my hand and emptied it, as a dog scrapes in the ground. Holding his coins close to his breast, he snarled at me of his astuteness, and took obscene pride in his guile. "Is Palamone an old fool then? Eh, mercy and truth, was there ever such a wise old fox born into this world? Did I not, when I saw you at Rovigo, lay this finger to this nose, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... a sight. All at once he looked vulgar, obscene. And nobody had, before. That did it. Somebody said they were humans, not pigs, and if the men on the rescue ship had never seen a naked body before it was time they did. What was so wrong ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... Travels,' but do not agree with Captain Britton that it is a witty and uncommonly interesting book; the wit is obscene, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... altogether in harmony with the customs and conventions of Ancient Comedy. The Comic Poet never spares us a single detail of everyday life, no matter how commonplace or degrading; he pushes the materialistic delineation of the passions and vices to the extreme limit of obscene gesture and the most cynical shamelessness of word ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... largest house in the village, ambitiously ornamented with fancy-plaited mats and king-posts carved into obscene and monstrous forms half-human and half-animal. Into it they went, in the obscure light stumbling across the sleeping-logs of the village bachelors and knocking their heads against strings of weird votive-offerings, ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... by your mother which, according to your assertion, concern her love affairs, and you do so before this gathering here assembled, a gathering before which you would not dare to read the verses of some obscene poet, even if bidden to do so, but you would be restrained by some sense of shame. Nay, you would never have touched your mother's letters, had you ever been in touch with letters in the wider sense of the term. But you have also dared to submit a letter ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the conversation among men of mode, and which I cannot but look upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... problem of labour without fail. His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... pusillanimous, and other things as well," the scientist replied stonily, "but, unlike you, I am not a fool. These walls, this very atmosphere, are fields of force that will transmit no rays directed by you. You weak-minded scion of a depraved and obscene house—arrogant, overbearing, rapacious, ignorant—your brain is too feeble to realize that you are clutching at the Universe hundreds of years before the time has come. You by your overweening pride and folly have doomed our beloved planet—the ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... they would decoy the youthful and unsuspecting, and, after stripping them of their possessions, send them forth into the world the ready and desperate instrument of vice. Our streets were ever resounding with the echoes of their drunken and obscene mirth, and no citizen was secure from their villainy. Frequently, in armed bodies, they have disturbed the good order of public assemblages, insulted our citizens, and defied our civil authorities. Thus had ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... strong presumption against his immortality. This plea, familiar enough in sceptical discussions of the subject, has been put forward with great poetic force by Mr. William Watson; after graphically describing {228} "the gibbering form obscene that was and was not man," as lower in many respects than the beasts and birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... awe-inspiring in "the dim religious light.'' But in one of the temple buildings, where the two monks who accompanied us said that daily prayers were chanted, I saw representations in brass and gilt that were as filthily obscene as anything that I saw in India. There is immorality in lands that are called Christian, but it is disavowed by Christianity, ostracized by decent people and under the ban of the civil law. But Buddhism ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... of nonsense that he had thought about the immaculacy of the flesh? The world in general found his theories ridiculous or obscene. The world might be right. After all, the majority is not necessarily wrong. Jamie's illness interfered like a blank space between his present self and the old one, with its strenuous ideals of a purity of body which ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, and epithets. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... catching the court-ear! Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet he, In days of sonetting, trusted them with much: Dante is hard, and few can understand him. But, for a desperate wit, there's Aretine; Only, his pictures are a little obscene— You ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... brown bread; though dastardly and unfit for war, he is useful at home, if you allow this, that great things may derive assistance from small ones. The poet fashions the child's tender and lisping mouth, and turns his ear even at this time from obscene language; afterward also he forms his heart with friendly precepts, the corrector of his rudeness, and envy, and passion; he records virtuous actions, he instructs the rising age with approved examples, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... imitating an animal's head. The other was older, dressed in a leather suit, with a wooden mask like a vacant-looking human face. These two were very popular, and indulged in many acts that bordered on the obscene. We got no satisfactory explanation of this whole performance. The cura said that it represented the conflict between Christ and the Jews; this ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Paris when he gave the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... thorns. He was brought back, and having become perfectly quiet, was thought to be well, and resumed his duties; but a short time after our return to Paris he had a new attack. The character of his malady was exceedingly obscene; and he presented himself before the Empress Josephine in such a state of disorder, and with such indecent gestures, that it was necessary to take precautions in regard to him. He was confided to the care of the wise ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... courtly paraphrase, but called things by their plain names. (891) Afterwards, through the spread of evil thoughts and luxury, words which could be used by the ancients without offence, came to be considered obscene. (90) There was no need for this cause to change the text of Scripture. (91) Still, as a concession to the popular weakness, it became the custom to substitute more decent terms for words denoting sexual intercourse, exereta, &c., and to read ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... and marvels. Of these how many we might recount if we followed the wanderings of Odysseus, or the voyage of Jason and his heroic comrades in the ship Argo, when they went to seize the golden fleece of the speaking ram. We might tell of the Harpies, flying women-birds of obscene form; of the blind prophet; of the Symplegades, self-shutting rocks, between which, as if by miracle, the Argonauts passed, the cliffs almost entrapping the stern of their vessel, but destined by fate from that portentous ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... quiet. It was well for them that they did this, for now it was known that Agrippa's sickness was mortal, the most of the soldiers were already in a state of mutiny, and, inflamed with wine, paraded the market-places and larger streets, shouting and singing obscene songs, and breaking into the liquor shops and private houses, where they drank healths to Charon, who was about to bear away their king in his evil bark. As yet, however, they had not begun killing those against whom they had a ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... been immured in a place of furtive, obscene whisperings, but he had found there not only vice. There was the chance of an education. He had accepted it at first because he dared not let himself be idle in his spare time. That way lay degeneration and the loss of his manhood. He had studied under competent ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... and the turtle, is a Buddhist birth-story, the "Kacchapa-jataka," No. 273, which narrates how a monkey insulted a tortoise by thrusting his penis down the sleeping tortoise's throat, and how the monkey was punished. Although this particular obscene jest is not found in any of our versions, I think that there is a trace of it preserved in the Bagobo story. The passage runs thus (loc. cit. pp. 59-60): "At that all the monkeys were angry [incident D], and ran screaming to catch the tortoise. But the tortoise hid under the felled ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the name, I must here digress into a chapter of the history of manners in the nineteenth century, very well worth commemoration for its own sake. In some of the studios at that date, the hazing of new pupils was both barbarous and obscene. Two incidents, following one on the heels of the other, tended to produce an advance in civilisation by the means (as so commonly happens) of a passing appeal to savage standards. The first was the arrival of a little gentleman from Armenia. He had a fez upon his head and (what nobody counted on) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thing that it said—that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... within the limits of lofty gravity. "You would do well," said he, "to cease talking about what you do not understand." This only provoked light attacks of the witlings, until one of them dared to make some degrading and obscene comparison between the Blessed Virgin and Amina, the mother of Mahomet. In an instant Don Juan sprang to his feet, dashed chess-board and chess-men aside, and, drawing his sword, dealt, says the curate of los Palacios, such a "fermosa cuchillada" (such a handsome ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... heaven. The bark of the wolf, the snarl of the hyena, may be heard in the debate which the Government have encouraged in the House of Commons on the Church. Philistia rejoices. Let the movers in this obscene tumult look to themselves. Have they the confidence of the people even as the Church has that confidence? Let them put it to the test. I tell you, George Holland, the desert and the ditch, whose vomit those men ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Martin Marie Rigobert de Garnache, and my business now to make an end of one at least of this obscene ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... letters, till the secretary of state's warrant, by which Kearsley had been arrested, had been produced and shown to be a legal act; but this objection being overruled, the Lords voted the Essay a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel, and adjourned the farther consideration of the subject, as far as concerned the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... fashion, nor any opinion out of the applauded way. That thinks certainly all Spaniards and Jesuits very villains, and is still cursing the pope and Spinola. One that thinks the gravest cassock the best scholar; and the best cloaths the finest man. That is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses any thing too deep for him. That cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none. That is much ravished with such a nobleman's courtesy, and would venture his life for him, because he put off his hat. One that ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... brought up to respect the marriage bond, and to protect and honor women. The illicit was impossible to his candid soul. All the men he had associated with had been respecters of marriage, though some of them were obscene—thoughtlessly, he always believed—and now Jim, his chum, had come between a man and his wife! With Estelle in his mind as the type of purity, he could not understand how a wife could be the faithless creature Blanche ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... Biard, "we had to labor and sweat; in these were the pains of travail." They were compelled to make a thousand gesticulations and signs that greatly amused their savage instructors who sometimes palmed off on them words that were ridiculous and even obscene, so that the Jesuits labored with indifferent success in the preparation of their catechism. Their work was still in the experimental stage when the destruction of Port Royal by Argal in 1613, and the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... Obscene Men. In order to control drunken and obscene men, they have been bucked and gagged until sufficiently sober to regain self-control and quiet down. The use of a cold water hose in such cases has been known to ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in front of them. Occasionally one of our ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... confront the alarming obstacle presented by these sexual rites and aspects, hides himself behind the rather non-committal remark (speaking of the Eleusinian rites) "we have no right to imagine any part of this solemn ceremony as coarse or obscene." (6) As Nature, however, has been known (quite frequently) to be coarse or obscene, and as the initiators of the Mysteries were probably neither 'good' nor 'learned,' but were simply anxious to interpret Nature as best they ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... most primitive functions, and no higher functions." Dr. Maudsley thinks that the same view may be extended to the brain in its degenerated condition in some insane patients; and asks, whence come "the savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene language, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some of the insane? Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?"[12] This question must, as it would ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... low and rude evidences of vice around her she was saved by her misfortune. And at that hour the streets were quiet and silent, nor was her youthful ear shocked by the sounds which too often broke along the obscene and obscure haunts ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... behavior of that part of the guard which had participated in the action was suggestive of the freemasonry that exists between brave fellows to whatever side belonging. On the road the prisoners were subjected by every passer-by, to petty insults, the point in every case, more or less obscene, being the color of their skin. The solitary exception, curiously enough, being a nymph du pave in the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... meeting there came to him some premonition of the future, some half-revealed, half-blurred picture of prophecy. Perhaps that picture was one of himself, lying in the darkness on the roof of the railway carriage, and an obscene Boolba standing erect in a motor-car on the darkened station, waving his rage, ere the three quick shots ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... woman's destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature is first, man is second." But not a mute, a docile second! He may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... wearily measuring the dark, empty blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly, insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself—all she possessed—to the hovering beasts of prey. And even these rejected her, with gibes, with obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths like those which Bushmen tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh—myths cruel, puerile, obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of the membrane which covers his brain, may have the ultimate effect of turning him into an obscene creature with every bestial attribute! That a man's individuality should swing round from pole to pole, and yet that one life should contain these two contradictory personalities—is ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... fear in the Annales Patriotiques. Freron, in the Orateur du Peuple, rivalled Marat. Fauchet, in the Bouche de Fer, elevated democracy to a level with religious philosophy. The "last not least," Laclos, an officer of artillery, author of an obscene novel, and the confidant of the Duc d'Orleans, edited the Journal des Jacobins, and stirred up through France the flame of ideas and words of which the focus was ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Willett's drug store, where the young fellows loafed and gossiped in the evenings; all the time he was there the conversation had been made up of sly digs and hints about graveyard trysts, each thrust causing the kind of laughter that is the wake of the prurient and the obscene. Yes, she was right. There could be "nothing in it" for her in Sutherland. He was filled with pity for her. "Poor child! What a shame!" There must be something wrong with a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to tell, were as eager as he. It is impossible to describe or even conceive the purposeful and aching desire to get to close quarters regardless of all losses and of all consequences. The Bulgarians, in committing those obscene atrocities, not only damned themselves forever in the eyes of humanity, but they doubled, nay, quadrupled, the strength of the Greek army. Nothing short of extermination could have prevented the Greek army from victory; there was not a man who would not have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... comes a burst of coarse laughter, and a string of foul, obscene words on the heels of a jest. And again the childish trebles would ring on ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... for if night does not strip him of his happiness, why should blindness, which resembles night, have that effect? For the reply of Antipater the Cyrenaic, to some women who bewailed his being blind, though it is a little too obscene, is not without its significance. "What do you mean?" saith he; "do you think the night can furnish no pleasure?" And we find by his magistracies and his actions, that old Appius(119) too, who was blind for many years, was ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... of the eighteenth century, not only were religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence, but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... rich, the poor, the old man and the young; All, all make up one scheme of perjury, That faith doth reel; the very name of God Sounds like a juggler's charm; and, bold with joy, 80 Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, 85 Cries out, 'Where ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of a sentence and shrugged his shoulders. He went on walking mechanically. There was a small crowd in front of a shop-window. He stopped mechanically. It was a photograph and picture-postcard shop: there were pictures of girls in chemises, or without them: illustrated papers displayed obscene jests. Children and young girls were looking at them calmly. There was a slim girl with red hair who saw Christophe lost in contemplation and accosted him. He looked at her and did not understand. She took his arm with a silly smile. He shook her off, and rushed ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... cats are as poor a breed as the pure English, and, though no one feeds them, these domesticated tigerkins swarm. The only happy pets are the parrots. Every village swarms with hogs, the filthy wealth of the old Saxon proprietor, and their habits are disgusting as their forms are obscene. Every Anglo-Indian ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... prevent a thousand vicious or profane discourses, as well as actions; neither would men of understanding complain, that a clergyman was a constraint upon the company, because they could not speak blasphemy, or obscene jests before him. While the people are so jealous of the clergy's ambition, as to abhor all thoughts of the return of ecclesiastic discipline among them, I do not see any other method left for men of that function to take, in order to reform the world, than by ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... against the bulwarks would like to have been able to get rid of his enemy the sun for a moment, was probable enough. His companions, sitting on the combings of the main-hatch, or crouched in careless fashion on the shady side of the barricade, were laughing and talking, with blasphemous and obscene merriment hideous to contemplate; but he, with cap pulled over his brows, and hands thrust into the pockets of his coarse grey garments, held aloof from their ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... anti-Queensberry brutalism which forks first superseded—viz., the fiendish practice of introducing the knife between the lips. But, in defiance of all these facts, certain select hacks of the daily press, who never had an opportunity of seeing a civilized dinner, and fancying that their own obscene modes of feeding prevailed every where, got up the name of the Silver-fork School, (which should have indicated the school of decency,) as representing some ideal school of fantastic or ultra refinement. At length, however, when cheap counterfeits ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Ascetic Attitude Towards the Flesh. Normal Basis of Scatalogic Symbolism. Scatalogic Conceptions Among Primitive Peoples. Urine as a Primitive Holy Water. Sacredness of Animal Excreta. Scatalogy in Folk-lore. The Obscene as Derived from the Mythological. The Immature Sexual Impulse Tends to Manifest Itself in Scatalogic Forms. The Basis of Physiological Connection Between the Urinary and Genital Spheres. Urinary Fetichism ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, 115 Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Lights the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath: But some day the live coal behind the thought. Whether from Baael's stone obscene, 120 Or from the shrine serene Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, 125 Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men: Some day ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... one. At least it is correct as far as it goes, but leaves us very far from a complete explanation of this unpleasant survival. So scandalous is the interrelation of the armament firms[11] which has developed the world's trade in munitions and explosives into one obscene cartel; so cynical is the avidity with which their agents exchange their trade secrets, sell ships and guns, often by means of diplomatic blackmail, to friend or foe alike, and follow those pioneers of civilisation the missionary, the gin merchant and the procurer,[12] ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... when I perish, bid by fate, A night-ghost ye shall have in me. With crook'd nails I'll your faces tear, For great is injur'd spirits might, On your breasts seated, hard I'll bear, And banish sleep with ceaseless fright; Ye through the streets with stones the crowd To death shall pelt, ye hags obscene! Your limbs, no sepulture allow'd, The wolves shall tear and birds unclean. My parents who, though grey and old, Shall me survive, their youthful boy When they that spectacle behold Shall clap their hands and ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... with the howling world behind him. The grey, dank mists came down on him, his footsteps sank deeper and deeper, and ever the cries, as of damned spirits, grew in his ears. Mocking shapes flitted past him, the wings of obscene birds buffeted him, the morass grew up about him; and now it was all a red moving mass like a dead sea heaving about him. With a moan of agony he felt the dolorous flood above his shoulders, and then a cry pierced the gloom and the loathsome misery, and a voice he knew called ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... an epigrammatist Mr. Watson has no rival in Victorian or in contemporary verse. The epigram is a quite definite form of art, especially cultivated by the poets in the first half of the seventeenth century. Their formula the terse expression of obscene thoughts. Mr. Watson excels the best of them in wit, concision, and grace; it is needless to say he makes no attempt to rival them as a garbage-collector. Of the large number of epigrams that he has contributed to English literature, I find the majority not only interesting, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... were prosecuting Wilkes for a libel, the Lords also continued the prosecution. Wilkes, in conjunction with Potter, a dissipated son of Archbishop Potter, during some of their bacchanalian revels, had written a blasphemous and obscene poem, after the model of Pope's Essay on Man, called An Essay on Woman. The satire was not published, but a few copies of it were printed privately for the authors. Lord Sandwich had contrived to secure ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... are always the worst of all. Such men really have a lasting affection only for those girls who are fitting companions for clubmen—girls who have a habit of telling doubtful stories and bestowing depraved kisses. It seems to me that to attract and to hold such people, the nude and obscene are necessary both in word and in body—unless—unless—it is true that men are incapable of loving any woman for ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... of that prison-house of mortality be peopled with little save obscene phantoms? Truly, and too truly, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... strips Nature stark naked, and clothes her in the most fantastic and ridiculous fashion a wild imagination can invent. He is worse and more nasty than a dog, for in his broad descriptions of others' obscene actions he does but lick up the vomit of another man's surfeits. He tells tales out of a vaulting-school. A lewd, bawdy tale does more hurt and gives a worse example than the thing of which it was told, for the act extends but to few, and if it be concealed goes no farther; but the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the Constitutional Convention were voted to be dropped from the records, because they were so low and obscene. Dr. Townsend, of Lorain, and William Hawkins, of McConnellsville, were our friends in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in the judgment of this Board, the name 'National Liberal League' has become so widely and injuriously associated in the public mind with attempts to repeal the postal laws prohibiting the circulation of obscene literature by mail, with the active propagandism of demoralizing and licentious social theories, and with the support of officials and other public representatives who are on good grounds believed to have been guilty of gross immoralities, that it has been thereby ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... concluded calmly, tapping his gold snuffbox and holding it out to Bellecour, for all the world with the air of one who was discussing the latest fashion in wigs, "I can understand your repugnance at coming to blows with this obscene canaille. It is doing them an honour of which they are not worthy. But we have these ladies to think of, Messieurs, and—" he paused to apply the rappee to his nostrils—"and we must exert ourselves to save them, however disagreeable the course we may be compelled to pursue. Messieurs, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... appears to be widespread. Low writes of the Hudson Bay Eskimo: "During the absence of the men on hunting expeditions, the women sometimes amuse themselves by a sort of female "angekoking." This amusement is accompanied by a number of very obscene rites...." Low, The Cruise of ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... inmensidad f. immensity, vastness, infinity, unbounded greatness. inmenso, -a immense, infinite, vast. inmortal adj. immortal. inmvil adj. motionless, fixed, set, unaffected. inmundo, -a dirty, obscene, unclean. inocente adj. innocent, young. inquieto, -a restless, uneasy, anxious, disturbed, agitated. inquietud f. uneasiness, anxiety, disquietude, restlessness. insano, -a insane, mad. insensible ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... that though the British soldier and man-of-war's man were rough, and in some instances godless to the extent of being obscene, vicious, and debauched, they were, to use the phrase which Sir Alfred Milner has made historic, possessed of a 'great reserve of goodness'; that they were capable not only of good, but of God. As it were by fire the latent nobility of our nature was discovered, ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open palpable. Why, thou clay-brained guts; thou knotty-pated fool! thou whoreson, obscene, greasy, tallow-keech,— ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... schoolroom, the pupil finds that, in the newspapers and in the general conversation of adults, this sacred temple is treated as a common sewer, too filthy to be spoken of, and that the books which contain even the most necessary descriptions of it are liable to be condemned as "obscene" in the law courts.[189] It is vain for the physician to explain to young men and women the subtle and terrible nature of venereal poisons, to declare the right and the duty of both partners in marriage to know, authoritatively and beforehand, the state of each other's health, or to warn them that ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... even now at the recollection of the poissardes, or rather furies, who wore white aprons, which they screamed out were intended to receive the bowels of Marie Antoinette, and that they would make cockades of them, mixing the most obscene ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... screens, never good at best, were hardly more than filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes of controls and instruments into writhing masses of obscene horror that sent extensions wiggling off into nothingness at eye-aching angles. A spaceman could take this—knowing it wasn't real—but ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Incite, instigate, stimulate, impel, arouse, goad, spur, promote. Inclose, surround, encircle, circumscribe, encompass. Increase, grow, enlarge, magnify, amplify, swell, augment. Indecent, indelicate, immodest, shameless, ribald, lewd, lustful, lascivious, libidinous, obscene. Insane, demented, deranged, crazy, mad. Insanity, dementia, derangement, craziness, madness, lunacy, mania, frenzy, hallucination. Insipid, tasteless, flat, vapid. Intention, intent, purpose, plan, design, aim, object, end. Interpose, intervene, intercede, interfere, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... of Stalin are with us!" a lumpy man said. "Go and die in a kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... YOU,' returned the woman, 'who trouble even this obscene resting-place of the dead, and strip the gibbet of its honoured burden? Where is ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... old Hellenic patois still continued to survive. Their gods were henceforward those of the towns in which they resided, such as Marna and Dagon and Gaza,* Dagon at Ashdod,** Baalzebub at Ekron,*** and Derketo in Ascalon;**** and their mode of worship, with its mingled bloody and obscene rites, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... own house? Effie! His wife to believe that? An unspeakable, beastly thing like that? He tried to show me with his finger the words on the paper. His finger shaking all over the thing. 'Hapgood, Hapgood, do you see this vile, obscene word here? I guilty of that? My wife, Mabel, think me capable of that? Do you see what they call me, Hapgood? What they call me by implication, what my wife, Mabel, thinks I am, what I am to be pointed at and called? Adulterer! Adulterer! My God, my God, adulterer! The word makes ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... is in connection with the cult of the obscene deity to whom these wretched creatures paid their scandalous vows that my most awful memories seem to have been associated. It may have been—I hope it was, a mirage born of my half delirious state, but it seemed to me that they ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... still more bitter against the base and cowardly actions to which sensual love will drive a man who is not strong enough to throw off its degrading chains. The whole of humanity seemed to her unclean as she thought of the obscene secrets of the senses, of the caresses which debase as they are given and received, and of all the mysteries which surround the attraction ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... abbot in Egypt, mentioned by [441]Gennadius. A priest named Paapis is to be found in the Excerpta from Antonius [442]Diogenes in Photius. There were particular rites, styled Pamylia Sacra, from [443]Pamyles, an antient Egyptian Deity. We may infer from Hesychius that they were very obscene: [Greek: Paamules, Aiguptios Theos Priapodes.] Hades, and Pi-Ades, was a common title of the Sun: and the latter, in early times, was current in Greece; where I hope to give ample testimony of the Amonians settling. He was termed Melech Pi-Adon, and Anac Pi-Adon: but the Greeks out of Pi-Adon ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... the waters of Phlegethon,[69] into a beak, and feathers, and great eyes. He, {thus} robbed of his own {shape}, is clothed with tawny wings, his head becomes larger, his long nails bend inwards, and with difficulty can he move the wings that spring through his sluggish arms. He becomes an obscene bird, the foreboder of approaching woe, a lazy owl, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... have lacked 'the extricating hand?' And we must wait God's time for such truth as is destined to appear. When Christians worshipped in the Catacomb, one man, no worse than the rest, though no less foolish, will have pointed to its mouth, and said, 'Obscene rites are practised in that darkness. The devotees of an execrable creed skulk there out of sight.' Not till the time was ripe, did lightning split the face of the rock, and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... noise reached her from the woodyard on her left, when she constantly imagined that she heard another step following hers like an audible shadow, when drunken raftsmen came toward her, hoarsely singing an obscene song, she pressed against a fence in order not to be seen by the dissolute fellows. But now a light came wavering toward her, looking like a shining bird flying slowly, or a hell-hound, with glowing eyes, and at the sight it seemed to her impossible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a villa on Twickenham Common, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... repeat them for laughing, always make Mr. Bracebridge look grave, he having a great antipathy to an indecent jest. In a word, the general is a complete instance of the declension in gay life, by which a young man of pleasure is apt to cool down into an obscene old gentleman. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... fact that the flattery residing in devotion and affection makes such an impelling appeal to all vain people, that the superior animal is discarded for the inferior? The dog is grossly and offensively obscene; he is dirty, he pollutes our streets; he is a coward, and has the pusillanimous spirit of a rather faint-hearted lackey. The cat, on the other hand, is decent, clean, consistently sanitary, brave, and possessed of the great-hearted self-reliant spirit of a born warrior. The cat, however, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of amusements, each noisier and duller than the one before. Now in the theatre, now in the open, they played a stupid but obscene vaudeville piece, and vicious topical songs were sung (a thunder of applause); an animated chansonnette-singer screeched and pulled about with her naked, excessively whitened shoulders, and winked with her exaggeratedly painted ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... trolley bells—the sweet perfume of the, fields, the smell of trees, of earth, of all of God's pure things untouched, unsoiled; the stench of Chatham Square, the reek of whiskey spilled with the breath of obscene, filthy lips—the little village that he could see beyond him, the tiny curls of blue smoke rising like the incense from an altar over the roofs of houses whose doors had no locks, whose windows were not barred, where plain, homely folk, unsullied, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of the Lysistrata! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius—she gladly grants it; but he has debased his genius. The mob ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... environment. The approach to the hospital, through sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless parturition. In a corner of the hall, near ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... marriage vow, there would be fewer written and published, and less wildfire would be spread abroad." Shun the romances which centre all in a false, unnatural affection. Oh, that they were all sunk in the ocean, the food for obscene sharks! And, oh, that only such pure and beautiful romances remained as picture the lives of a Hermann and a Dorothea, or a Gabriel ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... wreck adrift, Signs of misrule and tokens of unthrift; Within, profusion to discomfort joined, The listless body and the vacant mind; The fear, the hate, the theft and falsehood, born In menial hearts of toil, and stripes, and scorn There, all the vices, which, like birds obscene, Batten on slavery loathsome and unclean, From the foul kitchen to the parlor rise, Pollute the nursery where the child-heir lies, Taint infant lips beyond all after cure, With the fell poison of a breast impure; Touch boyhood's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... mobs, Picking Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight: Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in - A jargon so truly adapted, in fact, To each thievish, obscene, and ferocious act, So fit for the brute with the human shape, Savage Baboon, or libidinous Ape, From their ugly mouths it will certainly come Should they ever get weary of ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... replied that he would not write upon them for the reason that the Spirits had forbidden him to do so; that they had said they would not write on sealed slates, because many tricks had been played on them, one of which was the writing in advance of foolish and obscene matter, which, when the slates were opened, was attributed to the Spirits. I said to him, 'Would there be any objection by the Spirits to the use of the slates if these are brought here, opened and exhibited before you prior to their being used?' He replied, 'I have been forbidden ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... that caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the end made him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... merits of some particular animal; but she can do much more: she is a prophetess, though she believes not in prophecy; she is a physician, though she will not taste her own philtres; she is a procuress, though she is not to be procured; she is a singer of obscene songs, though she will suffer no obscene hand to touch her; and though no one is more tenacious of the little she possesses, she is a cutpurse and a ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... beliefs, says Hartenstein? Well, give me madmen who drool spittle, and foam at the mouth, and shriek obscene blasphemies. But not this pleasant-seeming gentleman who sat beside me and talked of horrors in a quiet, cultured voice, while ...
— He Walked Around the Horses • Henry Beam Piper
... hath refus'd To sing; ere Bacchus set him by the ears With common sense, his dull and morning guide; And stutterers speak fast, and quick men stutter, And gleams of fitful mirth shine on the brow Of moody souls, and careless gay men look Fierce melodrama on their friends around; While talk obscene and loyalty mark all; Then good or bad emotions meet the eye, Like a mosaic floor, whose black and white Glistens more keenly, moisten'd by the stain Of ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... with Harpies, dire Celaeno, in the vast Ionian main, Since, forced from Phineus' palace to retire, They fled their former banquet. Heavenly ire Ne'er sent a pest more loathsome; ne'er were seen Worse plagues to issue from the Stygian mire— Birds maiden-faced, but trailing filth obscene, With taloned hands and looks for ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... pursue one's way through Swift's poems, without being repelled again and again by the filth in which it pleases him to wade. The Beast's Confession, which has been reprinted in the Selections from Swift (Clarendon Press), is not obscene, like The Lady's Dressing-Room, Strephon and Chloe, and other poems of the class; but it has the inhumanity which deforms the description of the Houyhnhnms. Strange to say, in private life Swift appears to have been not only moral in conduct, but ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... each pile surround, And things obscene bestrew the ground; Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie, All dreadful ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... he lived. Those who hated him have tried to cover his memory with shame, and have represented him as merely a buffoon, but such was not the truth. He did often descend to buffooneries and to almost obscene sayings, and these things have had their influence upon France, and have contributed to make the French people what they are to-day—a nation of professed Catholics, but really a nation of infidels and atheists. But Rabelais was more than a wit. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... discussion, and the chatter that came from this enormous man was as small as his head, which sat like a pin's-head above his shoulders. Platt drifted from the obscene into the incomprehensible. The room was fast emptying, and the waiter loitered, waiting ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Gilgamesh epic[875] these three classes of harlots are introduced as the attendants of Ishtar, obedient to her call. The conclusion is therefore justified that Uruk was one of the centers—perhaps the center—of the obscene rites to which Herodotus[876] has several references. Several other incidental allusions in cuneiform literature to the sacred prostitution carried on at Babylonian temples confirm Herodotus' statement in general,[877] although the rite never assumed ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... bottom of anything. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It is all defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too much. He admits there are obscene rites; there had been human sacrifices; but the gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of gods, imposed these on men—not the gods; men practised them to avert the anger of daemons. The gods are ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... (1483-1553) was one of the most remarkable persons that figured in the Renaissance, a learned scholar, physician, and philosopher, though known to posterity chiefly as an obscene humorist. He is called by Lord Bacon "the great jester of France." He was at first a monk of the Franciscan order, but he afterwards threw off the sacerdotal character, and studied medicine. From about the year 1534, Rabelais was in the service of the Cardinal ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... certainly is. He made another happy phrase, criticizing the Spanish administration. 'For what reason do they write so many useless papers?' he said. 'So that rats, the obscene reptiles, can go on ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable of ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... Greece than with the religion of Jesus. I was with Paris when he gave the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... as a harmonious universe, finds it in idol worship and polygamy; another group seeking the same truth finds it in Christianity and monogamy. And the members of some groups are born to ideals, customs and habits that make it right for a member to sing obscene songs and to be obscene at certain periods, to kill and destroy the enemy, to sacrifice the unbeliever, to worship a clay image, to have as many wives as possible, and that make it WRONG to do otherwise. Indeed, he who wishes a child ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the hideous object, his brain awhirl with the horrible nightmare, the priest fled blindly from the scene. Nauseated, quivering with horror, with the obscene ravings of the leper still ringing in his ears, he stumbled about the town until daybreak, when the boat's shrieking whistle summoned him ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Secondly, linga worship, though prevalent in the south, is not confined to it, but flourishes in all parts of India, even in Assam and Nepal. Thirdly, it is not connected with low castes, with orgies, with obscene or bloodthirsty rites or with anything which can be called un-Aryan. It forms part of the private devotions of the strictest Brahmans, and despite the significance of the emblem, the worship offered to it is perfectly decorous.[349] The evidence thus suggests ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... obvious allusion to Ferdinand's seizure of property, he named the statute-book "The Rapacious Defraudment of the Land." He saw the lords oppressing the poor, sitting long at table, and discussing lewd and obscene matters. He saw the rich idlers with bloated faces, with bleary eyes, with swollen limbs, with bodies covered with sores. He saw the moral world turned upside down. No longer, said Comenius, did men in Bohemia call things by their right names. They ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... at him as if he were an obscene bird, looked at him with ever-increasing hate, with their fingers itching for the trigger of a gun. Pap had his weakness. He liked to babble of his own cuteness; he liked to sit upon a sugar barrel in the village store and talk of savoury viands, so to speak, and sparkling wines ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... With an obscene malediction at the body, he sprang upon a horse. A sjambok swung, and with a snort, which was half a groan, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Lords were in a humor to regard no violence against Wilkes as excessive; and, submitting to the guidance of the minister and the prelate, resolved that the "Essay on Woman,"[10] as also another poem by the same writer, a paraphrase of the "Veni Creator," was "a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel," and presented an address to the King, requesting his Majesty "to give the most effectual orders for the immediate prosecution of the author." And, in the course of the next few weeks, the House of Commons outran the peers themselves in violence and manifest unfairness. They ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of "polite taste." The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious—and useful—parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so squeamish ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... to pursue one's way through Swift's poems, without being repelled again and again by the filth in which it pleases him to wade. The Beast's Confession, which has been reprinted in the Selections from Swift (Clarendon Press), is not obscene, like The Lady's Dressing-Room, Strephon and Chloe, and other poems of the class; but it has the inhumanity which deforms the description of the Houyhnhnms. Strange to say, in private life Swift appears to have been not only moral in ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Rome might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... worst idolatry, having little or no connection whatever with morality, except to corrupt it with the infamous examples of their gods. "They all worshiped a multitude of gods and demons, whose favor they sought by obscene and ridiculous ceremonies, and whose anger they tried to appease with the most abominable cruelties." With them, heaven was open only to legislators and conquerors, the civilizers and destroyers of mankind. This was the summit of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... grim War, a bestial thing, with swinish tusks to tear; Upon his back the vampires cling, Thin vipers twine among his hair, The tiger's greed is in his jowl, His eye is red with bloody tears, And every obscene beast and fowl From out his leprous visage leers. In glowing pride fell fiends arise, And, trampled, God the ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk who meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their heels, carving with their imperceptible tools, the droll or odiously obscene ivory ornaments, marvelous cabinet curiosities which have made Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learnt by heart, or transmitted to their brains ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... natural history, he collected together from the neighboring swamps and the river-mud all kinds of hideous reptiles, as adders, lizards, toads, serpents: insects, as moths, locusts, and other crawling and flying obscene and obnoxious things; and out of these he composed a sort of monster or chimera, which he represented as about to issue from the shield, with eyes flashing fire, and of an aspect so fearful and abominable that it seemed to infect ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook's and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official back-stairs—would to heaven they HAD departed!—are very complacent and agreeable. Into a ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Rhine, Endured their ten years' drudgery in Gaul, Adjourned their fate, and saved the Capitol. I grew by every guilty triumph less; The crowd, when drunk with joy, their souls express, Impatient of the war, yet fear success. Brave actions dazzle with too bright a ray, Like birds obscene they chatter at the day; Giddy with rule, and valiant in debate, They throw the die of war, to save the state; And gods! to gild ingratitude with fame, Assume the patriot's, we the rebel's name. Farewell, my friends, your general forlorn, To your bare pity, and the public ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Gentiles, the life they led resembled that of beasts rather than of men. Uncleanness was risen to the last excess amongst them; and the least corrupt were those who had no religion. The greatest part of them adored the devil under an obscene figure, and with ceremonies which modesty forbids to mention. Some amongst them changed their deity every day; and the first living creature which happened to meet them in the morning was the object of their worship, not excepting even dogs or swine. In this they were uniform, that they all offered ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... prose writer, as the leader of a sect, and whose doctrines of art five or six faithful disciples spread while copying his waistcoats and even imitating his manner of speaking with closed teeth, is reduced to writing stories for obscene journals. "Chose," the fiery revolutionist, had obtained a good place; and the modest "Machin," a man hardly noticed in the clubs, had published two exquisite books, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... ancient days! Theirs taught the truth in academic shades, Ours in lewd hops and midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired of th' undeserved applause Bestowed on bards affecting Virtue's ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... novelle, the first of which was Piccolomini's Euryalus, and the less obscene comedies, adultery and derision of marriage are the leading motives. The harlots were the Muses of belles-lettres during the Renaissance. They boldly took their place by the side of the saints of the Church, and contended with them for fame's laurels. There is ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... They still thought that he was the Lord-Lieutenant, and, expectant of benefits of some sort, they shouted their best. He glanced at the veiled statue, but turned his eyes away from it immediately, as if it were something obscene or otherwise disgusting. He took no notice of Mary Ellen, though she smiled at him. Father McCormack and Doyle followed him, crestfallen. Major Kent, who seemed greatly pleased, also followed him. Half way across the square Lord Alfred Blakeney turned round and asked which ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... him, and have heard his long lectures against singing and dancing and such debaucheries, and going to filthy plays, and profane music meetings, where the lewd trebles squeak nothing but bawdy, and the basses roar blasphemy. Oh, she would have swooned at the sight or name of an obscene play-book—and can I think after all this that my daughter can be naught? What, a whore? And thought it excommunication to set her foot within the door of a playhouse. O dear friend, I can't believe it. No, no; as she says, let him prove it, let him ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... glories in its strength. He obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St. Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport of a combative ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Persons. And I remember that, before making Deal, we saw a stranded Brig on the Goodwins, which was said to be a Leghorner, very rich with oils and silks; round which were gathered—just as you may see obscene Birds of Prey gathered round a dead carcass, and picking the Flesh from its bones—at least a score of luggers belonging to the Deal Boatmen. These worthies had knocked holes in the hull of the wreck, and were ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... mountain tops has been described minutely by those who claim to have seen the sight. Sometimes they cackled and gibbered through the night before the houses of the clergy, and it was only at Christmas that their power failed them. The meetings were devoted to wild and obscene orgies, and the intercourse of fiends and witches begot a progeny ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... consideration," sighed Tai-yue, "but such a supremely suspicious person am I that I imagined that you inwardly concealed some evil design! Yet ever since the day on which you represented to me how unwholesome it was to read obscene books, and you gave me all that good advice, I've felt most grateful to you! I've hitherto, in fact, been mistaken in my opinion; and the truth of the matter is that I remained under this misconception ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... home in a raging fever, which increased during the night to delirium. His ravings were of magistrates, the jeering crowd, dungeons, chains, and the convict-ship. Then he was at the penal settlement. He heard the frightful oaths, obscene jests, and blasphemous laughter of the convicts. Among them he beheld Caroline Clifford—haggard, and in rags—now toiling at her task, now shrieking beneath the bloody lash—and he seemed to grasp the throat of Jennings, and implored him to stay ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... of pleasure, provided he hath any delicacy in his constitution. How inconsistent with good-breeding it is to give pain and confusion to such, is sufficiently apparent; all double-entendres and obscene jests are therefore carefully to be avoided before them. But suppose no ladies present, nothing can be meaner, lower, and less productive of rational mirth, than this loose conversation. For my own part, I cannot conceive how the idea of jest or pleasantry came ever to be ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... clear, and girlish, but the eyes of a depraved girl, in which a licentious expression flickered, without, however, hurting their pure surface. She moved like an overgrown school-girl, arms akimbo, bashful and blushing and in this position she sang in a thin, high voice, obscene verses which contrasted strangely with her apparent timidity. This was her charm and the audience received her atrocious words with roars of delight, contenting themselves with this, without demanding that she dance, respecting ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Aristotle who gave Plato an offensive interpretation in this matter. No one would freely submit to such a condition of affairs as multiple marriage carried out, in the spirit of the Aristotelian interpretation, to an obscene completeness, but that is all the more reason why the modern Utopia should not refuse a grouped marriage to three or more freely consenting persons. There is no sense in prohibiting institutions which no sane people could ever want to abuse. It is claimed—though ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... infinitely NASTIER than any thing else in the English language. They have, however, the negative virtue of being nowise licentious or demoralizing—or at least no more so than is inseparable from the choice of obscene and repulsive subjects. Nearly all his unobjectionable comic verses may be found ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... and air; and when the sheriff let her in through the clanging outer gate she started back at sight of the tanks. Within high walls of concrete a great, wrought-iron cell-house rose up like a square box of steel and, pressed against the bars, were obscene leering eyes staring out for ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Ovid's account that there was much drunkenness and obscene language; this was, in fact, a festa very different in character from those of the Numan calendar; and that there was a magical element in the cult of the deity seems proved by the mysterious allusion to "virgineus cruor" in connection with her grove not far from this ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... lordly obstruction, he did not discover it by word or feature. He went on humming a tune without words as he worked, handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew. Jim had eaten his breakfast already, and was smoking a cigarette at his ease. Now and then he addressed somebody in obscene jocularity. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... or from a supposed necessity of winning the favour of the populace, that he might be able to tell them bold and unpleasant truths. We know at least that he boasts of having been much more sparing than his rivals in the use of obscene jests, to gain the laughter of the mob, and of having, in this respect, carried his art to perfection. Not to be unjust towards him, we must judge of all that appears so repulsive to us, not by modern ideas, but by the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without ever ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... has told me of his Majesty's father, for whom Shakespeare was a closet companion, who loved all that was noblest in the drama of the Elizabethan age. Time, which should have refined and improved the stage, has sunk it in ignominy. We stand alone among nations in our worship of the obscene. You have seen plays enough in Paris, Hyacinth. Recall the themes that pleased you at the Marais and the Hotel de Bourgogne; the stories of classic heroism, of Christian fortitude, of manhood and womanhood lifted to the sublime. You who, in your girlhood, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... describe such a visit, but I must enter a loud, a screeching protest against the Arab brutes—the schieks being the very worst of the brutes—who have these monuments in their hands. Their numbers, the filthiness of their dress—or one might almost say no dress—their stench, their obscene indecency, their clattering noise, their rapacity, exercised without a moment's intercession; their abuse, as in this wise: "Very bad English-man; dam bad; dam, dam, dam! Him want to take all him money to the grave; but no, no, no! Devil ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... The approach to the hospital, through sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... a link for hire but some of these industrious poor, and even such, not without some ticket or badge, to let people know whom they trust. Thus would the streets be cleared night and day of these vermin; nor would oaths, skirmishes, blasphemy, obscene talk, or other wicked examples, be so public and frequent. All gaming at orange and gingerbread barrows should be abolished, as also all penny and halfpenny lotteries, thimbles and balls, &c., so frequent in Moorfields, Lincoln's-inn-fields, &c., where idle fellows ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... Gaston began to inspect La Jonquiere's library, and found it composed of three sets of books: theatrical books, obscene ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... were out in the bare school-yard during the afternoon recess, when Maria, sitting huddled over the stove for warmth, heard such a clamor that she ran to the window. Out in the desolate yard, a parallelogram of frozen soil hedged in with a high board fence covered with grotesque, and even obscene, drawings of pupils who had from time to time reigned in district number six, was the little Ramsey girl, surrounded by a crowd of girls who were fairly yelping like little mongrel dogs. The boys' yard was on the other side of the fence, but in the fence was a knot-hole ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Plague-stricken? Had the very Gods, that saw Thy glory lighten on us for a law, Thy gospel go before us for a guide, Had these waxed envious of our love and awe, Or was it less their envy than thy pride That bared thy breast for the obscene vulture-claw, High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesied That fate should yet mean freedom? Howsoever, That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise, Which blots out of man's book of after days The name above all names abhorred for ever. ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... neither a great general nor a great statesman, he is a gentleman. I am therefore surprised that he allows obscene caricatures of the Empress to be publicly sold in the streets and exhibited in the kiosks. During the time that she occupied the throne in this most scandal-loving town, no scandal was ever whispered ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the world, how Maria Theresa hates vice, and how she punishes crime, without respect of persons. Both criminals shall feel the lash of justice. If my woman's heart break, the empress shall do her duty. It shall not be said that lust holds its revels in Vienna, as at the obscene courts of Versailles and St. Petersburg. No! Nor shall the libertines of Vienna point to the Austrian emperor as their model, nor shall their weeping wives be taunted with reports of the indulgence of the Austrian empress. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... endeavoured by some students to show that these are relics of the Fetish worship of equatorial Africa, but such a genealogy has never been satisfactorily demonstrated. The cannibalistic rituals, human sacrifices, and obscene ceremonies resembling those of the Black Sabbath of the Middle Ages, reported to prevail in Haiti and other of the islands, and by some among the negroes of the Southern States of America, may be said to rest on doubtful authority. Nevertheless, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... Villiers, the fourth earl, according to his English biographers, represented the highest type of English politician and English gentleman. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1846-1852. He hired the editor of an obscene journal in Dublin to publish libels upon the moral character of the Young Irelanders, and conducted the affairs of the country from March to June, 1848, under this man's advice. He paid L3,400 for the services rendered and a demand for further payments led to a public ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... though sheets were unknown, and cleanliness or decency were but little attended to. Not only were the habits of many of the crew dirty, but their manners and ideas were bad, and their language most foul and obscene; cursing and swearing went on all day long, just as a thing of course. It might seem strange to some who don't know much about human nature, that I, a lad decently brought up by good, religious people, and fairly educated, should have willingly submitted to live along with such people. ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... of Philip Sparrow," by the witty, but obscene Skelton, who wrote towards the close of the fifteenth century, says that "Gower's Englishe is old;" but the learned Dean Collet, in the early part of the succeeding century, studied not only Gower, but Chaucer, and even Lydgate, in order to improve ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... War. But, once this was over, he relapsed; and expressing himself very clearly in action, so that he became known to the many instead of the few, he lived what he previously wrote, and now it is generally recognized that Gabriel of the Annunciation, as he calls himself, who produced a row of obscene and histrionic novels, is a mountebank, a self-deceiver and a most affected bore. When he came to Rieka he thought fit to appeal to the England of Milton. And, like him, Milton lived as he wrote. Milton, Dante and Sophocles—to mention no others ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the scullery, where the shining sink had grown a gray, rough skin, a sort of fungoid coat, from the grease that clung to it, and the gas stove, furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster in its corner. He was afraid, morally and physically afraid, to look at that thing of infamy behind the back door. He tried to pretend ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... madwomen thou facest in Salpetriere; the obscene shouts and curses of the fallen; the fury of the female criminal; the misery of the poor distracted half-wits, where mad and sane are given the same cell:—these shall be but confused phantasmagoria projected on thy sick brain during this ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... strange republic. Fanatical, where the Bible is burned in the public plaza whenever introduced, yet, where the most obscene prints are publicly offered for sale in the stores. Where it is a "mortal sin" to listen to the Protestant missionary, and not a sin to break the whole Decalogue. Backward—where the villagers are tied to a post and whipped by the priest when they do not please him. Progressive—in ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... retailing filth, journalists largely given to the invention of sensational lies, politicians largely obeying either atheistic demagogues or clerical intriguers; and all together acting like a swarm of obscene, tricky, mangy monkeys chattering, squealing, and tweaking one another's tails in a cage. Some of these monkeys I saw performing their antics in the National Assembly then sitting at Versailles; and it saddened me to see ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... this Lady appears in the Boxes the grave part of the fair Sex are seen to put their Fans before their Faces; and are heard to whisper one another— Lud what an indecent Sight Miss Giggle's Neck is— It is really quite obscene! I wonder somebody does not tell her of it, then the Men, they are all in a high Grin; and the Smarts are frequently heard to roar out— O Gad— they are ravishingly White, and smooth as ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... Guimi, Kanoldt, Kandinsky, Utrello—a good street effect; Werefkin and several Frenchmen were in evidence. The modelling was both grotesque and indecent. The human figure as an arabesque is well within the comprehension of the average observer, but obscenity is not art—great art is never obscene. The blacks and whites that I saw in Munich at this particular show were not clever, only bestial. I only wish that German art of the last decade had not gone over, bag and baggage, to the side of vulgar license. Certainly Matthew Arnold could say of it, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... China—a gilded figure about sixty feet high—colossal and rather awe-inspiring in "the dim religious light.'' But in one of the temple buildings, where the two monks who accompanied us said that daily prayers were chanted, I saw representations in brass and gilt that were as filthily obscene as anything that I saw in India. There is immorality in lands that are called Christian, but it is disavowed by Christianity, ostracized by decent people and under the ban of the civil law. But Buddhism puts immorality ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... officers of the law. He is as eloquent in giving lessons to novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel of sin ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Swinburne says, you cannot believe for a moment that the pain of torture will ever open Iago's lips. He is equally unassailable by the temptations of indolence or of sensuality. It is difficult to imagine him inactive; and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by. 'What should I do?' Roderigo whimpers to him; 'I confess ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... rude evidences of vice around her she was saved by her misfortune. And at that hour the streets were quiet and silent, nor was her youthful ear shocked by the sounds which too often broke along the obscene and obscure haunts she ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... indexed by search engines. We are satisfied that the remainder of the indexable Web, and the vast "Deep Web," which cannot currently be indexed, includes materials that meet CIPA's categories of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, and harmful to minors. These portions of the Web cannot presently be harvested through the methods that filtering software companies use (except through reporting by customers or by observing users' log files), because they are not linked to other known ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... end, and surrounds the lights with a lurid halo. It's too hot to sleep, and my sole amusement consists in watching the cockroaches, which are in a state of intense excitement and happiness. They manifest these feelings in a very remarkable manner—a sudden unanimous impulse seems to seize the obscene thousands which usually lurk hidden in the corners of my cabin. Out they rush, helter-skelter, and run over me, my table, and my desk; others, more vigorous, fly, quite regardless of consequences, until they hit against something, upon which, half spreading their wings, they ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... won't let me speak about it. She's funnier than ever. She treats me as if I were some obscene monster just crawled up out ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... of British women, with their knuckled hands, their splayed feet. Their abominable dressing, too, a bust and a brooch and a hooped skirt—their grocers' conventions, prudish, almost obscene, avoiding of the natural in word, deed, or thought.... He wanted Fenzile, with her eyes, vert de mer, her full childish face, her slim hands with the orange-tinted finger nails, her silken trousers, her little slippers of silver and blue.... Her soft arms, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... and a few rods away—over the line—other grog shops were opened wherein were sold similar goods not so guaranteed. Gambling sharks arrived and set up shell games and bedraggled prostitutes—outcasts from urban centers of debauchery—-came and camped nearby and made night hideous with their obscene revelry. ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... cottonwood thicket, Purdy watched him pass. He wanted to talk with him. Maybe he had a bottle and Purdy needed a drink. The man was idly twirling the end of his rope and singing a song as he rode. He seemed care-free, even gay. The song that he sang was a popular one on the cattle range, grossly obscene, having to do with the love intrigues of one ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... time their leading spirit was no longer Staupitz, disagreeably conscious of the difficulties of the enterprise, but the hunchback AEsop, who seemed to burn with a passion for slaughter. Lagardere likened him in his mind to some ungainly, obscene bird of prey, as he loomed out of the mirk waving his gaunt arms and shrieking in his rage and hate. "Kill them! kill them!" he screamed, as he rushed across the intervening space, and the bravos, heartened by his frenzy of fight, streamed ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... although every one saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties, people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene orgies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the eighteenth century, not only were religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence, but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms. The existence of the Supreme Being ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... light here and there. The flies, which had been a nuisance across the stream, here swarmed in myriads so thick that they seemed to hang in clusters from the boughs; and their incessant buzzing added to the horror of the place a hint of something foul, sinister, almost obscene. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... with him I could only summon courage to put my arm over his chest, but I could not sleep for unsatisfied desire, and the unrelieved erection caused a dull pain on the morrow. I had always disliked conversation that might be regarded as bordering on the obscene, and consequently was very ignorant on most matters; it pained me even to hear him laugh at such remarks. I think if he had been intimate with me I should have not conversed much on such topics, but now I felt ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... he there or is it intenser shadow? Dark huddled coilings from the obscene depths, Black, formless shadow, Shadow. Doors creak; from secret parts of the chateau come the scuffle and ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... out logically, to the letter. The treatises on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of blasphemous and obscene epithets which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in casting out devils. The Treasury of Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... supreme power remained in the hands of the multitude, constitute the first of these; and it goes by the name of the old comedy. In those pieces no person whatever was spared. Though they were so modelled and represented as to deserve the name of regular comedy they were obscene, scurrilous, and defamatory. In them the most abominable falsehoods were fearlessly charged upon men and women of all conditions and characters; not under fictitious names, nor by innuendo, but directly ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... savage ignorance. About the psychology of races yet more undeveloped we can have no historical knowledge. Among the lowest known tribes we usually find, just as in ancient Greece, the belief in a deathless "Father," "Master," "Maker," and also the crowd of humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are in flagrant contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, are what we call ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Of Solomon he led by fraud to build His Temple right against the Temple of God On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons, From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon And Heronaim, Seons Realm, beyond The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines, 410 And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool. Peor his other Name, when he entic'd Israel in Sittim on their march ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... wretched and lingering career. Abhorred and despised by even the few who are cognisant of its miserable and disgraceful existence, stifled by the very filth it so profusely scatters, rendered deaf and blind by the exhalations of its own slime, the obscene journal, happily unconscious of its degraded state, is rapidly sinking beneath that treacherous mud which, while it seems to give it a firm standing with the low and debased classes of society, is nevertheless ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... thoroughfares that were most quiet. It was well for them that they did this, for now it was known that Agrippa's sickness was mortal, the most of the soldiers were already in a state of mutiny, and, inflamed with wine, paraded the market-places and larger streets, shouting and singing obscene songs, and breaking into the liquor shops and private houses, where they drank healths to Charon, who was about to bear away their king in his evil bark. As yet, however, they had not begun killing those against whom they had a grudge. This happened afterwards, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... boisterous manner. "I want to go," he cried, "to the family Ancestral Temple and mourn my old master. Who would have ever imagined that he would leave behind such vile creatures of descendants as you all, day after day indulging in obscene and incestuous practices, 'in scraping of the ashes' and in philandering with brothers-in-law. I know all about your doings; the best thing is to hide one's stump of an arm in one's sleeve!" (wash ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... partner's act seemed monstrous. He had been brought up to respect the marriage bond, and to protect and honor women. The illicit was impossible to his candid soul. All the men he had associated with had been respecters of marriage, though some of them were obscene—thoughtlessly, he always believed—and now Jim, his chum, had come between a man and his wife! With Estelle in his mind as the type of purity, he could not understand how a wife could be the faithless creature Blanche Burke seemed. Her ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... was contemplated chiefly under the attribute or property of fecundity; the symbols of the reproductive power being those under which its prolific potencies were exhibited. It is not because modern fastidiousness affects to consider those symbols as indecent, and even obscene, that we should therefore suppose them to have been so regarded by the ancients: on the contrary, the view of them awakened no impure ideas in the minds of the latter, being regarded by them as the most sacred objects of worship. The ancients, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baal's stone obscene, Or from the shrine serene Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men Some day the soft Ideal that we ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the future. What knowest thou of the runes of old, whispered by the trunkless skull to the mighty Odin? runes that control the elements, and conjure up the Shining Shadows of the grave. Not with thee will the stars confer; and thy dreams are foul with revelries obscene, not solemn and haunted with the bodements of things to come! Only I marvelled, while I beheld thee on the Saxon's grave, what joy such as thou can find in that life above life, which draws upward the soul of the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... effeminacy is not opposed to perseverance. For a gloss on 1 Cor. 6:9, 10, "Nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind," expounds the text thus: "Effeminate—i.e. obscene, given to unnatural vice." But this is opposed to chastity. Therefore effeminacy is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... common sense, his dull and morning guide; And stutterers speak fast, and quick men stutter, And gleams of fitful mirth shine on the brow Of moody souls, and careless gay men look Fierce melodrama on their friends around; While talk obscene and loyalty mark all; Then good or bad emotions meet the eye, Like a mosaic floor, whose black and white Glistens more keenly, moisten'd by the stain ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... in his place O'er all the rest by head and shoulders; No sunshine on that noble face Which Nature meant to charm beholders! Mad with his self-made martyr's shirt, Obscene, through hatred of obsceneness, He from a pulpit built of Dirt Shrieks ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Old. This theologian was profoundly learned in the Oriental languages, but he was a reckless and irreverent critic. He made light of many of the occurrences of the Old Testament, and whenever the students applauded one of his obscene jokes, he was tickled into childishness. He made no claim to an experimental acquaintance with the operations of the Holy Spirit, and used his position as theological professor and lecturer only as the stepping-stone to money and fame. He would make Moses a very good sort of statesman, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... gibberish; confusion of tongues, Babel; babu English[obs3], chi-chi. figure of speech &c. (metaphor) 521; byword. colloquialism, informal speech, informal language. substandard language, vernacular. vulgar language, obscene language, obscenity, vulgarity. jargon, technical terms, technicality, lingo, slang, cant, argot; St. Gile's Greek, thieves' Latin, peddler's French, flash tongue, Billingsgate, Wall Street slang. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... life out o' me?" exclaims one, straining his mottled eyes, extending his wearied limbs, gasping as if for breath; then staggering to the counter. Finally, after much struggling, staggering, expressing consternation, obscene jeering, blasphemous oaths and filthy slang, they stand upright, and huddle around the notice. The picture presented by their ragged garments, their woebegone faces, and their drenched faculties, would, indeed, be difficult to transfer ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... prove a severe trial to most works of real value, whose scope extended beyond the respectabilities. Not to mention Byron's caustic remarks on the peculiar expurgation of Martial in Don Juan's edition, it is obvious that the Bible and Shakespeare could both be proved obscene by this process; and setting aside ancient literature altogether, half our own classics, before the age of Wordsworth and Scott, would come under the same condemnation. I know I am intruding among my betters; but I do not claim equality with them; I merely ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... dark and lonely hiding-place (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fring'd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven Cries out, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... inexhaustible store of epithet native to the shores of the Mediterranean. Rivals, on meeting here again after a set-to on the beach the day before, would revive the passions of the unsettled argument, annotating insults with obscene gestures, emphasizing accusations with cadenced slapping of hands on thighs, or lifting clenched fists above their heads as if they were about to strike. And then, when you would think of calling the police, if not the undertaker, laughter, ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the Roman Empire without becoming more dignified; rather the reverse. The names of some authors of mimes have survived: Publius Syrus and Laberius, in the time of Caesar. What is curious is that these mimes, licentious and even obscene though they were, throughout gave occasional utterance to highly moral observations which Latin grammarians have preserved for us. This curious mixture may be explained or contrasted at pleasure; perhaps it ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... of the night in a resort of gamblers and sharpers, carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the old Tower; that hearth of his ancestors was still too sacred for ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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