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More "Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ever witnessed. Scores of members were on their legs at the same time; men hitherto quiet, composed, and good-natured, began to raise cries hoarse with rage, and finally four or five hundred voices were united in producing the deafening and discordant din of angry and contradictory voices. Nor was this all. In some parts of the House men began directly to assail each other—to exchange language of taunt, and insult, and defiance; and, in more than one corner, there were the signs of impending physical conflict. The one relief of the situation was that some men kept ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Davies's little squad, halted as ordered, was now isolated from all, far over on the east side of the jagged spur, over whose crest their lieutenant had just disappeared from their sight, with Murray in attendance, riding wearily back to find his captain, disturbed by contradictory orders and dishearted to see him in march full a mile farther away than he supposed, and diverging from the point of direction of his own party with every step. Time and again had Devers, still fuming with nervous tension and mingled wrath and pain,—hungry and savage, too, it must be borne ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... conception of a separated voice—'The viewless spirit of a lonely sound,' plaining in the woods as if seeking for some incarnation it cannot find, and saddening the spring groves by a note so contradictory to the genius of the season. In reference to the note of the cuckoo we find the following remarks among the fragments from the commonplace-book of Dr Thomas Brown, printed by Dr Welsh:—'The name of the cuckoo has generally been considered as a very pure instance of imitative harmony. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... secreted, using it when he dared, a sixpence at a time; the case, with its papers, he buried in the spot where his master afterwards found it. With all this upon the young man's conscience, no wonder he was a little confused and contradictory in his statements to Pike: no wonder he fancied the ghost of the man he could have saved and did not, might now and then be hovering about him. Pike learned the real truth at last; and a compunction had come over him, now that he was dying, for having ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... up, and, overhearing the question, declares that her mistress's hand has already been promised,—a statement which Eva modifies by adding that her future bridegroom is yet to be chosen. As these contradictory answers greatly puzzle Walther, she hurriedly explains that her father, the wealthiest burgher of the town, wishing to show his veneration for music, has promised his fortune and her hand to a Master Singer, the preference being given ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... will prosper, and if he objects with full arguments, his adversaries have a perfect right to claim that he himself sets a poor example and that his psychology helps still more to increase that noisy discussion which he denounces as ruinous to the community. But in this contradictory situation the circle must be broken somewhere, and even at the risk of adding to the dangerous tumult which he condemns, the psychologist must break his silence in order to plead for silence. I shall have to go into all the obnoxious detail, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... masterpieces. In short, with all due respect to the entire sincerity of this magnificent writer, it must be said that those who would enjoy and appreciate him rightly, should ignore his philosophico-religious treatises, which are contradictory and confusing to the last degree. As an illustration, let me cite the case of the famine in Russia of 1891-92. Great sums of money[45] were sent to Count Tolstoy, chiefly from America, and were expended by him in the most practicable and irreproachable manner—so ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped after luncheon. There were pleasanter pastimes, even for the women, contradictory as this may seem. By eleven o'clock Courtlandt had finished the reading of his mail, and was now ready to hunt for the little lady of the Taverne Royale. It was necessary to find her. The whereabouts of Flora ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... began to spread. Helgi, who alone knew the truth, held his peace for Estein's sake, even when the ale flowed most freely. The others who had sailed with them laid no such restraint on their tongues, and stories of a spell and an Orkney witch, vague and contradictory, but none the less eagerly listened to and often repeated, went the round of the country. The king at last began to take alarm, and one day he called Earl Sigvald to him ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... is all c'llected in the middle of his visage, an' bunched up like they's afraid of Injuns or somethin' else that threatenin' an' hostile—them sort of countenances you notes carved on the far ends of fiddles. We-all is averse to Ryder. An' this yere Ryder himsc'f is that contentious an' contradictory he won't agree to nothin'. Jest to show you about Ryder: I has in mind once when a passel of us is lookin' at a paper that's come floatin' in from the States. Thar's the picture of a cow-puncher into it who's a dead ringer for Dave Tutt. From y'ears to hocks that picture is Tutt; an' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... skeptics never dream of reproaching themselves; they pass their lives in reasoning against reason. In short, Count Kostia respected nothing but facts, and believed that, properly viewed, there was nothing else, and that the universe, considered as an entirety, was but a collection of contradictory accidents. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... end of his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them, his force being small. The Government had assured Colonel Starr that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to arrange; that ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to waste away with hunger at home, because she imagined that she was suffering from a serious complaint of the digestive organs, but who nevertheless began to eat when she was taken elsewhere. However, that is but one circumstance, and there are so many contradictory cases." ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as if she were sorry. Indeed, she thought she was glad too. That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed contradictory. And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to relieve her suddenly and to take from her ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... By their contradictory statements, ever-increasing embarrassment, and unveracious assertions, the jury were soon convinced of their guilt. The unhappy youth was their brother, and had inherited property from their mother, he being her child by a second husband. So these monsters murdered him for revenge ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... he perceived that Guillaume was now very pale and had closed his eyes. Had even he, with his faith in science, felt the doubt which is born of contradictory theories, and the despair which comes when one sees the fight for truth resulting in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... must be aware that the accounts which you gave of yourself last night were very contradictory. Even at the best, you are, according to your own statement, a newspaper correspondent, which in our eyes is the same as a spy. But more than this, you confess yourself to be an American, which makes it still worse. And so, senor, you ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... word-portrait as I could of the French lieutenant; and—I suppose on account of that same perversity—I felt no surprise whatever when he assured me that I had faithfully described to him the arch-pirate who had left him and his crew to perish in the flames. Indeed, in my then contradictory state of mind I should have been disappointed had he said otherwise. The man's conduct—his stealthy but searching scrutiny of the ship; his endeavour, as I regarded it, to mislead us with his broken English; and his excessive curiosity, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... forgiven to men of genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with most of us. An eager imagination—a vivid sense of beauty—quick readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral loveliness—these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of much that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... 1738 is more extensive, although somewhat contradictory, and exhibits a strong element of dissention. Oglethorpe admitted the difficulties under which the people labored, ascribing them to the Spanish alarms, but reports that John Mohr Macintosh, pursuant to ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... we have already said of this singular work, the criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only allege in excuse the fact that the book ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... roused by some great calamity that people bestir themselves; and then there is such a variety of plans proposed to avert similar cases of distress, that to attempt to concoct a rational plan out of such a crude, ill-digested, and contradictory mass of opinion, requires more labour and attention than most people are inclined to give it, unless a regular business was made of it. In Paris the corps of military firemen are so well trained, that although their apparatus is not so good as it should be, the amount of ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... of witchcraft was tried in 1711, before Lord Chief Justice Powell; in which, however, the jury persisted in a verdict of guilty, though the evidence was of the usual absurd and contradictory character, and the enlightened judge did all in his power to bring them to a right conclusion. The accused person was one Jane Wenham, better known as the Witch of Walkerne; and the persons who were alleged to have suffered from her witchcraft were two young women, named ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... its want of literary research, is not likely to be soon supplied, than Thomas Erastus, whose theological, philosophical, and medical celebrity entitle him to rank with the greatest men of his century. At present we have to collect all that is known of his life from various scattered and contradictory sources. John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, contrary to the usual candour and fairness of his judgments, speaks slightingly of Erastus. There was, however, a sufficient reason for this. Erastus had shown up the empiricism of Webster's ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... qualities differing from His real nature and qualities, and dishonoring Him. A very good definition, if you only know what His nature and qualities are. But that is not revealed; for, studying Him through the medium of the bible, we find Him illimitably contradictory. He commands us not to work on the Sabbath day, because it is holy. Yet God works himself on the Sabbath day. The sun, moon and stars swing round in their orbits, and all the creation attributed to this God goes on as on ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... moody, walked restlessly about, held consultations with his officers, gave contradictory orders in this shrill clamour pervading the whole empty edifice. Sometimes there would be long and awful silences. Several times he had entered the torture-chamber where his sword, horsewhip, revolver, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most of them finished their career. It is an instructive fact that ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... that their counsels were contradictory, and their promises were distant, and the lord of the castle was impatient and bewildered in mind. For meantime the manifold voices of the town went up around him like smoke, and he knew that underneath it some fires of trouble ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... by this retrospect how difficult it is to seize all the shifting subtleties of this remarkable character. His sophisms even, when self-contradictory, are so adroit that they are often hard to parry. He made a great merit to himself for not having originated the new episcopates; but it should be remembered that he did his utmost to enforce the measure, which was "so holy a scheme that he would sacrifice ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... belongs his Almansor, a dramatic poem which has suffered the most contradictory criticism. In my opinion, it has usually been misunderstood. Almansor is intelligible only if regarded from a Jewish point of view, and then it is seen to be the hymn of vengeance sung by Judaism oppressed. Substitute ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... his irritation died away, and something wholly contradictory took its place. He felt a rush of self-pity, and then of trust. What if he called on her to help him—unveiled himself to this kind and charming woman—confessed to her his remorse about Phoebe—his secret miseries and anxieties—the bitterness ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mind, is variously called the evil or carnal mind, the mind of the flesh, the old man, the serpent, the devil, the adversary. It is simply the opposite or contradictory of the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... inclination to receive proof. Hamlet is sent to sea just to get such proof as will not only thoroughly satisfy himself, but be capable of being shown to others. He holds now in his hand—to lay before the people—the two contradictory commissions. By his voyage then he has gained both assurance of his duty, and provision against the consequence he mainly dreaded, that of leaving a wounded name behind him. 272. This is the shaping of his ends—so exactly to his needs, so different from ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... circumference nowhere,' that I am not prepared to say what may or may not be found within it. You will ultimately think with me that, though an earnest and profound thinker, your master is no Memnon, waking only before the sunlight of truth. His utterances are dim and contradictory." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... that I am very much in want of information, and can think of no unprejudiced individuals to whom to apply for the facts as really existing in other parts of India. As for books, when I look into them for any information, I am at once met by quantities of unlimited condemnations, or a host of contradictory statements. And, as an instance of the latter, I may mention that in Kerr's "Domestic Life of the Natives of India" we are informed, at page 31, that "alms are given to the poor without distinction of caste," while at page ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... we could not form the conception of any environment at all, and consequently could have no recognition of our own existence. The confusion of thought involved even in the attempt to state such a condition shows it to be perfectly inconceivable, for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory and self-destructive. On this account it is clear that our own existence and that of the world around us necessarily implies the presence of a Universal Mind acting on certain fixed lines of its ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... notes. Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... returns to the charge. He observes (as I have also observed) the often contradictory nature of our evidence. Here I may offer an anecdote. The most celebrated of living English philosophers heard that I was at one time writing a book on the 'ghostly' in history, anthropology, and society, old or new, savage or civilised. He kindly dictated a letter to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... overlapping of these laws, so contradictory in principle, it may happen that securities held by taxpayers residing in other states than those of the issue are taxable two or three or more times; but few if any loans of this kind are made except by ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... as Fitz and Luke came into the room. Luke's eyes were only for her. Fitz, with the unconcealed absorption which was often his, absolutely ignored her presence. And the little incident roused something contradictory in Agatha—something evil and, alas! feminine. She awoke to the very matter-of-factness of the present moment, and she determined to make a conquest ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... him. "When to go up and when to come down!" he repeated with the same idiotic drawl and contradictory gesture. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... her afterward that she must have had two simultaneous and contradictory ideas as to who he was. She knew,—she must have known, instantly—that he was Anthony March, but his uniform suggested Rush and drew her over toward him just as though she had actually believed him to be her brother. And then as he became aware of her ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... shoulders, and that the two arms may be visible to right and left of the body. The contours of the trunk are best modelled in a three-quarters view, whereas the legs show to most advantage when seen sidewise. The Egyptians did not hesitate to combine these contradictory points of view in one single figure. The head is almost always given in profile, but is provided with a full-face eye and placed upon a full-face bust. The full-face bust adorns a trunk seen from a three-quarters point of view, and ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... The legal is extremely complex, laws being infinite in number and character. Sometimes the letter is to be observed, sometimes the spirit. Sometimes we get at its meaning by comparison, or induction; sometimes its meaning is open to the most contradictory interpretations. Hence there is room for a far greater display of diverse kinds of excellence in the legal than in the rational department. Thus the declamatory exercises called suasoriae, which are confined to rational considerations, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... on intoning their dreary Latin doggerel? Priestcraft and Sham! There's no escape from it anywhere, not even in the wilds of Caucasus! I wonder if the man I seek is really here, or whether after all I have been misled? There are so many contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems incredible that he should be a monk; it is such an altogether foolish ending to an intellectual career. For whatever may be the form of faith professed by this particular fraternity, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of all moral authority by persistent efforts to procure their indirect repeal through contradictory enactments. They had been practically abrogated by the legislation attending the organization of Utah, New Mexico, and Washington. If any vitality remained in them it would have been taken away, in effect, by the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... awakened by the repeated avowal of the unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity, which was but another form of his egotism, was so complete as to baffle ordinary malicious cunning, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... fairly of the circumstances attending the advent of painless surgery. The committee decided unanimously that Doctor Wells did not carry his experiments far enough to reach a decided result; that Doctor Jackson's testimony was contradictory and not much to be depended on; and that the credit of discovering painless surgery properly appertained to Dr. W. T. G. Morton. They recommended an appropriation of a hundred thousand dollars to be given to Doctor Morton in return ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... a snug Party Club prove a trifle too free, Or give an equivocal "treat," or hat-ticket; A seven years' nursing of Slopville-on-Slime, A well-fought Election and Glorious Victory (Crowed o'er by proud Party prints at the time) May—lose you your Seat. It does seem contradictory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... now touched on what seem to me the salient points in both of the volumes by these two famous statesmen. I have, I hope, brought out sufficiently the fact that on their own showing they were pursuing contradictory policies, and that it was the consequent failure to follow a policy that was consistent and continuous that in the end led Germany to the slippery slope down which she glided into war. The circumstances of the world before and ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... miserable, because he had two hundred thousand dollars, and she had not as many hundreds. All this strangely conflicted with Betts' preconceived opinion of a French woman's selfishness, and, while he was disposed to believe his adored perfection, he almost feared it was a trick. Of such contradictory materials ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... dissatisfaction of Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, and Germans. Republicans taking full advantage and liable, in order to garner disaffected vote, to make absolute issue against League, Reaction intensified by your absence and lack of publicity from your end and confusion caused by contradictory statements and explanations of Quote so-called compromises End Quote. Simonds' article appearing in certain American newspapers Sunday, admirable, explaining reasons for Saar Valley and French ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... of government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,—this is the only reality of government and politics. How shall this absolute liberty, synonymous ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... too by the tendency of character to grow permanent. And when we are told that God "willeth all men to be saved," and that God can do everything, we are forced to ask, Can God do contradictory things? Can God make a door to be open and shut at the same time? Can God make a thing to be and not to be at the same time? Can God make a man's will free to choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall certainly choose good at the last? One ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park, her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given back to her the self-respect ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said he had often expostulated with his old comrade of the "Beagle" for entertaining views which were contradictory to the First ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... take every care to avoid a confusion between the manifest and the latent content, for I ascribe all the contradictory as well as the incorrect accounts of dream-life to the ignorance of this latent content, now first ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... on the floor of the United States Congress, fifteen years afterward, an apologetic denial of what appears from the evidence of those who escaped,—taken by the Congressional Committee,—and also contradictory to the confederate General S. D. Lee's report, in which he fails to convince himself even of the inaccuracy of the reports of brutality, as made by the few who escaped being murdered. ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... satisfaction, these things are all true. But heaven is not lying upon couches and eating of a feast. There is another use of this metaphor in this same Gospel, which, at first sight, strikes one as being contradictory to this. Our Lord said: 'Which of you, having a servant ploughing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, go and sit down to meat, and will not rather say unto him, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... truly!" returned Alida, half tempted, by the wild and excited eye of her companion, not withstanding all the contradictory evidence which surrounded him, to believe she was addressing one of the very rovers in question. "The book was lent me by a brave seaman, who holds himself in readiness to repress their depredations; and while reading of so much wickedness, I endeavor to recall the devotion ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and we firmly believe that they are practicable, and binding on every Christian, and that, in the life to come, every man will be rewarded according to his works. And, further, it is our belief that, in order to enable mankind to put in practice these sacred precepts, many of which are contradictory to the unregenerate will of man, every man, coming into the world, is endued with a measure of the light, grace, or good spirit, of Christ, by which, as it is attended to, he is enabled to distinguish good from evil, and to correct the disorderly passions and corrupt ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world, which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration—'It did not weigh as much as I expected, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... explained" to me before I went to Pulaski, and "properly appreciated," instead of upon what I had gathered from General Thomas's orders to Stanley and subsequent orders to me about fighting Hood at Pulaski, absolutely contradictory to that stated in his report, "without risking a general engagement," and his assent to my radically different suggestions made after I assumed command at Pulaski, as stated in my report. It is not incumbent upon ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... 'How contradictory is this!' said Emily;—'but we may be overheard. My recollection of it shall depend upon yours; I will endeavour to forget, or to recollect it, as you may do. Let us join the Count.'—'Tell me first,' said Valancourt, 'that you forgive the uneasiness I have ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... sensation was one of joyous self-confidence, which sensation had been produced in her by the remarks and the attitude of Musa. She had always known that she was both shy and adventurous, and that the two qualities were mutually contradictory; but now it appeared to her that diffidence had been destroyed, and that that change which she had ever longed for in her constitution had at ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... and prettier, Pip?" And when I said yes (for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella's moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like "Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... men, in the absence of contradictory evidence, seem adequate in support of Aristotle's point that social contacts are indispensable for human development. The story by Helen Keller, the talented and celebrated blind deaf-mute, of her emergence from the imprisonment of sense deprivation into the free life of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... contemplates commercial aloofness nor any other aloofness contradictory to the best American traditions or loftiest human purposes. Our fortunate capacity for comparative self-containment affords the firm foundation on which to build for our own security, and a like foundation on which to build for a future of influence and importance in world commerce. Our trade ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that the enemies attack those travellers with doubts as to the possibility of ever reaching the mountain's top, and with scores of questions about apparently conflicting passages of Scripture, and contradictory experiences of Christian people; and, alas! with only too frequent success, for the whole plateau seems to be strewn with the records of broken resolutions relating to the renouncements of evil habits, tempting ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... that a Jew might drink them or wash in them. Their dwellings were clean, so that he might enter them, and eat or lodge in them. Their roads were clean, so that the dust of them did not defile a Jew's feet. The Rabbis even went so far in their contradictory utterances, as to say that the victuals of the Cuthites were allowed, if none of their wine or vinegar were mixed with them, and even their unleavened bread was to be reckoned fit for use at the Passover. Opinions thus wavered, but, as ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Rajas, there is Tamas, and there is Sattwa, the third. There are again three states of the understanding, viz., waking, dreaming, and sound sleep. The Soul has knowledge of the pleasures and pains, which are all contradictory, of those states, and which partake of the nature of the threefold attributes first mentioned.[677] The Soul enters the senses like the wind entering the fire in a piece of wood.[678] One cannot behold the form of the Soul by one's eye, nor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... understand," said a third—very judiciously, however—"that our author has the good sense to rely more on his chisel than on the Muses." The lessons taught were of a sufficiently varied, but, on the whole, rather contradictory character. By one writer I was told that I was a dull, correct fellow, who had written a book in which there was nothing amusing and nothing absurd. Another, however, cheered my forlorn spirits by assuring me that I was a "man of genius, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... this significance of the oscillation of the birth-rate, though he expressed it in a somewhat peculiar way, as the social capillarity theory. It is the natural and universal tendency of mankind to ascend, he declared; a high birth-rate and a strong ascensional impulse are mutually contradictory. Large families are only possible when there is no progress, and no expectation of it can be cherished; small families become possible when the way has been opened to progress. "One might say," Dumont puts it, "that invisible valves, like those which direct ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... to be sure, certain conventional anecdotes, which prove that Pope consulted various friends, whose classical attainments were sounder than his own, during the undertaking; but it is probable that these examinations were the result rather of the contradictory versions already existing, than of a desire to make a perfect transcript of the original. And in those days, what is called literal translation was less cultivated than at present. If something like the general sense could be decorated with the easy gracefulness of a ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... afraid our talking might disturb my aunt," she said, and on her way back to him she picked up the photograph case and brought it to the light. "These are my father and mother. We live at Yonkers; but I'm with my aunt a good deal of the time in town—even when I'm at home." She laughed at her own contradictory statement, and put the case back without explaining the third figure—a figure in uniform. Dan conjectured a military brother, or from her indifference perhaps a militia brother, and then forgot about him. But the partial Yonkers ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of men and acts, and things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the one prepared by the association. The author of the third believed that women could obtain suffrage only through a constitutional amendment, which was what his bill called for. The women received such contradictory advice on this point as to awaken much anxiety. However, they read in their meetings a copy of the statutes of Colorado, and possessing only plain common sense and not the legal ability which would have qualified them for a place in the Supreme Court, concluded that the referendum to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... sincerity, and always was amenable enough to counsel, was doubtless much confused by such contradictory diagnosis of his case. The question, Poetry or Prose? became more and more pressing, more and more insoluble. He decided, at last, to appeal to the public upon it;—got ready, in the late autumn, a small select Volume of his verses; and was ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... mystery, and remains so to the last. We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye—only thus CAN we judge of him; and this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... "Paradise Lost," and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book. She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness. Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well. She remembered people's ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... contradictory figures and statements, the deficit alone came out clearly. M. de Brienne promised important economies, the Assembly voted a loan: they were not willing to accept the responsibility of the important reforms demanded by the king. The speeches were long and vague, the objections endless. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... old man was exceedingly troubled, and bewailed the misery of those licentious times, and seemed to wonder (save that the times were such) that any should write, or be permitted to publish any error so contradictory to truth, and the doctrine of the Church of England, established (as he truly said) by clear evidence of Scripture, and the just and supreme power of this nation, both sacred and civil. I name not the books, nor their authors, which are ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... This leaning toward individual caricature nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail. Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of hair, grew out of the contradictory effort to restrain and render uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... expositions—especially as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work,—a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former views ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... regarded as a peculiarly interesting portion of scripture: a blessing being promised those who read, hear, and keep the things which are written therein. It has been subjected to so many contradictory interpretations, that any attempt to comprehend its meaning is often regarded with distrust; and the impression has become very prevalent, that it is a "sealed book,"—that its meaning is so hidden in unintelligible symbols, that very little can be known ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... support of anything that is at variance with uniform experience,[10] will be rejected at once by all sound reasoners. Let us then consider what sort of a story it is that is proposed to our acceptance. How grossly contradictory are the reports of the different authorities, I have already remarked: but consider, by itself, the story told by any one of them; it carries an air of fiction and romance on the very face of it. All the events are great, and splendid, and marvellous;[11] great ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... training has also so much. One cultivated and honest man has an enthusiastic and most real love and enjoyment of Gothic architecture, and an absolute hatred for that of the classic revival; another man, equally cultivated and honest, has tastes which are the logical contradictory of these. No one can doubt the ability of Byron, or of Sheridan; yet each of them thought very little of Shakspeare. The question is, What suits you? You may have the strongest conviction that you ought to like an author; you may be ashamed to confess that you don't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... lay thus busied with contradictory thoughts and feelings, the soldier who stood sentinel upon his quarters announced to the Marquis that two persons desired to speak with ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... first reached us through the newspapers was meagre and contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother left us no room for doubt. The sickness was in the city. The hospitals were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the stricken place by every steamboat. The unsettled state ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a few contradictory dates and statements in this precious document, and for the occasional flights of a pious imagination in the biographer or his subject, we arrive at the following historical basis: Rahere was a man of humble origin, who had found his way to the Court of Henry I, where he won favour by ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... preserving the fish for the grampuses and seals;—in short, the evidence regarding both their habits, and the best mode of catching them, having in view the preservation and increase of the breed, is so completely contradictory as to leave a doubt in the mind of every one who reads it, and has no other means of forming an opinion. I will endeavour to show in some instances which of the testimonies is correct, and it will be for my ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gathering, where all were in some degree noble, the distinctions drawn by the boys themselves between lineage and wealth, political prestige and the quiet conservatism of lofty birth, were so arbitrary, so contradictory, so innately Russian, that the very masters, who, from Becker down, were German, did not pretend to understand the system, but blindly followed the lead of the scholars and their truculent head. And, to those who ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped away the characteristics which mark a special era; what is there essentially and everlastingly good—in the true sense "classic"—in virtue of which these particular writers renew for themselves with every generation ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... they had received of the state of this country, had been so contradictory, that no opinion could be formed as to the real condition, or the number of its inhabitants. They had been told that the sheik's soldiers were a few ragged negroes, armed with spears, who lived ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... making, from which the distinctive Lutheran doctrines were eliminated. And in order to conciliate the protesting conservatives, the General Synod in the same year passed the resolution, adopted 1856 by the Pittsburgh Synod, which served the contradictory purposes of condemning Lutheran doctrines plainly taught in the Augustana, and, at the same time, acquitting the Confession of harboring these doctrines. Thus the General Synod, though unwilling to commit herself to the Platform as ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a projected thought of scientific content; ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and perhaps I can more graphically set J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks before my readers by a few incidents which show his contradictory characteristics in action than by verbal diagrams, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... historians, whose records contain nearly all the particulars of the early life of Caesar which are now known, give somewhat contradictory accounts of the adventures which befell him during his subsequent wanderings. They relate, in general, the same incidents, but in such different connections, that the precise chronological order of the events which occurred can not ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... proper knowledge of this little pronoun it, many grammarians have been greatly puzzled how to dispose of it, or how to account for its multiform, and, seemingly, contradictory characters. It is in great demand by writers of every description. They use it without ceremony; either in the nominative or objective case; either to represent one person or thing, or more than one. It is applied to nouns in the ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... puzzled by some current English slang. One of the passenger prisoners—the hero of the kerosene porridge—was known among us as the "hot-air merchant." This was simple enough, but when we said he also suffered from cold feet, the Spanish Captain admitted defeat. Such a contradictory combination seemed inconceivable. "If a man were full of hot air, how could he have cold feet?" he said. Lieutenant Rose, however, was au fait with the latest English slang, and always used ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... an—undertaker's pathos is better than none at all—he was not a single-minded aspirant to our social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes, was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the man's nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man who gives frequent and bigger dinners, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which seem to imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed,—a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the inconsistencies hitherto observed in the religion of the ancients will disappear so soon as we obtain a clearer knowledge of their chronology; and events which now seem contradictory will be satisfactorily explained when placed in their proper order with regard to date. Religion, like everything else, is constantly shifting its position to accommodate itself to the changed mental conditions of its adherents; hence, ideas which at any given time in the past were perfectly ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... back Eleanor refused to be serious about anything. The mischievous, contradictory, incalculable little devil that always lurked in her took full possession. She teased Quin, and laughed at him, leading him on one minute and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... the honour of the family, and overtopping his elder brother. He had a natural ductility of mind, without much warmth of affection, or elevation of sentiment; and therefore readily complied with every variety of caprice; patiently endured contradictory reproofs; heard false accusations without pain, and opprobrious reproaches without reply; laughed obstreperously at the ninetieth repetition of a joke; asked questions about the universal decay of trade; admired the strength of those heads by which the price of stocks ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... spectacular pageantry, nor as hymners of the achievements of the principal actors in the story, but as participants. They heard unwonted accents from these actors and saw them behave in conduct which from moment to moment appeared strangely contradictory. There were mutterings of popular discontent, which, under threats, gave way to jubilant acclamation in the first great scenes in the beginning of the opera. There were alternate mockeries and adulations in the next scene in which the people figured; ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's 'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter? It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his Excellency's ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... his time and country, but truthful quite beyond the limits of a mere negative virtue. But he was also, what seems almost incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness, excessively self-conscious and morally attitudinising, a thin-skinned poseur. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory characteristics, to become what he wished to appear, to pose as what he was, to make himself up (if I may say so) as himself, to intensify what he recognised as his main characteristics and efface all his other ones, now became to Alfieri a sort of unconscious ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... one of the most prolific and popular novel and playwrights now living in Germany. As to his last work, Die Ritter vom Geiste (The Knights of the Spirit), of which only the first volume has been published, the critics entertain the most contradictory opinions. Some exclaim at its great length, which indeed is rather terrific: there are to be nine books, and the first occupies the whole of the first volume. Others are charmed with the skill with which the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Rome, as I write, I look back through forty years of worldly changes to behold Keats's dear image again in memory. It seems as if he should be living with me now, inasmuch as I never could understand his strange and contradictory death, his falling away so suddenly from health and strength. He had that fine compactness of person which we regard as the promise of longevity, and no mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling. I cannot summon a sufficient reason why in one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and riveted ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Great care was used in apportioning the parts, for there was no disposition to let anybody win but the Americans. Seesaw Simpson was usually made commander-in-chief of the British army, and a limp and uncertain one he was, capable, with his contradictory orders and his fondness for the extreme rear, of leading any regiment to an inglorious death. Sometimes the long-suffering house was a log hut, and the brave settlers defeated a band of hostile Indians, or occasionally were massacred by them; but in either case the Simpson ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Few Biblical characters manifested such contradictory elements of character. Early in life he manifested an earnest, conscientious and religious spirit. He was prayerful and sought above all else wisdom and that for the good reason that he might be able to ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often apparently insincere—still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger's legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Saul began to talk of the document left by his ancestor, among the many eyes looking at him two pairs sparkled passionately, with, however, quite contradictory sentiments. They were the eyes of the melamed, who laughed softly and maliciously, and the eyes of Meir who drew himself up in his chair and looked into his grandfather's face with ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... but universally to all men, "Go therefore and tell all nations, baptising them," &c. Matt. xxviii. 19. "Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," Mark xvi. 15. Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God, he will have all saved, and not all, how can this stand together? be secure then, believe, trust in him, hope well and be saved. Yea, that's the main matter, how shall I believe or discern my security from carnal presumption? my faith is weak and faint, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... turned to the young man and gave him, in the excitement of her triumph, a look in which mischief was mingled with an expression of love. Their brows cleared, joy flushed each agitated face, and a thousand contradictory thoughts rose in their hearts. Madame du Gua noted in that one look far more of love than of pity in Mademoiselle de Verneuil's intervention; and she was right. The handsome creature blushed beneath the other ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... vain. Many an expelled man, more unjustly treated than Selwyn, has talked of appeal in vain. Appeal to whom? To what? Appeal against men who never acknowledge themselves wrong, and who, to maintain that they are right, will listen to evidence which they can see is contradictory, and which they know to be worthless! An appeal from an Oxford decision is as hopeless in the present day as it was in Selwyn's. He wisely left it alone, but less wisely insisted on reappearing in Oxford, against the advice of all his friends, whose characters were lost if ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... at once enchanted and cast down; radiant with joy, and filled with sorrow; in a seventh heaven of ecstasy, and in the depths of despair. He laughed and he wept alternately, swayed by the most tumultuous and contradictory emotions. The intense happiness of at last knowing himself beloved by his adored Isabelle made him exultant and joyful, while the terrible thought that she never would be his made his heart sink within him. Little by little, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... and am not responsible for either: but people who are given to moods act as I have described; sometimes they like one person and sometimes another." Perhaps she was thinking not so much of moody natures as of those contradictory characters who have inherited the traits of very dissimilar ancestors. She wrote another novel which she herself liked much better and had great hopes of, which was lost in some miraculous way by her publisher Mr. Fields. He paid her for it what many people would consider a handsome compensation—exactly ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... number. D'you mind?' And I held out my Field Note-book, having turned over the page." (There are not many people who can say 'No' to B——.) "He didn't mind, So he wrote it down. Naturally I took care of those pages. Next day old Macassey must have remembered that he had issued two contradictory orders in the same day. Ordered me to expand and contract at the same time, like the third ventricle. And he knew that I had first-class documentary evidence, and that I guarded his autographs as though I were ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... one, and morphology was in an unsound state so long as it rested upon the mere perception of the analogies which obtain between fully formed parts. The unchecked ingenuity of speculative anatomists proved itself fully competent to spin any number of contradictory hypotheses out of the same facts, and endless morphological dreams threatened to supplant ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... she had no one particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... military movements behind the Germans' front in Belgium are contradictory and too bragmentary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Wingfield, chosen first president of the governing council in Virginia, found himself removed from office, imprisoned, and sent home by the spring of 1608, all as a result of charges brought against him that for the most part were petty and contradictory. Pettiness and contradictions, in this instance, were rooted in the miserable conditions which the colonists had to endure their first summer: famine and sickness not only demoralized the colonists but were killing them faster ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... and every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life;—to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... to make some observations on the Laws of Ireland. "In my country" (England), said he, "the laws are numerous, but then one is always found to be a key to the other. In Ireland it is just the contrary; your laws so perpetually clash with one another, and are so very contradictory, that I protest I don't understand them."—"True, my lord," cried Harwood, "that ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... to overlook this. It's mad to go on. It's mad anyway. If you knew how I've lied to myself, how I've struggled and fought and twisted to keep this back from you! And here it is, confused and grotesque and contradictory and wrong. If I could look at you and say it, I could get it right. If I could look at you—if I could see you. Give me a chance. Then I'll go away again—if you say so. I had to give you warning—it didn't ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... Nairobi the first matter to be decided was the district to be worked. The choice lay between the Sotik and the Kapeti Plains. According to the usual batch of contradictory stories in such cases, the game was said to be equally plentiful, or equally scarce, in both districts. Both had been shot over considerably of late, and, anyhow, no one could really tell us where the most game was to be found; because, as one informant explained, the game everywhere shifted so ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... in early life a prominent figure among the French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and contradictory definitions of the word romantisme that were current in the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... instance, if I held no communication with you for a year, would it not be a wonderful proof of your love to and faith in me, if you kept on writing me and telling me your joys and trials? To go back—I have been a good deal confused by the contradictory testimony of different Christians, and am driven more and more to a conviction that human beings, at the best, are very fallible. We must get our light directly from on high. At the same time we influence each other for right or for wrong, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... impossible to a person who had a really good heart and a gentle nature. The manners of a young man of fashion who keeps his hat on when speaking to a lady, who would smoke in her face, and would appear indifferent to her comfort at a supper-table, who would be contradictory and neglectful—such manners would have been impossible to Thomas or John Carlyle, reared as they were in the humblest poverty. It was the "London swell" who dared to be rude in their ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the one hand you are annihilated as an individual; on the other, you are and remain everything. That is what I meant when I said that after your death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to find a more precise answer to your question and at the same time be brief. The answer is contradictory, I admit; but it is so simply because your life is in time, and the immortal part of you in eternity. You may put the matter thus: Your immortal part is something that does not last in time and yet is indestructible; but there you have another contradiction! ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon." Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, "Take me to her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, "I don't know her. I ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... this book is to set out the relation between explanations and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show exactly why Bergson must use self-contradictory terms if the explanation of reality which he offers is to ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... the conduct of our priests in many other points, makes freethinking unavoidable; for some of them own, that the doctrines of the Church are contradictory to one another, as well as to reason; which I thus prove: Dr. Sacheverell says in his speech at his trial, That by abandoning passive obedience we must render ourselves the most inconsistent Church in the world: Now 'tis plain, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... our eyes to see the unworthy means employed by sacerdotal policy to stifle the dawning reason of men. During their infancy they are taught tales which are ridiculous, impertinent, contradictory, and criminal, and to these they are enjoined to pay respect. They are gradually impregnated with inconceivable mysteries that are announced as sacred truths, and they are accustomed to contemplate phantoms before which they habitually tremble. In ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... conditions for telescopic observation. At such times there is revealed to the astronomer a surface which is covered with an amazing number of shadings and markings which as yet have been incompletely interpreted. The faint nature of these indications has led to very contradictory statements as to their form; no two maps which have been drawn agree except in their generalities. There is reason to believe that Mars has an atmosphere; this is shown by the fact that in the appropriate ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... winter of the King's execution, and the long frost, when he, Reuben, was last in London. His evidence was confused and confusing; and he drew upon himself much good-natured ridicule from the junior who opened the case. Out of various muddle-headed answers and contradictory statements the facts of Lord Fareham's unexpected appearance at the Manor Moat, his account of his lady's illness, and his hurried departure, carrying the young madam with him on horseback, were elicited, and the story of the ruse by which Mrs. Angela Kirkland had ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of exhaustion and depravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it back from this twofold departure. But how can the cultivation of the fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten a spring and loose it; and if it cannot produce this double effect, how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... ignorant, and it is only from the arrieros, or muleteers, and the correos, or runners, that any knowledge of this kind can be obtained, and then only in a very confused form, and with most preposterous and contradictory estimates of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... know of whom you have borrowed this new spirit. And yet the seeds of it must be in your heart, or it could not all at once shew itself so rampant. It would be doing Mr. Solmes a spite to wish him such a shy, un-shy girl; another of your contradictory qualities—I leave you to make out what I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... title of Pater Patriae. This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of homespun for the habit ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is composed of the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... "The contradictory views in which woman is represented are as pitiful as varied. While the Magnificat to the Virgin is chanted in all our cathedrals round the globe on each returning Sabbath day, and her motherhood extolled ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... weighted under some grievous responsibility, and this night, back there at Tuxtla, she had been true to it. And whatever it was, it exacted imperatively that no Confederate aid should reach Maximilian. Such was Napoleon's wish, however contradictory to official instructions. But the marshal was sufficiently a disciple of the little Napoleonic statecraft to beware of meddling. He fretted under methods whereby the whisper of the Sphinx reached him through private ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... like ordinary men; not that they are of the common mould, but seem so because their uncommon qualities are not then called forth. Superiority requires an occasion. The common man is helpless in an emergency: assailed by contradictory suggestions, or confused by his incapacity, he cannot see his way. The hour of emergency finds a hero calm and strong, and strong because calm and clear-sighted; he sees what can be done, and does it. This is often a thing of great simplicity, so that we marvel others did not see it. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... in dealing with the Bible so superior! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are, because Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. But ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... candle again, and went away hastily to her room. She said to herself that she was keeping Fletcher up, and that this was unkind. But, as a matter of fact, she was not thinking about Fletcher. There had sprung up in her soul a fear which was twofold and contradictory. If one of those alarms was justified, then the other would be fallacious; and yet the existence of the one doubled the force of the other. One of these elements of fear—the contradiction, the new terror—was ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a fighting man," retorted the young minx with no contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a red-headed person: all that I know ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... denying the naturalness of his goatherds and fishermen, in a word, his genuineness. Mahaffy wavers between two statements, that the Idylls are an affectation for Alexandria, and sincere for Sicily. The two statements are by no means contradictory. Much the same thing is true of Canticles, the Biblical Song of Songs. It is unreasonable for anyone who has seen or read about a Palestinian spring, with its unique beauty of flower and bird and blossom, to imagine that the author of Canticles ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... degree sanction the principle that man could hold property in man; that the slaves were our equals by creation, and for their salvation, equally with ours, did Christ leave the right hand of the Father to suffer on the cross. I told them that contradictory as it might seem to them, the man who was now paying money for slaves, had such a detestation of the system, that he deemed it a duty to abstain from eating or wearing any of the products of slavery. This seemed to them ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... differences has reference to the nature of the eternal or self-existing substance. Both theories agree that there is such a substance; but on the question whether this substance be mental or material, the two theories give contradictory answers, and logically so. For, if mind as we directly know it (namely, in ourselves) is taken to be a cause of motion, within our experience mind is accredited with priority; and hence the inference that elsewhere, or universally, mind is prior to motion. Furthermore, as motion cannot take ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... builder left it not only the most lofty in England then and since, but in actual effect the most lofty in the world. This is claimed in spite of its 404 feet being exceeded by Amiens (422 feet), and Strasburg (488 feet), and although it might appear special pleading to urge such a theory against contradictory facts, yet since at Amiens the nave roof is 208 feet high, against the 115 feet of Salisbury, it is obvious that the apparent height of the latter exceeds its French rival. At Strasburg the excess of elaboration in the ornament is detrimental ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... bread and brown bread; on the other hand, the flours, mixed with bran, made a brownish, doughy, and badly risen bread, and it was therefore concluded that the bran, by its color, produced this inferior bread. From this error, accepted as a truth, the most contradictory opinions of the most opposite processes have arisen, which are repeated at the present day in the art of separating as completely as possible all the tissues of the wheat, and of extracting from the grain only 70 per cent of flour fit for making white bread. It is, however, difficult for the observer ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... espoused the same sentiments.—Lord Kaims, a Scottish writer of great reputation, whose authority in this case ought to have the more weight, as his countrymen have not the most worthy ideas of liberty, speaking of the feudal law, says, "A constitution so contradictory to all the principles which govern mankind, can never be brought about, one should imagine, but by foreign conquest or native usurpations." Brit. Ant. p. 2.—Rousseau speaking of the same system, calls it, "That most iniquitous ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... any notice of it. Besides he knew nothing of Frau Sabine except her bare neck and arms, and though they were pleasing enough, they did not justify his coming to a definite opinion about her. However, he was conscious; of a kindly feeling towards her: and in a contradictory spirit he was especially grateful to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... [Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain] In this naval dialogue, perhaps the first example of sailor's language exhibited on the stage, there are, as I have been told by a skilful narrator, some inaccuracies and contradictory orders. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... bring against Mr. Darwin's views. Everyone who has considered the matter carefully will be able to ferret out as many more "difficulties;" but he will also, I believe, fail as completely as they appear to me to have done, in bringing forward any fact which is really contradictory of Mr. Darwin's views. Occasionally, too, their objections and criticisms are based upon errors of their own. As, for example, when Mr. Mivart and the Quarterly Reviewer insist upon the resemblances between the eyes of Cephalopoda and Vertebrata, quite forgetting that there are striking and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... themselves their own mother gave instructions that they were to do everything that I told them, and not to tear their clothes or make themselves untidy. These directions, even to myself, at the time, appeared contradictory. But I said nothing. And out into the wilds ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... former doctrine, that that God whose words they are, is able to make a reconciliation and most sweet and harmonious agreement with all the sayings therein, how obscure, cross, dark, and contradictory soever they seem to thee. To understand all mysteries, to have all knowledge, to be able to comprehend with all saints, is a great work; enough to crush the spirit, and to stretch the strings of the most capacious, widened soul that breatheth on this side glory, be ...
— Miscellaneous Pieces • John Bunyan
... think it answers any of the questions debated in our last conversation at all satisfactorily: the right one man has to enslave another, he has not the hardihood to assert; but in the reasons he adduces to defend that act of injustice, the contradictory statements he makes appear to me to refute each other. He says, that to the continental European protesting against the abstract iniquity of slavery, his answer would be, 'the slaves are infinitely better off than half the continental ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... was on her back. In her gestures he glimpsed a new world. He had been secretly scorning the affairs of the luncheon and all that it implied, and he had been secretly scorning himself for his pitiful lack of brilliancy at the luncheon. These two somewhat contradictory sentiments were suddenly shrivelled in the fire of his ambition which had flared up anew at contact with a spark. And the spark was the sight of the girl's costly fur coat. He must have a costly fur coat, and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... examining the clever little craft beside which their own looked cumbersome, though sea-worthy, and giving such a sad mixture of information that in the end Jack was glad he had his reliable charts to fall back on, since one man's account seemed to be exactly contradictory in comparison with the ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... necessary and indispensable. Under that placid exterior he conceals, I believe, a boundless ambition, and hatred and jealousy lurk under his professions of esteem and political attachment. His is one of those contradictory characters, containing in it so much of mixed good and evil, that it is difficult to strike an accurate balance between the two, and the acts of his political life are of a corresponding description, of questionable utility ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... staggered by two apparently contradictory facts—it was a fine sermon, yet every idea may be ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... all contradictory. In one breath, on the self-abnegation principle, he would say, 'I don't know any thing about paintings;' in the next breath, his overweening egotism would make him loudly proclaim: 'There never was but one painter in this world, and his name is Hockskins; he lives in my town, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work,—a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... queer, baffling, contradictory face altogether. Only one thing about it was certain, and that was written so plainly thereon that even a child ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... his coadjutors were all influenced by a Spanish proverb, which, though contradictory to reason and common sense, says Dubitat Augustinus, or it is contradicted by St Augustine; who, in the 9th chapter of the 21st book of his city of God, denies the possibility of the Antipodes, or that any person should be able to go from one hemisphere into the other. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... knew thenceforward that it was no easy matter to deceive them. He soon fell into despair, which he was careful to hide from such stern mentors as he imagined them to be; and the Southern temper that runs so easily through the whole gamut of mental dispositions, set him making the most contradictory resolutions. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... them," said The Man; "to me they are occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... from these imperfect and discordant manuscripts that men have to make their Greek and Hebrew Bibles. They have nothing else from which to make them. And those Greek and Hebrew Bible makers have no means of knowing which of the various and contradictory manuscripts are the best.... You must understand that the original writings from which the manuscripts now in existence originated, have perished many ages ago. It is probable that the last of them perished more than sixteen hundred years ago. We ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... see that our original statement that the relation of man to the gods was mechanical and external in the Greek conception, must at least be so far modified that it must be taken only as an expression of the central or dominant point of view, not as excluding other and even contradictory standpoints. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... never yet known or imagined such a fear. That she felt. But she had another feeling, contradictory, surely. It began to seem to her as if this fear, which was now coming upon her, had been near her for a long time, ever since the night when she knew that she was going to Africa. Had she not even expressed it ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... glaciere, through the means of a letter which he went to write. It was absurd to see this hot little man sign himself 'Dugravel, glacier,' that being the style of his profession, naturally recalling the contradictory conduct of ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... who turned, squinted horribly at the Princess, and salaamed to her with a curious and contradictory dignity, turning his fingers, covered with ...
— The Princess And The Jewel Doctor - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... hero. They are compounded of right and wrong, and such as I judged (and working men whom I am proud to number among my friends have assured me that I judged rightly) that a working man of genius would feel during the course of his self-education. These thoughts and feelings (often inconsistent and contradictory to each other), stupid or careless, or ill-willed persons, have represented as my own opinions, having, as it seems to me, turned the book upside down before they began to read it. I am bound to pay the working men, and their organs in the press, the compliment of saying ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the queer sicht for a guid omen. It's unco strange hoo fowk 'll mix up God an' chance, seein' there could hardly be twa mair contradictory ideas! I min' ance hearin' a man say,'It's almost ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... fluid, is a conception that has been entertained as a working hypothesis, and much experimental and analytical work has been done to test its correctness. This work has been so slightly related to practical ophthalmology, and so contradictory in its results that alterations in the fluids can only be regarded as a possible etiologic factor. Glaucoma secondary to intra-ocular hemorrhage, operations on the lens or its capsule, or severe nutritional disturbance may be ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... people of all ages are muddled about the relationship between health and diet. Their confusions have created a profitable market for health-related information. And equally, their confusions have been created by books, magazine articles, and TV news features. This avalanche of data is highly contradictory. In fact, one reason I found it hard to make myself write my own book is that I wondered if my book too would become just another part ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... her, dismayed. All his confused contradictory impressions assumed a new aspect at this announcement; and to hide his surprise he added lightly: "Ah—then you will ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... furious cannonade from their guns. This daring operation placed him in the middle of the Italian ironclads, which, well directed, could have closed round him and destroyed him, but they were not directed either well nor ill—they were not directed at all. Persano put up contradictory signals, most of which were not seen, and those which were seen meant nothing. The plan followed by Admiral Tegethoff may be best described in his own words: 'It was hard to make out friend from foe, so I ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... others close in behind. Sympathy in the grandstand was beginning to turn; everybody appreciates pluck. The spectators, however, knew him to be a novice, and many supposed that he had lost his head; so when he passed the grandstand on the first lap, any amount of contradictory advice ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... purpose, that these propositions be capable of proof, or even that, by arguments drawn from the light of nature, they can be made out to be probable; it is enough that we are able to say concerning them, that they are not so violently improbable, so contradictory to what we already believe of the divine power and character, that either the propositions themselves, or facts strictly connected with the propositions (and therefore no further improbable than they are improbable), ought to be rejected at first sight, and to be rejected by whatever strength ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... of law, whatever may have been their origin, and in the year 528, appointed ten jurisconsults, among whom was the celebrated Tribonian, to select and arrange the imperial constitutions, leaving out what was obsolete or useless or contradictory, and to make such alterations as the circumstances required. This was called the Code, divided into twelve books, and comprising the constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. This was published in fourteen months ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Government post to the army at such a time, and who had brought his golf clubs out to America? Her imagination for a moment revolved around the problem of his apparently uninteresting and yet, in some respects, contradictory personality. Was it really her fancy or had she, every now and then, detected behind that flamboyant manner traces of something deeper and more serious, something which seemed to indicate a life and aims of which nothing appeared upon the surface? She clasped her ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was contradictory. But Jean herself was somewhat contradictory, and the place fitted her. Here was where she spent those hours when her absence from the Bar Nothing was left unexplained to any one save Lite. Here was where she drew into her shell, when her Uncle Carl made her feel more than usually ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... sent reinforcements to his generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as the Duke of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his runaway king to France, as was involved in a maze of contradictory designs, the one clear principle of which was the future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis XIV, who had reasons of his own for wishing to keep the armies of William locked up in Ireland, was altogether willing to advise and help a continuance of hostilities in that country. James seems ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... come to stay and seemed to think we were expecting them. They said the young woman, whom they call Cousin Dink, had sent them. I have tried to question them, but their answers are confused and contradictory. I felt that perhaps it was better to wait for you and see what ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... which had been "fully explained" to me before I went to Pulaski, and "properly appreciated," instead of upon what I had gathered from General Thomas's orders to Stanley and subsequent orders to me about fighting Hood at Pulaski, absolutely contradictory to that stated in his report, "without risking a general engagement," and his assent to my radically different suggestions made after I assumed command at Pulaski, as stated in my report. It is not incumbent upon me to try ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... write this in his book also, and, ordering him to read what he had written, soon convinced him how contradictory his wishes had been. In the winter, he wished it to be always winter; in the spring, he wished for a continuance of that season; in the summer, he wished it never to depart; and when autumn came, it afforded him ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... liberty. It will have Reform: it will not have revolution: it will destroy political abuses: it will not suffer the rights of property to be assailed: it will preserve, in spite of themselves, those who are assailing it, from the right and from the left, with contradictory accusations: it will be a daysman between them: it will lay its hand upon them both: it will not suffer them to tear each other in pieces. While that great party continues unbroken, as it now is unbroken, I shall not relinquish the hope that this ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of our academic school of painters are grouped. There is George de Forest Brush, the painter of the "Boston Madonna", in some of his earlier illustrative canvases and a very fine pre-Raphaelite "Andromeda". Brush is so contradictory at times that this small group is quite insufficient to do him full justice. Horatio Walker clings persistently to his conviction of the supremacy of the older methods, without giving any indication ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... they were free from the whims and foibles of womankind,—and sometimes of man-kind,—of all ages. They were, doubtless, contradictory and impulsive at times; they could scold and they could gossip. We believe that they laughed sometimes, in the midst of dire want and anxiety, and we know that they prayed with sincerity and trust. They bore children gladly and ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... studious; she had no one particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... and—I suppose on account of that same perversity—I felt no surprise whatever when he assured me that I had faithfully described to him the arch-pirate who had left him and his crew to perish in the flames. Indeed, in my then contradictory state of mind I should have been disappointed had he said otherwise. The man's conduct—his stealthy but searching scrutiny of the ship; his endeavour, as I regarded it, to mislead us with his broken English; and his excessive curiosity, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... meaning of the term; for their education, native sense and principles, had a leaning to order, good government, and the dignity of the country; but as factions became fiercer, and names got to be confounded and contradictory, the landed branch settled down into what they thought were American, and the commercial branch into what might properly be termed English Federalists. We do not mean that the father of John intended to be untrue ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... incarcerated only to learn that she had escaped months before, and that the German officer had disappeared at the same time. From there on the stories of the chiefs and the warriors whom he quizzed, were vague and often contradictory. Even the direction that the fugitives had taken Tarzan could only guess at by piecing together bits of fragmentary ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the inconsistencies hitherto observed in the religion of the ancients will disappear so soon as we obtain a clearer knowledge of their chronology; and events which now seem contradictory will be satisfactorily explained when placed in their proper order with regard to date. Religion, like everything else, is constantly shifting its position to accommodate itself to the changed mental conditions of its adherents; ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... political conservatism—and if every day increases the army of their avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us—I was about to say by a law of intellectual symbiosis—that they are neither irreconcilable with, nor contradictory to, each other. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... not only an interesting group of the admiral's associates, but also the record of a conversation concerning him, under his own roof, transmitted by one of the parties to it; particularly instructive, because showing the contradictory traits which illustrated his character, and the impression made by him upon his contemporaries and intimates,—men who had seen him upon all kinds of occasions, both great and small. It corroborates, too, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... which he was asked to observe, the mouth of the Mississippi. When he perceived his mistake, and entreated M. de Beaujeu to turn back, the latter would no longer consent. La Sale, seeing that he could make no impression upon the contradictory mind of his companion, decided to disembark his men and his provisions in the Bay of St. Bernard. Yet, in this very last act, Beaujeu manifested an amount of culpable ill-will, which did as little honour to his judgment as to his patriotism. Not only was ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... result, namely society. Simple or complex, stable or unstable, barbarous or civilized, this society contains within itself its explanations of its being. Strange as a social structure may be, it can be explained; also its institutions, however contradictory. Neither prosperity, nor decline, nor despotism, nor freedom, is the result of a throw of the dice, of luck or an unexpected turn of events caused by rash men. They are conditions we must live with. In any event, it is useful to understand them, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... His bete noir extravagance. We are not saved by syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at one and the same moment of time self-contradictory propositions. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... essentials, by something very much more like instinct. And it is to this instinct which, by the nature of the case, is simple and infallible, that we ought to look to tell us what is good, and not to our reason, which, as you admit yourself, can only land us in contradictory judgments. I know, of course, that you have a ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... all of them wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions. To one who is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State, property, religion, the Church, the ancient regime, the Revolution, the present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the parliament. Certainly the Right would like to see the First Consul ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... did not understand in what way I had displeased her, for we always had met amicably before, I seized upon this sign of displeasure on her part as explanatory, perhaps, of the curtness and show of contradictory feelings on the part of her dependent niece. Yet why should the old woman frown on me? I had been told more than once that she regarded me with great favour. Had I unwittingly done something to displease her, or had the game of cards she had just ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... despite the ample opportunity he enjoyed for forming definite conclusions, Gerrard remained balanced between two contradictory opinions, and he was still much tumbled up and down in his mind when he landed and fell into the eminently bracing company of Charteris. British troops and siege-guns—not now to be spared from Granthistan—had come and ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... summer the water is hotter and more plentiful than in winter. The former circumstance I should have expected, from the less mixture, during the dry season, of cold water; but the latter statement appears very strange and contradictory. The periodical increase during the summer, when rain never falls, can, I think, only be accounted for by the melting of the snow: yet the mountains which are covered by snow during that season, are three or four leagues ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... pursuit. Do you imagine that this must needs give birth to sects, and thus destroy all free and reciprocal intercourse in religion? It is true, indeed, in contemplation, that everything which is separated into various parts and embraced in different divisions, must be opposed and contradictory to itself; but consider, I pray you, how Life is manifested in a great variety of forms, how the most hostile elements seek out one another here, and, for this very reason, what we separate in contemplation all flows together in ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... "craving for a 'faith'," his heart being with Paul and John, though his head was with Spinoza. In after life, speaking of his conversion to Christianity, he often repeated—He did not believe in the Trinity, because to him at that time, the belief seemed contradictory to reason and scripture. "What care I," said he, "for Rabbi Paul, or Rabbi John, if they be opposed to moral sense." This was going a step beyond the Socinians, but this step was the means of his being ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... was chiefly some demonstration on the animal's part that he had feared. A snort, a hoof-beat, a whinny would betray him, and very liable was the animal to any of these expressions. One realizes how unnecessary is speech for the exposition of opinion when brought into contradictory relations with the horse which one rides or drives. All day had this animal snorted his doubts of his master's sanity; all day had he protested against these aimless, fruitless rambles; all day had he held back with a high head and a ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Cycle is the process by which information is acquired, converted into intelligence, and made available to policymakers. Information is raw data from any source, data that may be fragmentary, contradictory, unreliable, ambiguous, deceptive, or wrong. Intelligence is information that has been collected, integrated, evaluated, analyzed, and interpreted. Finished intelligence is the final product of the Intelligence Cycle ready to be delivered to ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... society. He who, in a proper state of things, would have been the representative of living spiritual principles, is a mere supernumerary. He makes signs of the cross, pronounces accustomed formulas, but he never once thinks of examining into the strange and contradictory relations existing between the husband, forced by his very being into the Future, and the wife, fettered by the conventions and chains of the Past. Neither does he study, with an eye enlightened by philanthropy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... told that the Society is aiming at the liberation of all the slaves, and then that it has no design of attempting either partial or general emancipation: so contradictory are its assurances! It is manifest that it does not mean to touch the question of slavery; and hence the imperious necessity of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... with suburban life—in other words, a faint resurrection of the original English mind in him. He enjoyed and he grew akin to this Saxon prosperity; he learned to recognise it as manifested in the various prospects of the weald and the wold, and he loved this medley of contradictory aspects —the spires of the village churches, the porches of the villas, the rich farmhouses and their elm trees, the orchards jammed between masses of chalk, the shepherds seen against the sky of the Downs. It is true that he felt that this country was alien to him, but he was not individually ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... logic in dealing with the Bible so superior! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are, because Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. But that is ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... our lives, and leave no leisure to enjoy the goods of fortune:—still tost on the billows of passion, hurried from care to care the whole time of our existence here, is one continued scene of restlessness and variated disquiet.—Strange propensity in man!—even nature in us seems contradictory to herself!—we wish long life, yet shorten it by our own anxieties;—nothing is so dreadful as death, yet we hasten his approach by our intemperance and irregularity, and, what is more, we know all this, yet still run on ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... the walls of the city, very extraordinary and apparently contradictory accounts are given by the various ancient authors who described them. Some make them seventy-five and others two or three hundred feet high. There have been many discussions in respect to the comparative credibility of these several statements, and some ingenious ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... which these irreconcileable discrepancies are? For my own part, I freely renew in this place the challenge I gave in my IIIrd Sermon[18]. Let any one of these Gentlemen publicly and definitely lay his finger on one or more of these contradictory statements in the Gospels, during term-time; and within a week I hereby undertake publicly to refute him in the Divinity School of this University: and our peers ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "Poor man! he is not made for this world." Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... would that make of this provision? Here they have provided that the law establishing slavery shall exist, that the property of the master in him shall be recognized as it is there established by law; and then the gentleman supposes that to be exactly contradictory, to refer to the common law as furnishing the rule of decision, which common law says there can be no property, as he interprets it, in man, and that when trover was brought for ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here. However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of Mr. Johnson were anomalous and in many respects contradictory. By birth he belonged to that large class in the South known as "poor whites,"—a class scarcely less despised by the slave-holding aristocracy than were the human chattels themselves. Born in North Carolina, and bred to the trade of a tailor, he reached ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... failure to overcome any "inexorable laws and indestructible properties of matter," but is implied in the inexorable laws of thought—in that eternal right reason which makes it impossible for Deity to do what is self-contradictory or absurd. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the feverish tumult of feelings excited during the two or three first days, Mrs. Butler thought her sister's manner was completely contradictory of the desponding tone which pervaded her correspondence. She was moved to tears, indeed, by the sight of her father's grave, marked by a modest stone recording his piety and integrity; but lighter impressions and associations had ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... not sleep that night My brain was in a whirl from the excitement of this new adventure. In that adventure every circumstance was one of the most impressive character; and at the same time every thing was contradictory and bewildering to such an extent that I did not know whether to congratulate myself or not, whether to rejoice or lament. I might rejoice at finding the Lady of the Ice; but my joy was modified by the thought that I found her meditating flight with another man. I had saved ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... his second son his heir and successor. At this point Du Clercq's manuscript is broken off abruptly and the remainder of his conjectures are lost to posterity. Where the text begins again, the author dismisses all this contradictory hearsay and says in his own character as veracious chronicler, "I concern myself only with what actually occurred. The dauphin gave a feast in the forest and then departed secretly to avoid ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... astonishment. In spite of the force and uniformity with which my senses were impressed by external objects, the transition I had undergone was so wild and inexplicable; all that I had performed, all that I had witnessed since my egress from the pit, were so contradictory to precedent events, that I still clung to the belief that my thoughts were confused by delirium. From these reveries I was at length recalled by the groans of the girl, who lay near ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... little overdone and that civic duties and the use of the rifle ought to be taught. Statements are made—the sort of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is no swift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out into vague qualifications and butt gently against other partially contradictory statements. There is a classification of minds—the sort of classification dear to the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the purposes of the essay and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told, accurate ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... The minds of some are so versatile, and so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, that their ideas sparkle and coruscate, they splinter every ray of light into a thousand colours, and produce all kinds of strange juxtapositions and combinations. (This exuberance has probably led to the seemingly contradictory saying that men of sentiment are generally men of humour.) No doubt their sallies would be poor and appreciated by themselves alone were they without a certain foundation, but a vast number of things are capable of affording amusement. Pleasantries ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... various spheres, claim a monopoly of employment for their members, to the exclusion of those who do not belong to their associations. Logic has something, perhaps not much, to do with political action, and it is almost inconceivable that a party can go on for long holding these two contradictory opinions. Which of them will be abandoned, ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... for having indirectly caused that great unhappiness, and at the same time so keenly resent her sympathy, which she could not easily express without speaking indignantly of Miss Starbrow—this seemed so strange, so almost incongruous and contradictory, that if the case had not been so sad she would have burst into a laugh. As it was she only burst into tears, and threw her arms round ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... been the most ancient, and the chromatic and diatonic gradually superseding it. In Plato, Aristotle and many of the Greek writers, especially in Athenaeus, much is said about the characteristic expression of the different modes, but as they are mutually contradictory, one saying of a given mode that it is bold and manly, while another calls it feeble and enervating, we may leave this for the antiquarians to settle ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... shy, and not merely negatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him to endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Mr. Proctor of Wellington, near Newcastle (about 1840), and found to his surprise that Mr. Proctor registered on occasion, day by day, for many years, precisely the same phenomena as those which had vexed the Wesleys. {0b} Various contradictory and mutually exclusive theories of these affairs have been advanced. Not one hypothesis satisfies the friends of the others: not one bears examination. The present writer has no theory, except the theory that these experiences (or these ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Cases of Conscience, Increase Mather says that he hears that "some have taken up a notion," that there was something contradictory between his views and those of his son, set forth in the Wonders of the Invisible World. "Tis strange that such imaginations should enter into the minds of men." He goes on to say he had read and approved of his son's book, before ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... greater because it had only been held in check. For it should be emphatically understood that in the matter of occult training it is not so much a question of what we may already seem to possess, but of carefully and regularly practicing what we need. Contradictory as this phrase may appear, it is nevertheless true that though life may have trained us to this or to that, the qualities to serve us in occult training are those that we have acquired for ourselves. Should life have ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... never stopped running until they were stopped by the river. That they were both capable of deliberately bearing false witness needs no other proof than that furnished by themselves—by Cox in the contradictory statements made in his two official reports of the Battle of Franklin, and by Scofield in his false map of Spring Hill, which he claimed was drawn to scale, but which he had forged to uphold his claim for extraordinary services rendered by ...
— The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee • John K. Shellenberger
... are to receive the Constitution as the text, and then to lay down in its margin the contradictory commentaries which have been, and which maybe, made by different States, the whole page would be a polyglot indeed. It would speak with as many tongues as the builders of Babel, and in dialects as much confused, and mutually as unintelligible. The very instance now before us presents ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... and nearing the Russian frontier. Everywhere one heard curses on Bonaparte, "the enemy of mankind." Militiamen and recruits were being enrolled in the villages, and from the seat of war came contradictory news, false as usual and therefore variously interpreted. The life of old Prince Bolkonski, Prince Andrew, and Princess Mary had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the most favourable side to attack, but the Duke of Burgundy, who nominally had the supreme command, and who was jealous of Vendome's reputation, countermanded this order; alleging that an impassable morass separated the two armies in that quarter. Those contradictory orders produced indecision in the French lines, and Marlborough, divining its cause, instantly took advantage of it. Judging with reason that the real attack of the enemy would be made on his left by their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... for the officers who have worked upon the case and for the captain or inspector who has directed their efforts, takes all the papers and tabulates all their information. His practiced eye shows him at once that a large part is valueless, much is contradictory, and all needs careful elaboration. A winnowing process occurs then and there; and the officers probably receive a "special detail" from headquarters and thereafter take their orders from the prosecutor himself. The ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... idle, however, to examine these memorable words as we should examine a chapter of Aristotle or of Hobbes. Such words are to be considered, not as words, but as deeds. If they effect that which they are intended to effect, they are rational, though they may be contradictory. It they fail of attaining their end, they are absurd, though they carry demonstration with them. Logic admits of no compromise. The essense of politics is compromise. It is therefore not strange that some of the most important ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... settlers from the Free States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... accept, it asserted the Lord's Body to be incapable of sin or corruption, and only subject to suffering by the voluntary exercise of His divine power. While the accusations against Justinian in John of Nikiu and Nicetius of Trier are contradictory to each other, and make it clear that he did not accept the opinion of Julian of Halicarnassus, they may serve to illustrate the confusion of thought with which these subjects were handled. The followers of Julian, whose view has here ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... support by evidence of the most cogent kind. For it is not always enough to shew that no intrinsic objections lie against the antiquity of the work in question. It may be so short, or so general in respect to its subject as to leave no room for contradictory and impossible sentences or expressions. It is not enough to shew that there were no reasons against such a literature being developed; since it is difficult to say what conditions absolutely forbid the production of a work stamped by no very ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... above, pointing upwards, is exquisitely sculptured, and deserves much attention. Dallaway mentions that there appear to have been two chantries and a brotherhood founded in this church, whose history is rather obscure, in some measure contradictory; the first he adds, "was built by Walter Burgess who in the year 1307, obtained a license to endow with 50 acres of land, a chaplain to celebrate divine service daily in the parish church of Horsham, for the souls of himself and his successors. The other was denominated ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... with its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore—and this is not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the mass—it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... address some reproaches to the field-marshal. To these the latter replied, by complaining bitterly, first, of the double and contradictory instructions which he had received, to cover Warsaw and Minsk at the same time; and second, of the false news which had been transmitted to him by ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... and fewer still will agree with Mahaffy in denying the naturalness of his goatherds and fishermen, in a word, his genuineness. Mahaffy wavers between two statements, that the Idylls are an affectation for Alexandria, and sincere for Sicily. The two statements are by no means contradictory. Much the same thing is true of Canticles, the Biblical Song of Songs. It is unreasonable for anyone who has seen or read about a Palestinian spring, with its unique beauty of flower and bird and blossom, to imagine that the author of Canticles needed or used second-hand ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... the experience, to anticipate all the embarrassments of a parliamentary government, they unwittingly committed themselves, and illegal acts are constantly resorted to, in order that the system may be upheld. The charter was bestowed ad captandum, and is a contradictory melange of inexpedient concessions and wily reservations. The conscription undermined the popularity of Napoleon, and Louis XVIII. in his charter says, "The conscription is abolished; the recruiting for the army and navy shall be settled by a law." Now the conscription is not ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... spirits, and that he was deputed to carry me to the paradise of the Ojibbeways. "But, sir," I cried in painful confusion, "there is here some great mistake. I am no Ojibbeway, but an Agnostic; the after-life of spirits is only (as one of our great teachers says) 'an hypothesis based on contradictory probabilities;' and I really must decline to accompany you to a place of which the existence is uncertain, and which, if it does anywhere exist, would be uncongenial in the extreme to a ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Mrs Smith, I want none," cried Anne. "You have asserted nothing contradictory to what Mr Elliot appeared to be some years ago. This is all in confirmation, rather, of what we used to hear and believe. I am more curious to know why he ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the feeling was even stronger, and reached its climax one Sunday when a Chinaman was stoned to death by a crowd of children returning from Sunday-school. I am offering these examples with no ethical purpose, but merely to indicate a singular contradictory condition which I do not think writers of early Californian history have fairly recorded. It is not my province to suggest any theory for these appalling exceptions to the usual good-humored lawlessness and extravagance of the rest ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... does rise the conviction that there is much in us which it is impossible should be the object of God's love. Nor need I remind you how all these difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based on the contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of providence, and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved to have been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find mythologies and religions of all types and gods of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... at least in part what is taking place around and within us. That such an intelligence could very probably be educated, always within prehuman limits or in a lesser degree than in human infancy, does not on the whole seem to me so contradictory to our actual psychological knowledge: since we may very well suppose that the animal under examination may make use of its proper faculties, as far as lies in its power, to profit by the situation for the purpose ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... Maud Fitz-Warene were announced: they had just come from the Commons; a dame and damsel full of political enthusiasm. Lady Firebrace gave critical reports and disseminated many contradictory estimates of the result; Lady Maud talked only of a speech made by Lord Milford, which from the elaborate noise she made about it, you would have supposed to have been the oration of the evening; on the contrary, it had lasted ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... what was contradictory between Captain Nemo's manifest aversion to islands and continents, and his invitation to hunt in a forest, I ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of the case all over the colonies and in any sympathetic quarter they could find in England. The seigneurs sent home a warm defence of Murray; and Murray himself sent Cramahe, a very able Swiss officer in the British Army. The home government thus had plenty of contradictory evidence before it in 1765. The result was that Murray was called home in 1766, rather in a spirit of open-minded and sympathetic inquiry into his conduct than with any idea of censuring him. He never returned ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... itself, the irrelevant uproar, becomes the motive of the fable. War and Peace, the drama of that ancient alternation, is now the subject out of which the form of the book is to grow. Not seldom, and more frequently as the book advances, the story takes this new and contradictory alignment. The centre shifts from the general play of life, neither national nor historic, and plants itself in the field of racial conflict, typified by that "sheep-worry of Europe" which followed the French Revolution. The young people immediately change their meaning. They are ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... have good intentions, or be well employed? Is his frame of mind adapted to the study of the Bible?—to make its meaning plain and welcome? What must he think of God, to search his word in quest of gross inconsistencies, and grave contradictions! Inconsistent legislation in Jehovah! Contradictory commands! Permissions at war with prohibitions! General requirements at ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... allow—but it is something which cannot be experienced. There must be points of reference—a starting point and an ending point at least. Pure Change, as is the way with "pure" anything, turns into its contradictory. Paradoxical though it may seem, it ends as static. It becomes the One and Indivisible. This, at least, was recognized by Heraclitus and is expressed by him in his figure ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... treatment transformed her, from a violent, outrageous kitten, to a well behaved cat, and it was curious to see the instantaneous effect which the voice of his preceptress produced. Cats will learn all sorts of antics, and form all sorts of contradictory attachments; young birds, puppies, rats and mice frequently being the objects. My mother-in-law had both a favourite canary and an equally beloved cat; the former lived in her bed room; and when alone, she suffered him ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... meantime, events were moving. The year 1851 was a year of anxiety and apprehension for the politicians of Plassans, and the cause which the Rougons served derived advantage from this circumstance. The most contradictory news arrived from Paris; sometimes the Republicans were in the ascendant, sometimes the Conservative party was crushing the Republic. The echoes of the squabbles which were rending the Legislative Assembly reached the depths of the provinces, now in an exaggerated, now in an attenuated ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... were complex and contradictory, flitting about and crossing each other in his mind with astounding rapidity. He wished she had not come, because his father was there, and the thought of his father would intensify his self-consciousness. He wondered ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Contradictory as it may seem, there was nothing which entertained and edified him more than the little fellow's interest in his tenantry. He had never taken any interest in them himself, but it pleased him well enough that, with ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... doubt, of agitation, of alienated feeling, if not of alienated act. All the symptoms were abroad which provide disaffection with its opportunity; and in the natural confusion which attended the revolt from the papacy, the obligations of duty, both political and religious, had become indefinite and contradictory, pointing in all directions, like the magnetic ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined, painful unbelief. To me, ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... two contradictory principles, even if she has the best intentions in the world, what is she to do? Is it to be wondered at, if many a modern mother, in this predicament, vacillates between the two? She doesn't like to punish the child and most of the time she avoids doing ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... his vacations spent at Neuilly he had twice failed to meet her, for she was almost always travelling. He knew that she was very ill, in consequence of a fall from a horse when she was thirteen, a critical moment in a girl's life; and her despairing mother, perplexed by the contradictory advice of medical men, was taking her each year to a different watering-place. Then he learnt the startling news of the sudden tragical death of that mother, who was so severe and yet so useful to her kin. She had been carried off in five days by inflammation of the lungs, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Maximilian von Wied-Neuweid, in 1832-'34, appears elsewhere in this paper. In Fremont's expedition of 1844 special and repeated allusion is made to the expertness of the Pai-Utes in signs, which is contradictory to the statement above made by correspondents. The same is mentioned regarding a band of Shoshonis met near the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and one of "Diggers," probably Chemehuevas, encountered on a tributary of the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... represented Shakspeare as the greatest borrower, plagiarist, and imitator that all time has brought forth. This, however, did not shake his faith in the poet's greatness; and to reconcile what to some would appear contradictory positions, he proposes the fact, I might say the truism, that the greatest man is not the most original, but the "most indebted" man. This, in the sense in which it is true, is saying no more than that the educated man ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... worship, refined enjoyment, cultivated companionship were all lavished upon him. But he soon tired of this, because it was an exotic thing. It was a little paradise of a very innocent kind, from which all harsh and contradictory elements had been excluded. But this mere sipping of exquisite flavours became to him a very objectless thing, because it corresponded to no real need. I believe that if at this time he had discovered his literary gifts, and had begun ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... imaginable physical disease, but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are. Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease, with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for only the carefully trained in all the requirements of diagnosis can differentiate ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... lordships my reasons for asking them to make the rule absolute. I argued that, as a press offence, our case was eminently one for a special jury; that the law of blasphemy, which had not been interpreted for a generation, was very indefinite, and a common jury might be easily misled; that as contradictory statements of the common law existed, it was highly advisable to have an authoritative judgment in a superior Court; that grave questions as to the relations of the statute and the common law might also arise; that it was manifestly unfair, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... cross and ball. On the other hand, the followers of the Bourbons, in whose company I had spent my youth, were equally disappointed at the manner in which the mass of the French people hailed this final step in the return from chaos to order. Contradictory as were their motives, the more violent spirits of both parties were united in their hatred to Napoleon, and in their fierce determination to get rid of him by any means. Hence a series of conspiracies, most of them with their base in England; and hence ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... actress who is always miscast and who is rarely able to display her fine qualities, was this contradictory "heroine," while Miss Katherine Grey, usually assigned to dark melodrama, was the white-muslin girl with the Vassar mis-label. William Lamp, as the boy who kissed, was possibly the best member of the cast, that also included ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... far-spread subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass god with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is becoming generally recognised. You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or less confused and contradictory talk on this subject—nor can you fail to notice that, in one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like discussions in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say that education ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... inhabitants of a distant continent, in the freedom of extemporaneous debate, were not framing their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... through the forest: a whole flock of bare-headed boys surrounded us. They would all be our guides; the one screamed longer than the other, and every one gave his contradictory explanation, how high the water stood, and how high it did not stand, or could stand. There was also a great difference ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... turn on the decision of Lord Palmerston. This tantalizing vision of a swift fulfilment of his prayers seemed to Philip Vaughan even less endurable than his previous apprehensions. To hear from hour to hour the contradictory chatter of irresponsible clubmen and M.P.'s was an insupportable affliction; so, at the beginning of the Session, he "paired" till Easter, and departed on one of his solitary rambles. Desiring to cut himself off ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye—only thus CAN we judge of him; and this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies. Bourgonef had ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... judged under the circumstances—she had revealed the whole to her daughter under injunctions to secrecy, which had been strictly observed while she lived, and broken now only for a brother's sake, and after a long conflict between obligations apparently contradictory. When, from her deathbed, she had welcomed Margaret as a daughter-in-law, it was in the gratitude which it was natural for a mother to feel, on finding the attachment of an only son at length appreciated ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... upon others, and I soon begin to be downcast if I have not some one to help or to be helped by. But happily He who takes away is the same as He who gives, and His great heart of affection understands our manifold and seemingly contradictory needs. Life would be intolerable if we had no one who knew us perfectly, not simply the outside part of our life, but that inside and apparently incommunicable part. Those who are least able to express themselves ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... telegraphed to Washington. Gideon Welles was a pugnacious man. His dislike for Seward was deepseated. Imagine his state of mind when it was accidently revealed to him that Seward had gone behind his back and had issued to naval officers orders which were contradictory to his own! The immediate result was an interview that same night between Seward and Welles in which, as Welles coldly admitted in after days, the Secretary of the Navy showed "some excitement." Together they went, about midnight, to the ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... months, however, and they know practically nothing of him. To-day he came home at an unusual time, letting himself in with his latchkey, and went away at once with a bag, but the accounts of the exact time are contradictory. One servant thought it was before twelve, and another insisted that it was after one. He has ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... possible for me to discriminate between these contradictory statements,—all made, moreover, by gentlemen who wrote as if each were in himself a complete horticultural encyclopaedia? Though utterly confused by them, and quite at a loss to know which plan of cultivation to adopt, yet one fact seemed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... everything. That is what I meant when I said that after your death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to find a more precise answer to your question and at the same time be brief. The answer is contradictory, I admit; but it is so simply because your life is in time, and the immortal part of you in eternity. You may put the matter thus: Your immortal part is something that does not last in time and yet is indestructible; but there you have another contradiction! ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep of the fold of Poe. But alas, she was but a woman, without money and without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable and contradictory rumors afforded. That was, after all, what she most needed—a clue. If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she would follow it to ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... about the same time, and uniformly pursued the same system, we may discover reason to suspect that they acted under the direction of some acknowledged though invisible leader. The nobility and gentry, intimidated by the hostility of their tenants, and distressed by contradictory reports, sought security within the fortifications of their castles. The only man who behaved with promptitude and resolution was Henry Spenser, the young and warlike Bishop of Norwich. In the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge, and Huntington ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... absurdum is a variety of analysis. Starting from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove, we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in various ways as reductio ad absurdum, proof per impossibile, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... comes about that the first results are often so contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots are being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives in different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and carelessly that ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same way—frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they were ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... year 1738 is more extensive, although somewhat contradictory, and exhibits a strong element of dissention. Oglethorpe admitted the difficulties under which the people labored, ascribing them to the Spanish alarms, but reports that John Mohr Macintosh, pursuant to orders from the Trust, had disposed of a part of the servants ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... the governing council in Virginia, found himself removed from office, imprisoned, and sent home by the spring of 1608, all as a result of charges brought against him that for the most part were petty and contradictory. Pettiness and contradictions, in this instance, were rooted in the miserable conditions which the colonists had to endure their first summer: famine and sickness not only demoralized the colonists but were killing them faster than ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... towards the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them—having regard to the prevalent habit of keeping ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... words respecting the revolt of the Venetian States, which, in consequence of the difference of political opinions, has been viewed in very contradictory lights. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... entered, with Marsham and the butler behind him. Mr. Ferrier, in his London frock-coat, appeared rounder and heavier than ever but for the contradictory vigor and lightness of his step, the shrewd cheerfulness of the eyes. It had been a hard week in Parliament, however, and his features and complexion showed signs of overwork and ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... LETTER ALPHA}) Origen plainly teaches that prayer before justification is a good work. "Though you are sinners," he says, "pray to God; God hears the sinners."(231) The seemingly contradictory text John IX, 31: "Now we know that God doth not hear sinners,"(232) is thus explained by St. Augustine: "He speaks as one not yet anointed; for God also hears the sinners. If He did not hear sinners, the publican would have cast his eyes to the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... the elevated style, purity of diction, and easy flow of language, frequently exhibited, will appear unaccountable and contradictory, in view of his want of early mental culture. But to the thousands who have listened with delight to his speeches on anniversary and other occasions, these same traits will be noted as unequivocal evidence of originality. Very few men present in their written composition, so perfect ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... unfortunately, simultaneously at the end of his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them, his force being small. The Government had assured Colonel Starr that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to arrange; that he was ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in this field hitherto. The proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires him to seek. Men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any science of the forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces will seek,—'it is their nature to,'—whether in man, or in any other form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of declamation that is ever going to stop them. The power that is in everything that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... satisfactory response concerning her own home. She maintained she was just 17 and had come to Chicago to make her own way in the world. After some account of herself, the details of which were somewhat contradictory, it was inferred that she might be Agnes W. She vehemently denied it, but being the same age and some likeness being discerned, the questioning was continued. Various matters of Agnes W.'s antecedents were gone into and after a time Inez ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and morbid dissociability of psychic activity. A single idea is sufficient in a hysterical subject, to produce the realization of what it represents. The passionate imagination may lead to opinions and actions which are absolutely contradictory. Love and hatred often alternate by transformation. According to the influences to which she is exposed, the same hysterical woman may become a ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... those days an exorbitant and inconvenient power, ordering the justices of the king's court, in suits about lands, to turn out, put, and keep in possession, which of the litigants they pleased; to send contradictory orders; and take large sums of money from each; to respite proceedings; to direct sentences; and the judges, acting by their commission, conceived themselves bound to observe such orders, to the great delay, interruption, and preventing of justice; ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to make ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... obstinate objection to the presence of a medical man at his bedside. Generally speaking, he appeared to be in a delicate state of health. His nervous system was out of order—he was at once timid and contradictory. When I spoke to him in English, he answered in Italian; and when I tried him in Italian, he went back to English. It mattered little—the malady had already made such progress that he could only speak a few words at a time, and those in ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... to suffer more than the evening before. His complaints were curious and contradictory. A million pins were pricking him. There was a weight under the skin; a cold, wet animal was crawling over him. Then there were other creatures on ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... himself among the precursors of Darwin. In some passages of the second edition of his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1826), he certainly talks evolution and anticipates Prof. Weismann in denying the transmission of acquired characters. He is, however, sadly self-contradictory and his evolutionism weakens in subsequent editions—the only ones that Darwin saw. Prof. Poulton finds in Prichard's work a recognition of the operation of Natural Selection. "After inquiring how it ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... men; not that they are of the common mould, but seem so because their uncommon qualities are not then called forth. Superiority requires an occasion. The common man is helpless in an emergency: assailed by contradictory suggestions, or confused by his incapacity, he cannot see his way. The hour of emergency finds a hero calm and strong, and strong because calm and clear-sighted; he sees what can be done, and does it. This is often a thing of great simplicity, so that we marvel others ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... morbid gloom of Siva-worship, the colourless negativeness of Buddhism, and the childish intricacy of ceremonies which formed the religion of the mass of ordinary Hindus, still we cannot find much to admire in it. There seems to be something almost contradictory in representing the highest and purest emotions of the mind by images drawn from the lowest ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... Argyll, and Lanark had actually retired. On October 22, from their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy, by nobles and others in the king's favour, to cut their throats. The evidence is very confused and contradictory: Hamilton and Argyll were said to have collected a force of 5000 men in the town, and, on October 5, such a gathering was denounced in a proclamation. Charles in vain asked for a public inquiry into the affair ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... a more elaborate discussion of this prophecy, and an ample defence of this interpretation, are referred to "Levi's Letters, to Priestly;" and those who are desirous of seeing an account of the various, contradictory, perplexed and multitudinous contrivances, by which it has been endeavoured to apply this prophecy to Jesus, are referred to Prideaux, Michaelis, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... three epochs, English in blood and American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough grasp of our literature thus requires—and in scarcely less a degree than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe—a survey of a long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the underlying forces of the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature, that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was. I wanted to go on serving under that man. I realized suddenly how much I loved my work, and when I got back to my quarters that night and saw ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... war back into France and by holding the Duke of Burgundy to his faith, to distress and disturb Charles very much, Charles sometimes asked the Maid of Orleans what the Voices said about it? But, the Voices had become (very like ordinary voices in perplexed times) contradictory and confused, so that now they said one thing, and now said another, and the Maid lost credit every day. Charles marched on Paris, which was opposed to him, and attacked the suburb of Saint Honore. In this fight, being again struck down into ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... me! Poor, unhappy Olivier!" The tones of her voice cut De Scuderi to the heart; again there stirred in the depths of her soul a dim presentiment that there was some mystery connected with the case, and also the belief in Olivier's innocence returned. Her mind distracted by the most contradictory feelings, she cried, "What spirit of darkness is it which has entangled me in this terrible affair? I am certain it will be the death of me." At this juncture Baptiste came in, pale and terrified, with the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... last order of the people, that was law? Nay, certainly they all knew it; and they therefore obeyed the Aemilian law, rather than the old one, under which the censors had been at first created; because it was the last order; and because, when two laws are contradictory, the new always repeals the old. Do you mean to say, Appius, that the people are not bound by the Aemilian law? Or, that the people are bound, and you alone exempted? The Aemilian law bound those violent censors, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... about from place to place. His pseudo-theology or mythology ended in a theatrical comedy, and the comedy in a tragedy." "In 1839 this famous Dr. Strauss—who resolved the gospel history of salvation into an incoherent and self-contradictory mythological poem, and denied the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul—was duly elected professor of Christian dogmatics and ethics in the University of Zurich, by the party then in power, which consisted mostly of demagogues ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... of disposition more displeasing to men than one which is obstinate and contradictory. People of this sort are pests of conversation, firebrands in social intercourse, sowers of discord. Like hedgehogs and horse-chestnuts, they have prickles all over them, and cannot be handled. On the other hand, a gentle, pliable, condescending disposition, which is ready ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... of his agony, came inspiration. He must save them all with a lie! Queer that, queer and contradictory! Yes, after practicing the truth, he must save them all from shipwreck ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... frowned. This somewhat contradictory evidence had very sensibly affected her; and when, a moment later, the coroner, having dismissed the witness, turned towards her, and inquired if she had anything further to say in the way of explanation or otherwise, she threw her hands up almost spasmodically, ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... persecuted pietist he became a close client of Royalty, and almost the chief of court favorites in an age of favoritism. That some of his sayings and doings in these two strangely-contrasted scenes of his life should be a little contradictory is, to say the least, no matter of wonder. Mr. Macaulay, accordingly, giving him full credit for religious principle, but not much for strength of mind, depicts the stubborn and fanatical Quaker of former days as having become in the reign of King James the compliant and, though well-meaning, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... mouth for a few months, thy eyes would get sound again!' The 'complainant' did not even return thanks for this medical counsel, but sipped his toddy in silence, and soon after left the room, 'uttering never a word.' . . . THERE have been various surmises, and sundry contradictory statements, in relation to the work superscribed 'Count D'Orsay on Etiquette,' which we noticed at some length in our December issue. Mr. WILLIS, of the 'New Mirror' weekly journal, seems to question its having been written by the COUNT, but expresses his belief that he may ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... therefore unreasonable. He would not play subordinate, so left Leonora no choice but to lend herself gracefully to Denis's companionship. These two were sure to misunderstand one another. Fred was contradictory. With intense and variable feeling, he possessed the traits of slower natures. A kind of natural prudence retarded him. He puzzled Leonora. One moment he cooed over her, the next became Horatian. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pointed in instructing them. He considered it a miracle, that they yielded their hearts to his teaching; but it seemed to me, that if the good priest's gentle ways and entire devotion to their welfare had produced no effect, it would have been as contradictory to all the laws of nature as any miracle could be. While instructing some savages from Puget Sound, he said the idea came into the mind of one of the priests, to represent by a ladder, which he made on paper, the various truths and mysteries of religion, ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... however, of a discharge of discreet inquiries as to when he arrived, how long he meant to stay, whether he found Cadurcis altered, and similar interrogations which required no extraordinary exertion of his lordship's intellect to answer, but to which he nevertheless contrived to give inconsistent and contradictory responses, Cadurcis in time recovered himself sufficiently to maintain a fair though not very brilliant conversation, and even ventured occasionally to address an observation to Venetia, who was seated at her work perfectly composed, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... degree of romance will always be attached to the history of the Irish wolf-dog, but so contradictory are the accounts handed down to us respecting it, that, with every disposition to do justice to the character of this noble animal, the task is ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... to go, I set about learning the how and the where, with the usual results; much advice asked and unasked of a very contradictory sort. The American Legation with fine courtesy offered no counsel, but gave every possible help, securing for me the proper vises for my passports, even speeding the wheels of the slow-moving Wai-wu-pu so that I might not be delayed. The matter of getting a servant ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... When such self-contradictory "information" is placed before the public as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of irrelevant ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... therefore between the devils and the human race ought to be considered. These matters however, become still clearer when the promise is considered. For since the promise is universal, and since there are no contradictory wills in God, there must of necessity be in us some cause of difference why Saul is rejected and David is received; i.e., there must of necessity be some dissimilar action in these two. Cum promissio ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the custom of the Greeks, gave leave, by their herald, to any person who chose to offer advice, not one stood forth; but they sat a long time, looking on each other in silence. It was no wonder that men, revolving in their minds matters of such contradictory natures, and who found themselves puzzled and confounded, should be involved in additional perplexity by the speeches continued through the whole preceding day; in which the difficulties, on all sides, were brought into view, and stated in their full force. At length Aristaenus, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... barrel-organ's one leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... they understand not so much as the very Terms they have Learn'd in them: And more often find the Proportions therein contain'd, so short in the Information of their Ignorance; or so unintelligible, to their Apprehensions; or so plainly contradictory of the most obvious Dictates of common Sense; that Religion (for the which they never think of looking beyond these Systems) appears to them indeed a thing not Built upon, or defensible by Reason: In consequence of which Opinion, the weakest attaques made against it, must ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... in their various spheres, claim a monopoly of employment for their members, to the exclusion of those who do not belong to their associations. Logic has something, perhaps not much, to do with political action, and it is almost inconceivable that a party can go on for long holding these two contradictory opinions. Which of them will be abandoned, the future ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... classes of the people, a moral control of themselves, so absolute that, no matter what the inconvenience, or how great the sacrifice, legal ways shall alone be used. In this manner, two of the greatest and apparently most contradictory wants of every legal or moral person, the want of uninterrupted continuity and that of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... toilette next day. Certain it is that Miss Sandbrook's mountain costume was an exquisite feat of elaborate simplicity, and that the completion of her sketch was interrupted by many a backward look down the pass, and many a contradictory mood, sometimes boding almost as harsh a reception for Robert as for Mr. Calthorp, sometimes relenting in the thrill of hope, sometimes accusing herself of arrant folly, and expecting as a pis aller the diversion of dazzling and tormenting an Oxonian, or a soldier or two! Be the meeting ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these devoted Christians when they were thrown into the Tiber in the reign of Maximian. But as the place and manner of their martyrdom are involved in hopeless obscurity, the various accounts given of both being contradictory, the ecclesiastical legend has no weight. Cosma and Damian were Arabian doctors who were converted to Christianity, and belonged to the class called "silverless martyrs"—that is, physicians who took no fee from ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... would escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... as the rate of movement of the rod becomes slower and slower'; and this is equivalent to saying that the distance between the bands diminishes as the rate of movement of the rod decreases. The statements are contradictory. But there is no doubt as to which is the wrong one—it is the first. What these authors have called 'distance between the bands' has here been shown to be itself a band. Now, no point about this illusion can be more readily observed than that ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Toffy began to writhe under the cruel speeches which Avory made to her; he never saw for an instant that there was a fault anywhere save with the husband. She was one of those women who invariably inspire sweeping and contradictory criticisms on the whole of her sex, one man finding in her a proof that all women are angels, and the next discovering as certainly that ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... whole party had been closeted with this and that leading "Radical"; and that the poor, stricken, down-trodden South—the land fairest and richest and poorest and most peaceful and most chivalric, the most submissive and the most defiant; in short, the most contradictory in its self-conferred superlatives—that this land of antipodal excellences must now look for new forms of tyranny and new measures ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to the popular ideas on the achievements of Samson at Gaza, but only obtained such uncertain and even contradictory answers, that on this journey it did not seem worth while to take any great trouble on the subject; but I certainly had not expected to get better information from either the Mohammedans or from ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... to speak soon died out of knowledge. The localities of many very interesting incidents cannot be identified. This is very observable, and peculiarly remarkable as to places in the now City of Salem. The reminiscences floating about are vague, contradictory, and few in number. In a community of uncommon intelligence, composed, to a greater degree perhaps than almost any other, of families that have been here from the first, very inquisitive for knowledge, and always imbued with the historical spirit, it is truly surprising ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... and contradictory aspect of this neighborliness, this kindliness, this thought for mutual welfare, and that was its narrowness, especially in New England, as regards the limitations of space and locality. It is impossible to judge what caused this restraint of vision, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... light on all those families of one or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her, aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was too simple a solution ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... there is neither leisure nor inclination, and the doctrines that have been dictated concerning our intellectual faculties and their operations, have tended rather to stifle than to promote inquiry. It is therefore unnecessary to enumerate the catalogue of illustrious names whose contradictory systems have created suspicion and distaste in the student. The science that has been improperly termed Metaphysics, ought to be considered a branch of human physiology, not abstracted from, but in this state of existence, connected with ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... temerity, brave to heroism, and a tactician of the first order. But his career had felt the vicissitudes of politics, and like so many of his contemporaries,—more, perhaps, than any of them,—he had played the most contradictory parts. Equally intrepid in the army of Conde, in the Vendean army, and in the Grand Army of Napoleon, he had won as much distinction under the white flag as under the tricolor. The Emperor, who was an expert in military talent, having recognized in him a superior military man, had ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... midst of these contradictory advices the roughs lifted their struggling victim from his feet, and proceeded to carry him in the direction of ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... of my life," Mary declares through her heroine,—"continual restraint in the most trivial matters, unconditional submission to orders, which as a mere child I soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory. Thus are we destined to experience a mixture of bitterness with the recollection of our most innocent enjoyment." Edward, as the mother's favorite, escaped her severity; but it fell upon Mary with double force, and was with her carried out with a thoroughness that laid its shortcomings bare, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... could not get his thoughts together at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. "You ask me to take love for granted," said Corydon to him once; "but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... God treats it as national rejection of Him. Here it appears as due, on the part of the people, to their fear of the Philistines, and on the part of God to His loving yielding to their cry. In 1 Samuel xii. 12, Samuel traces it to the fear of Ammonite invasion. Are these contradictory or supplementary accounts? Certainly the latter. Though Israel had in heart rejected God, and He gave them a king that they might learn how much better they would have been without one, it is as true that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I'm a bundle of 'isms,' and in practice one can only be true to one at a time. When that one begins to make me feel uncomfortable, I become true to another. Thus I am always true to myself. All the mutually contradictory 'isms' unite in a higher synthesis. Am I not the most lovely higher synthesis you ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... insulted, honoured him with the title of Pater Patriae. This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to make things tally, that are contradictory in their natures. When I bid you not be a miser, I do not order you to become a debauchee or a prodigal. There is some difference between the case of Tanais and his son-in-law Visellius, there is a mean in things; finally, there are certain boundaries, on either side of which moral rectitude ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... of permanent appropriations for the civil list and military establishments, yet when the House desired to strengthen public credit it had rendered the appropriation for those objects permanent and not yearly. It was, therefore, "contradictory to suppose that the House was bound to do a certain act at the same time that they were exercising the discretionary power of voting upon it." The debate determined nothing, but it is of interest as the first declaration in Congress of the supremacy ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... suspicious nature so far misled by its own inventions, tickled me much. Yet as the laugh died, a kind of wrath smote me, and then bitterness followed: it was the rock struck, and Meribah's waters gushing out. I never had felt so strange and contradictory an inward tumult as I felt for an hour that evening: soreness and laughter, and fire, and grief, shared my heart between them. I cried hot tears: not because Madame mistrusted me—I did not care twopence for her mistrust—but for other ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... physiological—of the blood and tissues, and of the secretions and excretions of scurvy. Such inquiries would be of great value in their bearing upon the origin of hospital gangrene. Up to the present war, the results of chemical investigations upon the pathology of the blood in scurvy were not only contradictory, but meager, and wanting in that careful detail of the cases from which the blood was abstracted which would enable us to explain the cause of the apparent discrepancies in different analyses. Thus it is not ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of the parishioners, and the work of restoration was committed to the then famous Gothic architect Mr. George Gwilt. He did his work most carefully and conscientiously, adhering as far as possible to the original, though hampered throughout his progress by contradictory instructions from the managing committee, who, like most bodies of that kind, were apt to fluctuate between motives of economy and a sense of what was due to the ancient fabric. The Gothic revival was then in an incipient stage, and Mr. Gwilt, or his committee, must ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... across the fields the girls only spoke occasionally. Alice strove to see clear, but her thoughts were clouded, scattered, diffused. Force herself as she would, still no conclusion seemed possible; all was vague and contradictory. She had talked to these Brennans, seen how they lived, could guess what their past was, what their future must be. In that neat little house their uneventful life dribbled away in maiden idleness; neither hope nor despair broke the triviality of ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... tobacco brought peculiar relief to his over-wrought mind, and dulled for a few moments the edge of his remorse. In the wavering clouds of smoke he saw her eyes once more. And the crimson cloak! Was ever a wrap worn by mortal woman so bewitching, so deliciously contradictory in its suggestions? The Shaker women never married, and this was their peculiar garment, though they always wore one of sad, monotonous gray. Every winter they came to Warwick and sold cloaks of worldly colours to the rich young women of the town, seeking ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... denunciations, their narrowness and that horrible Covenant, had been a passage from bondage to liberty, there were times, as she paced the terrace alone and looked out on the gray sea of the east coast, when the contradictory circumstances of her life beset her and she was troubled. When she was forced to listen to the interminable harangues of hill preachers, sheltering for a night in the castle, and day by day was resisting the domination of her mother, her mind rose in ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... commercial people gave freely, as they always do. What trouble these matchless patriots had to overcome! Intrigue, treason, religious fanaticism, begrudging of supplies, the constant shortage of stores and provisions at every critical stage of a crisis, the contradictory instructions from the exasperating Tudor Queen: the fleet kept in port until the chances of an easy victory over England's bitterest foes had passed away! But for the vacillation of the icy virgin, Drake's ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... said to you to-day, 'There is something more important than the religion I preached to you and the gods I revealed; something more august and more sacred, and that is my own good pleasure'? Bernard, your love is full of contradictory desires. Inconsistency, moreover, is the mark of all human loves. Men imagine that a woman can have no separate existence of her own, and that she must always be wrapped up in them; and yet the only woman ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... they had come to stay and seemed to think we were expecting them. They said the young woman, whom they call Cousin Dink, had sent them. I have tried to question them, but their answers are confused and contradictory. I felt that perhaps it was better to wait for you and see what ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... to think of it, was inevitable. The life and habits and general attitude of the period would have been absolutely impossible, in conjunction with any serious face-to-face consideration of a situation which embraced, for example, such preposterously contradictory ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... proprietors, three of the largest land-agents in Ireland, two bank managers, an influential lawyer, three leaders of the people, and one probable assassin. Through the discourse of all of these—varied and contradictory as much of it necessarily was—I could see distinctly one ugly shadow, as of an old man filthy of aspect, hungry of eye, and greedy of claw, sitting in the rear of a gloomy store looking over papers by the light of a miserable tallow dip. From the papers ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... with the line so as to be receptive of a call at any time while the telephone is not in use. The requirements also demand that no conducting path shall normally exist between the two sides of the line. These two apparently contradictory requirements are met by placing a condenser in series with the ringer so that the ringer will be in a path that will readily transmit the alternating ringing currents sent out from the central-office generator, while at the same time the condenser will afford a complete ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... many of these objects serve other ends, medicinal and religious. I took no little pains in investigating this point, but the replies to my inquiries were at times so indeterminate, at others so varied, and so contradictory that I can not make any definite statement; but I am strongly inclined to believe, for sundry reasons, that both medicinal and magic powers are attributed to many of the innocent-looking objects that go to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... model for the ether which might furnish a satisfactory mechanical interpretation of Maxwell's laws of the electro-magnetic field. The laws were clear and simple, the mechanical interpretations clumsy and contradictory. Almost imperceptibly the theoretical physicists adapted themselves to a situation which, from the standpoint of their mechanical programme, was very depressing. They were particularly influenced by the electro-dynamical investigations of Heinrich Hertz. For whereas they previously had ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... Court at the capital of each island, with corresponding duties and powers. These powers are very loosely and vaguely defined, and are the subject of endless controversy everywhere, and nowhere more than in the courts themselves—such is the multiplicity of laws and so many are the contradictory decisions upon them, every decision constituting what is called a lantrag, or, as we might say, "precedent." The peculiarity of a lantrag, or previous decision, is that it is, or is not, binding, at the will of the honorable ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... a pause. She shrinks from looking at him—she trembles with strange contradictory sensations of pleasure and pain. His arm steals round her; he repeats his question in a whisper; his lips almost touch her little rosy ear as ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass god with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... As soon as the description was received from Mrs. Amidon (a description, by the way, which was unusually clear and precise, owing to the peculiar and contradictory features of the man), the police were able to recognize him among the many suspects always under their eye. Arrested, he pleaded, just as Miss Strange had foretold, an alibi of a seemingly unimpeachable character; ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... is compromise. His bete noir extravagance. We are not saved by syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at one and the same moment of time self-contradictory propositions. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... made me resolve once more to visit my native country, and my resolution was immediately put in practice. It was a relief, though of a painful kind, to the more painful state in which my undecided thoughts at that moment held me. The man whose contradictory impulses goad him in a thousand different directions, without permitting him to pursue any one, is happy to be ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... been asleep, and was just waking to painful life. For nearly four years had Grena Holland soothed her many misgivings by some such reasoning as that of Mr Justice Roberts. She had conformed outwardly: had not merely abstained from contradictory speeches, but had gone to mass, had attended the confessional, had bowed down before images of wood and stone, and all the time had comforted herself by imagining that God saw her heart, and knew that she did not really believe in any of these things, but only acted thus for safety's sake. Now, ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... plants for which self-pollination is of greater importance than it is for others is by no means contradictory to Darwin's view. Self-fertilisation is, for example, of greater importance for annuals than for perennials as without it seeds might fail to be produced. Even in the case of annual plants with small inconspicuous flowers in which self-fertilisation usually occurs, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... some demonstration on the animal's part that he had feared. A snort, a hoof-beat, a whinny would betray him, and very liable was the animal to any of these expressions. One realizes how unnecessary is speech for the exposition of opinion when brought into contradictory relations with the horse which one rides or drives. All day had this animal snorted his doubts of his master's sanity; all day had he protested against these aimless, fruitless rambles; all day had he held back with a high head and ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... denies that three times one are, or can be, one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man can ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... other, contribute together to form a total result, namely society. Simple or complex, stable or unstable, barbarous or civilized, this society contains within itself its explanations of its being. Strange as a social structure may be, it can be explained; also its institutions, however contradictory. Neither prosperity, nor decline, nor despotism, nor freedom, is the result of a throw of the dice, of luck or an unexpected turn of events caused by rash men. They are conditions we must live with. In any event, it is useful to understand them, either to improve our situation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... what sort of a kingdom he was to reign, that the errors crept in. The Messianic conceptions which have come down to us through the Prophets, the Targums, incidental allusions in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the few other traditions and records yet in existence, are very diverse and sometimes contradictory. They agreed in ardently looking for an earthly sovereign in the Messiah, one who would rise up in the line of David and by the power of Jehovah deliver his people, punish their enemies, subdue the world to his sceptre, and reign with Divine auspices of beneficence and splendor. They also expected ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... face with the enemy before he could be joined by Macpherson. In his explanatory report Massy stated that he had been misled by a memorandum[9] which he received from the Assistant Adjutant-General after his interview with me (although this memorandum contained nothing contradictory of the orders I had given him); that he understood from it that his business was to reach the Ghazni road at its nearest point in the direction of Arghandeh, and that he thought it better, with a thirty miles' march in prospect, to take the most direct line in order ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... philosophy of Heraclitus.[1] In this paragraph the statement is made that Aenesidemus and his followers, [Greek: hoi peri ton Ainesidemon], said that Scepticism is the path to the philosophy of Heraclitus, because the doctrine that contradictory predicates appear to be applicable to the same thing, leads the way to the one that contradictory predicates are in reality applicable to the same thing.[2] [Greek: hoi peri ton Ainesidemon elegon hodon ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... third Synoptic at all.' Of 'the events unknown to our Gospel' I have disposed in the text. But the statement which I have italicized is still more extraordinary. I am altogether unable to put any interpretation upon the words which is not directly contradictory to the facts, and must therefore suppose that we have here again one of those extraordinary misprints, which our author has pleaded on former occasions. As a matter of fact, the references to the Third and Fourth Gospels in this ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the right to an explanation from our young brother. I was denied that privilege at the time of his ordination. But I consider his contradictory statements so serious a thing that I shall give you the opportunity that ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... the words may have taken place through the fault of the early printers; but even if the present order be preserved, still the transposed sense is, I think, much less difficult than the forced and rather contradictory meaning contended for by MR. COLLIER. Has not the pause in Ferdinand's labour been hitherto too much overlooked? What is it that has induced him to forget his task? Is it not those delicious thoughts, most busy in the pauses of labour, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... That the moral good, if attained, should itself prove vain is a plain self-contradiction. For moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good. The question. "Why should I be moral," has no answer, because it is self-contradictory. The moral ideal contains its justification in itself, and requires to ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... which I had no share, decides at once upon my liberty and property, sending me from the court to a prison, and adjudging my family to beggary and famine. I am innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and uncertainty of your science. I never darkened it with absurd and contradictory notions, nor confounded it with chicane and sophistry. You have excluded me from any share in the conduct of my own cause; the science was too deep for me; I acknowledged it; but it was too deep even for yourselves: you have made the way so intricate, that you are yourselves ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... call it, in your Uncle Dan's sincerity, if only because he's done so many inconsistent and apparently contradictory things in his life. But that doesn't make me see any real reason why ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... revelation of truth and duty that the mind of man could conceive. I could no longer find in my heart to talk or write about what appeared to be its imperfections. There were passages that seemed dark or doubtful: there were some that seemed erroneous or contradictory; but they amounted to nothing. They did not affect the scope, the drift, the aim, the tendency of the Book as a whole. They might not be consistent with certain erroneous theories of inspiration, or with certain unguarded statements of extravagant theologians; but they were consistent with the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the legislator of his art. His vanity seems to have been as remarkable as that of Zeuxis. Among the most celebrated of his works was a portrait of the personified Athenian Demos, which is said to have miraculously expressed even the most contradictory ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... little consequence what colour or flavour we attribute to them, provided it be agreeable. Availing myself of the obliging assistance of Mr. Arphaxad Bowers, an ingenious photographick artist, whose house-on-wheels has now stood for three years on our Meeting-House Green, with the somewhat contradictory inscription,—"Our motto is onward,"—I have sent accurate copies of my treasure to many learned men and societies, both native and European. I may hereafter communicate their different and (me judice) equally erroneous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... as a peculiarly interesting portion of scripture: a blessing being promised those who read, hear, and keep the things which are written therein. It has been subjected to so many contradictory interpretations, that any attempt to comprehend its meaning is often regarded with distrust; and the impression has become very prevalent, that it is a "sealed book,"—that its meaning is so hidden in unintelligible symbols, that very little can be known respecting it; and ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... will be seen by this retrospect how difficult it is to seize all the shifting subtleties of this remarkable character. His sophisms even, when self-contradictory, are so adroit that they are often hard to parry. He made a great merit to himself for not having originated the new episcopates; but it should be remembered that he did his utmost to enforce the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... incidental questions which may arise; but when a case occurs in which we have the omnipotence of Parliament to set off against the infallibility of the pope—the sacred obligations of a will against the equally sacred principles of hereditary succession—and when we have, at last, two contradictory actions of the same ultimate umpire, we find all technical grounds of coming to a conclusion gone. We then, abandoning these, seek for some higher and more universal principles—essential in the nature of things, and thus independent of the ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to make the machine do the thing with as little dependence as possible on the human element, even though the human element was never emphasized more. Contradictory? Yet there it is. We men go to the impersonal. Yet deep down in our hearts we hunger for the human touch, the warm personal touch. This after all is the thing. We all feel that. Yet the whole crowding of life's action is ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... person of the Little Giant was contradictory, as was the man himself. His height was insignificant. But he had the head and shoulders of a lion, and even the lion's roar. What at contrast the ring of his deep bass to the tentative falsetto of Mr. Lincoln's opening words. If Stephen expected the Judge to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... these confessions he made such confusion, first confessing a little, then a little more, then contradicting himself, then admitting, when the thing had been proved against him, what he had before denied, that it was almost impossible to disentangle the truth from his confused and contradictory declarations. The substance of the case ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... state of mind the four walls of his room made an intolerable prison to him; they seemed to hem in and press down upon him all the crowd of contradictory thoughts and conflicting feelings, some of which would fly away in the open air. He had only an hour or two to make up his mind in, and he must get clear and calm. Once on Meg's back, in the fresh air ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square,' a 'present past,' 'two parallel lines that intersect,' are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... superstitious belief which is in question, but the reality of the miracles, and the sufficiency of the witnesses to establish them. What such objectors urge practically amounts to this: that we should believe in the actual occurrence of certain miracles contradictory to all experience, out of a mass of false miracles which are reported but never really took place, because some unknown persons in an ignorant and superstitious age, who give no evidence of personal knowledge, or of careful investigation, have ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... parallels in foreign countries. It must be remembered, however, that a great number of these plant-sayings originated very many years ago—long before the alteration in the style of the calendar—which in numerous instances will account for their apparent contradictory character. In noticing, too, these proverbs, account must be taken of the variation of climate in different countries, for what applies to one locality does not to another. Thus, for instance, according to a Basque proverb, "A wet May, a fruitful year," whereas it is ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... at the last moment, it will be broken. He has been obsessing me these last days. He too—I am certain of it—dreads the Irrevocable, and regrets the rupture between us. I dream of him continually—such restless, tantalising dreams. And yet my mood is so contradictory. If the marriage WERE broken off and he stood before me, free, and ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... in the religious symbolism of the peoples of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis. But by the side of divine serpents, essentially benign ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... is for protection and adornment. That of a book involves two other demands mutually so contradictory that bookbinding has always offered a most attractive challenge to the skill of the handicraftsman. The first demand is that the book when closed shall form a well-squared and virtually solid block, like the rectangle of wood from which its first predecessors were ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... hated bores especially—Me. de Stael or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis; he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set, I don't mean personally, but less tiresome, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to everything and everybody. Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in summer, he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening, and the consequence of this pilotage was ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... and elsewhere in the Prayer Book, means the minister in charge of the parish, having "cure of souls," not the assistant minister generally so denominated now. The direction that notice of Holy Communion is to be given at this part of the service is quite contradictory to the rubric following the Prayer for the Church Militant, which should be altered. The word "Homily," in the second of these rubrics, means "a plain sermon." Two books of Homilies have been put forth, one in 1547, by Archbp. Cranmer and others, and the ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... employed in negotiating treaties with that power, and afterwards in discussing their true intent and meaning. In this respect the convention of April 19, 1850, commonly called the Clayton and Bulwer treaty, has been the most unfortunate of all, because the two Governments place directly opposite and contradictory constructions upon its first and most important article. Whilst in the United States we believed that this treaty would place both powers upon an exact equality by the stipulation that neither will ever "occupy, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... in subdued but not unkindly tones. I heard him bid her be composed, and caught, as I thought, a light reply that ought to have satisfied me that Mrs. Urquhart had simply suffered from some nightmare horror at which she was as ready to laugh now as he. But my nature is a contradictory one, and I was not satisfied. The echo of her cry was still ringing in my ears, and I felt as if I would give the world for a momentary peep into their room. Influenced by this idea, I boldly knocked, and in an instant—too soon for him not to ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.' It is not, therefore, because this author has failed to furnish the rules of interpretation necessary for penetrating to the ultimate intention of this new kind of speaking, if all this affectation of simplicity, and all these absurd contradictory statements of his, have been suffered hitherto to pass unchallenged. It is the public mind he has to deal with. 'That which he adores in kings is the throng of their adorers.' If he should take the public at once into his confidence, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... are generally the most innocent and harmless people; who are then liable to accuse themselves of the greatest imaginary crimes, and have so much intellectual cowardice, that they dare not reason about those things, which they are directed by their priests to believe, however contradictory to human apprehension, or derogatory to the great Creator of all things. The maniacal hallucination at length becomes so painful, that the poor insane flies from life to become free ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... I made all my arrangements to that effect before leaving home. Rosa's reference to my desire to go back to my clients was sheer badinage"—smiling mournfully. "You have heard her talk often enough to understand how little of earnest there is in the raillery." More insincerity! For, contradictory as it may appear, Mrs. Sutton felt constrained to believe his unsupported word, in opposition to his wife's written assertion that he designed to return to his practice ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Perhaps a little more at the mercy of contradictory impulses than other women. But that's not her fault. I really think she has been ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... committed, offered on the floor of the United States Congress, fifteen years afterward, an apologetic denial of what appears from the evidence of those who escaped,—taken by the Congressional Committee,—and also contradictory to the confederate General S. D. Lee's report, in which he fails to convince himself even of the inaccuracy of the reports of brutality, as made by the few who escaped being murdered. ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... well informed of this will; and, when the testator is on his death-bed, he contrives to tease and persuade the dying man to alter the will again in his favor. This is exactly the state of the case; and though considerable doubts have been raised relating to the contradictory bequests of the Confessor, there can be no difficulty in admitting that the conflicting pretensions of William and Harold were grounded upon the acts emanating from a wavering and feeble mind. If such disputes take ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... glaring contradictions in the Gospels, leaving untouched a mass of minor discrepancies. We find the principal of these when we compare the three synoptics with the Fourth Gospel, but there are some irreconcilable differences even between the three. The contradictory genealogies of Christ given in Matthew and Luke—farther complicated, in part, by a third discordant genealogy in Chronicles—have long been the despair of Christian harmonists. "On comparing these lists, we ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... of our writers very extensively indulges the mixed construction of which I have said so much, and concerning the propriety of which, the opinions of our grammarians are so various, so confused, and so self-contradictory. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... come to repentance," 2 Pet. iii. 9. Besides, remission of sins is to be preached, not to a few, but universally to all men, "Go therefore and tell all nations, baptising them," &c. Matt. xxviii. 19. "Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," Mark xvi. 15. Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God, he will have all saved, and not all, how can this stand together? be secure then, believe, trust in him, hope well and be saved. Yea, that's the main matter, how shall I believe or discern my security from carnal presumption? my faith is weak and faint, I want those signs and fruits ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... not swear; into that which is completely abolished, such as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, being tainted with unrighteousness, and having the same work of unrighteousness, and these are taken away by the Saviour because contradictory (for those things which are contradictory are mutually destructive), "For I say unto you that ye in no wise resist evil, but if any one smite thee turn to him the other cheek also;" and into that part which ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... bitterness was awakened by the repeated avowal of the unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity, which was but another form of his egotism, was so ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... looking at the precedents in the case of regency. There are two modern contradictory precedents, 24 Geo. II. and 5 Geo. III., and no experience of either, nor has there been a minority since Edward ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... shed many tears—some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. We see reflections—re-reflections—views at ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... gait, pilot-cloth coat, and pocketed hands proclaimed him a sailor, there were one or two contradictory points about him. A huge beard and moustache savoured more of the diggings than the deep, and a brown wide-awake with a prodigiously broad brim suggested ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... excitement. For about a week after Christmas Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head, and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room hurriedly on being spoken to, for ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... Francis as well as his; and I had found Clara so gentle, so confiding, so flatteringly cordial in her intercourse with me, that, once within my power, and prevented from receding by shame, and a thousand contradictory feelings, I had, with the vanity of an amoureux de seize ans, the confidence to believe I could reconcile the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... given into her hand. As to the Squire, the owner of Mannering, who had provided her with the task, Mrs. Bremerton could not imagine him or envisage him at all. Elizabeth's accounts of him were so reticent and so contradictory.... 'Well, that's very interesting'—said Elizabeth thoughtfully, when Captain Dell laid down his papers—'I wonder what Mr. Mannering will say to it? As you know, I got his express permission for you to make these enquiries. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,—in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he would have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with it the significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead and temples ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... our priests in many other points, makes freethinking unavoidable; for some of them own, that the doctrines of the Church are contradictory to one another, as well as to reason; which I thus prove: Dr. Sacheverell says in his speech at his trial, That by abandoning passive obedience we must render ourselves the most inconsistent Church in the world: Now 'tis plain, that one inconsistency ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... present themselves to us in "antinomies," apparently contradictory pairs, pairs of poles, which, however, do not really contradict, or even limit, each other, but are only correlatives, the existence of the one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other, and giving ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... country? Certainly, certainly, my Lord, there can be but one answer to this question. Is it not far more reasonable that England should either prevent such emigration of her subjects, or that, if she encourage and promote it, she should leave them, not to the embroilment of a double and contradictory allegiance, but to their own voluntary choice, to form such relations, political or social, as they see fit, in the country where they are to find their bread, and to the laws and institutions of which they are to look for ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... newspapers are regarded with suspicion, not only because they come exclusively through British channels, but on account of their contradictory character. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Acre, I must observe that it introduces a theory which is altogether new, and not only opposed to the opinion that the Archbishop was of English or Norman descent on both sides, but essentially contradictory of the legend as to the fair Saracen who came from the East in search of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... self-contradictory to say that Congress had power to confiscate property, and yet had no power to restore it ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... as a people. An author was still wanting to collect all these together, so as to present us with something like a continuous history. But to do this was no easy task: the materials were scanty and often contradictory; they were all written in a spirit hostile to the Gauls; a deep vein of prejudice and national partiality ran through and tarnished them all; the motives of that people were misrepresented, their actions falsified, the historians often understood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the interpretation of the Egyptian word ka, especially during recent years. An excellent summary of the arguments brought forward by the various disputants up to 1912 will be found in Morel's "Mysteres Egyptiens". Since then more or less contradictory views have been put forward by Alan Gardiner, Breasted, and Blackman. It is not my intention to intervene in a dispute as to the meaning of certain phrases in ancient literature; but there are certain aspects of the problems at issue which are so intimately ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... was it admissible that, having reached them, they had perished for want of food. On the other hand, the great strength of the tides setting westward, past the islands, could only be caused by some exceedingly deep inlet, or by a passage through to the southern Indian Ocean. These contradictory circumstances were very embarrassing; and the schooner not being placed at my disposal, I was obliged, to my great regret, to leave this important geographical ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... should require others to believe, they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical work; ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... three's none," and that Mr. Russell, after turning a deaf ear to hints to retire which had gradually increased in bluntness, had suddenly turned restive and called Mr. Tasker a "mouldy image," a "wall-eyed rabbit," and divers other obscure and contradictory things. Not content with that, he had, without any warning, kissed Miss Vickers, and when Mr. Tasker, obeying that infuriated damsel's commands, tried to show him the door, had facetiously offered to show that gentleman the wall ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... part of the estate for L2,765. It was easy enough to buy, and even to pay, but to get possession was quite another thing. Precise information is difficult to get, for while some decline to say a word, others are mutually contradictory, and a State Commission would hardly sift truth from the confusing mass of details, denials, assertions, and counter-assertions. This much is clear enough. A tenant named Ruane was required to leave a house, with ground, which he had ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... William IV on the dissolution was another delusion, and so on in perverse, wicked, contradictory human nature. Those who like to probe such systems may do so—the only wise conclusion is Swift's, "If you want to confute a lie, tell another in the opposite direction." Madame de Sevigne tells of a curate who put up a clock on his church. His parishioners collected stones ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and responsible to the Court alone. His task was a difficult one. The Five Nations would fain have remained neutral, and let the European rivals fight it out; but, on account of their local position, they could not. The exactions and lies of the Albany traders, the frauds of land-speculators, the contradictory action of the different provincial governments, joined to English weakness and mismanagement in the last war, all conspired to alienate them and to aid the efforts of the French agents, who cajoled and threatened them ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... to piece it out finally from the narratives of the two tramps, and when he had returned to the Shorter home and listened to the contradictory and whole-souled improvisations of Shorter pere and mere ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... our above consideration, this would appear to be impossible. If every ray of light is propagated relative to the embankment with the velocity c, then for this reason it would appear that another law of propagation of light must necessarily hold with respect to the carriage — a result contradictory to the principle ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... escaping the issue of moral choice." "One opinion is as good as another." Discuss these two contradictory statements. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... me with great confidence; as if (notwithstanding his contradictory bashfulness) he would look me through; while my eye but now-and-then could glance at him.—He begged my pardon with great humility: he was afraid I would think he deserved no other answer, but that ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... fell from his hand, and he sighed aloud! Mr. Beckendorff started, and the Prince awoke. Vivian, confounded, and unable to overpower his emotions, uttered some hasty words, explanatory, apologetical, and contradictory, and retired. In his walk to the summer-house a man passed him. In spite of a great cloak, Vivian recognised him as their messenger and guide; and his ample mantle did not conceal his riding boots and the spurs which glistened ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... in the explanation of this passage. His interpretation, however, seems to me much too recondite. The meaning of the passage may be certain enough; but surely the expression is confused, and one part of it contradictory to the other. BOSWELL. This note is first given ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... were proved, and before forming the advance guard. I gave the order to the column, "With ball cartridge—load." I made inquiries from the inhabitants as to their knowledge of the whereabouts of the enemy. The reports were contradictory and evidently unreliable. To take proper precaution and keep my appointment at Stevensville was ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... overlookers brought reports to Albert that there were hardly any safety-lamps used in the great pit, and that the galleries were so insufficiently supported that there was great danger in continuing to work there. However, the reports were contradictory, and after trying in vain to settle what was to be done, Lord St. Erme rode this morning to the collieries, to make a personal inspection, and insist on the men using the Davy-lamp. After trying to dissuade him, Albert proposed to go ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... struggle for the possession of Kansas commenced. After the passage of the Kansas bill we had reports in the newspapers of gross frauds at pretended elections of rival legislatures, of murder and other crimes, in short, of actual civil war in Kansas; but the accounts were contradictory. It was plainly the first duty of Congress to ascertain the exact condition of affairs in that territory. This could not be done until a speaker ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the blow was given because wearing a white hat they thought I was a Tuscan. If the first reason had been sufficient, the other, miserable as it is, had not been necessary. But all the defence is palpably false, contradictory, and nothing worth. An untruth defended cannot become truth. All these facts, without troubling you further, prove the truth of my statement, which it has been my ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... for in them we find an instinctive feeling of shame, the unconscious perception of the fact that the whole institution has been ignominiously degraded, and that the sonorous words of wise and apathetic teachers are contradictory to the dreary, barbaric, and sterile reality. So there are no true cultural institutions! And in those very places where a pretence to culture is still kept up, we find the people more hopeless, atrophied, and discontented than in ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... been difficult to help seeing—that there was a singular, indescribable change in the old man, and that while his manner was far more restless and unsettled than usual, there was yet a curious, contradictory decision in it, that perplexed her very much. She fancied once that he spoke wildly, and at random; for on her saying she regretted not to have seen him when she had been there before that morning, he at first replied that he had been to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in thee, if thou dost not oblige thyself to other and new offices? Thou dost not stick to infringe her universal and undoubted laws; but stickest to thy own special and fantastic rules, and by how much more particular, uncertain, and contradictory they are, by so much thou employest thy whole endeavour in them: the laws of thy parish occupy and bind thee: those of God and the world concern thee not. Run but a little over the examples of this kind; thy life is full ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... said a third—very judiciously, however—"that our author has the good sense to rely more on his chisel than on the Muses." The lessons taught were of a sufficiently varied, but, on the whole, rather contradictory character. By one writer I was told that I was a dull, correct fellow, who had written a book in which there was nothing amusing and nothing absurd. Another, however, cheered my forlorn spirits by assuring me that I was a "man of genius, whose poems, with much that ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... contained the last word regarding matters of science. But the writers of the Hebrew text had been under the influence of that Babylonian conception of the universe which accepted the earth as unqualifiedly central—which, indeed, had never so much as conceived a contradictory hypothesis; and so the Western world, which had come to accept these writings as actually supernatural in origin, lay under the spell of Oriental ideas of a pre-scientific era. In our own day, no one speaking with authority thinks of these Hebrew ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in 1806. Let this suffice to show that the Prussians have not so much reason to complain against the French as they pretend to have; besides, the conduct of the Prussian Government itself was so vacillating and contradictory that they had themselves only to blame for what they suffered. They should have supported Austria in 1805. But the fact is that the vanity and the amour propre of the Prussian military were so hurt at the humiliation they experienced at ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... party calls meritorious, the other denominates flagitious. These opinions vary, contract, or expand, like the events of the war on which they are founded. What can an insignificant man do in the midst of these jarring contradictory parties, equally hostile to persons situated as I am? And after all who will be the really guilty?—Those most certainly who fail of success. Our fate, the fate of thousands, is then necessarily involved in the dark wheel of fortune. Why then so many useless reasonings; we are the sport ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... countenance could not carry the loss; it would forfeit what little air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard, an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... time the terror of the unfortunate passengers was very great— the more so that it was undefined. They saw the captain, however, every now and then come into the cabin and toss off a tumbler of strong rum-and-water, and then return on deck, and shout out with oaths often contradictory orders. The gale all this time was increasing, until it threatened to become as violent as the hurricane from which we had escaped. I could not help wishing that we had not left our leaky little schooner. We might have reached some land in her. Now we did not know where ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... even had the experience of one of my pieces, the march from Tannhauser, being interrupted by storms of applause. The pleasure thus expressed was aroused, it seems, because the audience was surprised to find that my music, of which there had been so many contradictory reports, contained such long phrases of connected melody. Well satisfied as I was, both with the way in which the concert had been carried out and its enthusiastic reception, I had on the following days to overcome contrary impressions caused by the papers giving vent to their feelings against ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... have been. To some Nicodemus it was given to hear Him discourse on the new heart; some lawyer heard His story of the good Samaritan; others midst the press and throng caught a part of the tale of the prodigal son. But the momentary glimpse, the fragmentary word, the rumors strange and contradictory, yielded only confusion and mental unrest. But this brief biography exhibits to us His entire career, sets each eager listener down beside Christ while He unrolls each glowing parable, each glorious precept, each call to inspiration and the higher life. Thus books ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... haughtiest and most imperious of queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was most dangerous to mistake it. It was part of her pleasure to find in her favourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, as her own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or the prudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what she had herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real greatness ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... contest, and everything seemed to turn on the decision of Lord Palmerston. This tantalizing vision of a swift fulfilment of his prayers seemed to Philip Vaughan even less endurable than his previous apprehensions. To hear from hour to hour the contradictory chatter of irresponsible clubmen and M.P.'s was an insupportable affliction; so, at the beginning of the Session, he "paired" till Easter, and departed on one of his solitary rambles. Desiring to cut himself off as completely as possible ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... respect to the opposite duties of leading celibate lives, and of continuing families, have been contradictory. In many nations it is and has been considered a disgrace to bear no children, and in other nations celibacy has been raised to the rank of a virtue of the highest order. During the fifty or so generations that have elapsed since the establishment of Christianity, the nunneries ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... fire. One of the village committee solemnly took off his hat and poured on oil. The great moment had come. Brenda Macrae approached the sacred pile, and, tremulous from the effect of much contradictory advice, applied the torch. Silence, thou Grieve and others, false prophets of disaster! Who now could say that Pettybaw bonfire had been badly built, or that its fifteen tons of coal and twenty cords of wood had been ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Reality. Pure Change is not only unthinkable—that perhaps Bergson would allow—but it is something which cannot be experienced. There must be points of reference—a starting point and an ending point at least. Pure Change, as is the way with "pure" anything, turns into its contradictory. Paradoxical though it may seem, it ends as static. It becomes the One and Indivisible. This, at least, was recognized by Heraclitus and is expressed by him in his figure of the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... small hotel just off Broadway. The old gentleman saluted. Orde nodded good-humouredly. In his private soul he was a little amused at the old boy. To his view a man and clothes carried to their last refinement were contradictory terms. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... critically. To the initiated, there was a good deal both in the man's speech and bearing to rouse suspicion. A subtle difference that would hardly be defined as superiority; was it not rather something contradictory, not quite homogeneous, and in so far disadvantageous? The Colonel was not addicted to careful analysis of his impressions, and he felt ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... allowed to persuade himself that Maurice had either never had any absorbing interest in the Costellos, or that his interest in them was being gradually supplanted by others. In this opinion, and in a curiously uncomfortable and contradictory humour, his friends found him when they came ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... will,) there are times when the strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations, voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... as a Spiritualist, or as a man,—being what he was,—let us remember that he was never false to his convictions, never a hypocrite nor a deceiver, and that he died with his harness on, having been occupied for the last five years of his life in digesting the treasury decisions, often contradictory, and always inaccessible, for there was no index, until he took them in hand, going back thirty years, I believe, and reducing the whole to a system which need be no longer unintelligible to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... with and if you wish to reflect credit on your father and mother, do it by accomplishing more than they did, because you live in a better time. Every nation has had what you call a sacred record, and the older the more sacred, the more contradictory and the more inspired is the record. We, of course, are not an exception, and I propose to talk a little about what is called the Pentateuch, a book, or a collection of books, said to have been written by Moses. And right here in the commencement let me say that Moses never wrote one word ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... questions appeared to embarrass the natives greatly. All their accounts were contradictory: one giving me to understand that Toby would be with me in a very short time; another that he did not know where he was; while a third, violently inveighing, against him, assured me that he had stolen away, and would never come back. It appeared to me, at the time, that in making these ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... allurements of company; and many a long winter evening passed delightfully in the elegant quietude of home, as they read, and sang, and talked of the past, and dreamed of the future in each other's society. But, contradictory as it may appear to the theory of the sentimentalist, it is nevertheless a fact, that two persons cannot always find sufficient excitement in talking to each other merely; and this is especially true of those to whom high excitement has been a necessary of life. After ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fact and to demand at once: "what shall we will? Tell us what we must will." Some seem to think that they have solved the difficulty when they have advocated certain systems of memory and mind-training. Such systems may be in themselves useful or useless—the evidence furnished to me is contradictory—but were they perfect systems, a man cannot be intellectually born again merely by joining a memory-class. The best system depends utterly on the man's power of resolution. And what really counts is not the system, but the spirit in which the man handles it. ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... improve his temper. He swore and cursed most terribly at his ill luck, as he chose to call it; and, to console himself, opened his spirit case and drank tumbler after tumbler of rum and water. The result was soon apparent: he issued contradictory orders—quarrelled with the mates—struck and abused the men, and finally turned into his cot with his clothes on, where he remained for several days, calling loudly for the spirit bottle whenever he awoke. From this period he became an altered man from what he had at ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... to very different conclusions. The philological arguments are no less beset with difficulties. Both the facts and their significance are obscure, and the inquiry into them has hitherto yielded little beyond confident and yet wholly contradictory assertions and theories which are not susceptible of proof. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, is definite and consistent, and perhaps deserves fuller notice than it has yet received. It illuminates, not only the material civilization, ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... more of our academic school of painters are grouped. There is George de Forest Brush, the painter of the "Boston Madonna", in some of his earlier illustrative canvases and a very fine pre-Raphaelite "Andromeda". Brush is so contradictory at times that this small group is quite insufficient to do him full justice. Horatio Walker clings persistently to his conviction of the supremacy of the older methods, without giving any indication of contact ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... Barere,[2116] with others, all of them wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions. To one who is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State, property, religion, the Church, the ancient regime, the Revolution, the present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the parliament. Certainly the Right would like to see the First ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... These opinions are as numerous, indeed, as the characteristic features of different nations and governments; but were they a thousand times more diversified than they are ascertained to be, and a thousand times more contradictory and absurd, they still recognise some instinctive or constitutional principle common to our race, and which no reasoning or artifices of priests or designing men could possibly produce. No conceit or imagination can ever originate, though it may certainly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... that they should both be one, but not without some Reluctancy on the Female side; for 'tis the Humour of our Sex, to deny most eagerly those Grants to Lovers, for which most tenderly we sigh, so contradictory are we to our selves, as if the Deity had made us with a seeming Reluctancy to his own Designs; placing as much Discords in our Minds, as there is Harmony in our Faces. We are a sort of aiery Clouds, whose Lightning flash out one way, and the Thunder another. Our Words ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... few, but universally to all men, "Go therefore and tell all nations, baptising them," &c. Matt. xxviii. 19. "Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," Mark xvi. 15. Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God, he will have all saved, and not all, how can this stand together? be secure then, believe, trust in him, hope well and be saved. Yea, that's the main matter, how shall I believe or discern my security from carnal presumption? my faith is weak and faint, I want those signs ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... dispatches and the rapid developments of critical conditions here had informed you of affairs in this quarter. I had not written to you fully and frequently, first, because in the incessant change of affairs I would be exposed to give you contradictory accounts; and secondly, because the amount of the subjects to be laid before you would demand too ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... that presumption alone makes Atheists. Inform them then what your God is; teach them his essence; speak of him intelligibly; say something about him, which is reasonable, and not contradictory or impossible. If you are unable to satisfy them, if hitherto none of you have been able to demonstrate the existence of a God in a clear and convincing manner; if by your own confession, his essence is completely veiled from ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... personal reasons rather than from conviction, and his sentiments were largely determined by filial prejudice and the interests of his friends; his views are generally superficial, and his judgments of persons biassed, sometimes contradictory, and often unjust. DODINGTON (Lord Melcombe), Diary, edited by Wyndham, 1785, ending with 1761. HARRIS, Life of Lord Hardwicke, 3 vols., 1847, useful to 1764, and with an account of the circumstances preceding C. Yorke's death in 1770, written by his brother. BISSET, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... place to me, Wynnie," he said, when I had ended. "I must go and see her. I have a suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that she is one whose acquaintance ought to be cultivated at any cost. There is some grand explanation of all this contradictory strangeness." ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped after luncheon. There were pleasanter pastimes, even for the women, contradictory as this may seem. By eleven o'clock Courtlandt had finished the reading of his mail, and was now ready to hunt for the little lady of the Taverne Royale. It was necessary to find her. The whereabouts of Flora Desimone was of vital importance. If she had not yet arrived, the presence of her friend ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... that a whole has many parts, that the continuous is also the divisible, that in all objects of sense there is a one and many, and that a like principle may be applied to analogy to purely intellectual conceptions. If we attend to the meaning of the words, we are compelled to admit that two contradictory statements are true. But the antinomy is so familiar as to be scarcely observed by us. Our sense of the contradiction, like Plato's, only begins in a higher sphere, when we speak of necessity and free-will, of mind and body, of ...
— Philebus • Plato
... "Your temper is contradictory to-day," said Clara coldly. "Did you know," she said presently, "that the princesses will be at the Countess ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 1623. Ben did not weave the amazing tissue of involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians. Beaumont died in the same year as Shakspere, who died in the depths of the country, weary of London. Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary poems dropped on the grave of the ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... misconception is shared both by the reviewers and the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed—a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Durham.—Having employed my leisure for many years in collecting materials for the biography of the famous Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, I am baffled by the conflicting and contradictory accounts of,—(1.) The title by which he became possessed of the Vesci estates; (2.) When and by what authority he took upon him the title of "King of the Isle of Man;" and (3.) How he became dispossessed of that title, which it is well known that Edward II. bestowed upon Gaveston; ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... from any remarks upon these contradictory statements until Mr. Fox shall have had an opportunity to obtain the means of fully explaining them. How essential it is that this should be promptly done, and that the steps necessary to a faithful observance on the part of Her Majesty's colonial authorities ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... his "plans and wishes," which had been "fully explained" to me before I went to Pulaski, and "properly appreciated," instead of upon what I had gathered from General Thomas's orders to Stanley and subsequent orders to me about fighting Hood at Pulaski, absolutely contradictory to that stated in his report, "without risking a general engagement," and his assent to my radically different suggestions made after I assumed command at Pulaski, as stated in my report. It is not incumbent upon me to try to reconcile this statement in ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... run off his pen with delightful ease. The third came harder; the events and incidents of the story became confused and contradictory; the character of Billy Isham obstinately refused to take the prominent place which Condy had designed for him; and with the beginning of the fourth chapter, Condy had finally come to know the enormous difficulties, the exasperating complications, the discouragements that begin anew with every ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that he needed rest, and the time to "review" his statements; it appeared that reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory. To this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large quiet establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he had found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself, engaged in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and others ready to lend an interested ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... that we were only four in number, counting the Indian. But by-and-by, our traveling companion became a source of considerable uneasiness. When questioned regarding his lost horse he did not give straight replies, but was evasive and somewhat contradictory, and Mr. Driskol began to have suspicions regarding his friendly intentions. But what to do, or how to rid ourselves of his presence, was a puzzling question. Besides, we felt that we were safer where he could ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... describes the vie intime of mermen and merwomen. Somewhat resembling Swift's inimitable creations, the Houyhnhnms for instance, they prove, amongst other things, that those who dwell in a denser element can justly blame and severely criticise the contradictory and unreasonable prejudices and predilections of mankind. Sayf al-Muluk (vol. viii. Night dcclviii.), the romantic tale of two lovers, shows by its introduction that it was originally an independent work and it is known to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... fought, rather less than ten miles from the town of Buenos Aires. The terrified civilian inhabitants of the town awaited the result in profound suspense. All the while the fight was raging a succession of messengers came galloping through the streets bearing contradictory fragments of news. After some hours the citizens were no longer left in doubt. The stragglers of Rosas's beaten army came pouring into the town, and it became known that the Dictator, completely defeated, had fled. General Rosas and his daughter were ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... unwritten law of social nature, to the great and pregnant principle of political necessity. All government supposes subjects; all authority implies obedience: to suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse, is absurd and contradictory; a state, so constituted, must rest for ever in motionless equipoise, with equal attractions of contrary tendency, with equal weights of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... animals, and will constantly improve them. The old adage, "Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well" is nowhere more true, than in the care of calves. We shall not pause to present the various and contradictory methods of raising calves, that are presented in the numerous books, on the subject, that have come under our observation. Hay-tea, various preparations of linseed-meal, oilcake-meal, oatmeal, and every variety of ground feed, sometimes mixed up with gin, or some kind ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... to write this in his book also, and, ordering him to read what he had written, soon convinced him how contradictory his wishes had been. In the winter, he wished it to be always winter; in the spring, he wished for a continuance of that season; in the summer, he wished it never to depart; and when autumn came, it afforded him too many delicious fruits to ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... and then saying no more? Of course Clara asked herself that question as soon as she was alone in her bedroom, after leaving Captain Aylmer below. And she made two answers to herself two answers which were altogether distinct and contradictory one of the other. At first she decided that he had said so much and no more because he was deceitful because it suited his vanity to raise hopes which he had no intention of fulfilling because he was fond of saying soft ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... fronds, and they were motionless and seemed not to have been touched by something passing through them. She had gone, yet I continued still, bent almost double, gazing fixedly at the spot where I had last seen her, my mind in a strange condition, possessed by sensations which were keenly felt and yet contradictory. So vivid was the image left on my brain that she still seemed to be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in this gross world; and at the same time I knew that she had been there—that ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Lord; and we firmly believe that they are practicable, and binding on every Christian, and that, in the life to come, every man will be rewarded according to his works. And, further, it is our belief that, in order to enable mankind to put in practice these sacred precepts, many of which are contradictory to the unregenerate will of man, every man, coming into the world, is endued with a measure of the light, grace, or good spirit, of Christ, by which, as it is attended to, he is enabled to distinguish good from evil, and to correct the disorderly passions ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... suffering to most of us as we conquer for them our awkwardness and our shyness? Let us pause for a moment, and try to be just. Let us contemplate these social ethics, which call for so much that is, perhaps, artificial and troublesome and contradictory. Society, so long as it is the congregation of the good, the witty, the bright, the intelligent, and the gifted, is the thing most necessary to us all. We are apt to like it and its excitements almost too well, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... have already said, those characters were meant to be both mouthpieces of the author and revived historical figures, but they were also meant—and primarily, I suspect—to be something else: embodiments of the contradictory phases of a single individual, namely ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... all nature. The real God of India is by himself without power; real efficacious power is attributed only to three divinities who exist externally to him. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, possessed of qualities in part contradictory and attributes that are mutually exclusive, have no other accord or harmony than that which results from the power of things itself, and which is found external to their own thoughts. Such is the Indian Trimurti. What an immense difference between this Triad and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... recited in low and measured tones one of his own poems, caring little or nothing whether his neighbors attended to him or not. The glib tongue of the Marchese Gualdro ran on smoothly and incessantly, though he frequently lost the thread of his anecdotes and became involved in a maze of contradictory assertions. The rather large nose of the Chevalier Mancini reddened visibly as he laughed joyously to himself at nothing in particular—in short, the table had become a glittering whirlpool of excitement and feverish folly, which at a mere touch, or word out of season, might rise to a raging ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... died away, and something wholly contradictory took its place. He felt a rush of self-pity, and then of trust. What if he called on her to help him—unveiled himself to this kind and charming woman—confessed to her his remorse about Phoebe—his secret miseries ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all sorts of contradictory rumours about the effect of the German crusade in the United States. Oh well, the world has got to choose whether it will have English or German domination in Europe; that's the single big question at issue. For my part I'll risk the English and then make a fresh ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... all likely," answered Dorothy, biting her lip, "that such a thing will happen." She was swayed by two contradictory impulses—one to scream with laughter, the other to ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... distinguished American statesman remarked that the war of the rebellion was waged "to expound the constitution." It is a pertinent question now, shall all other contradictory principles be retained in the constitution until they, too, are expounded by civil war? On what theory is it less dangerous to defraud twenty million women of their inalienable rights than four million negroes? Is not the same principle involved in both cases? We ask congress to pass a sixteenth ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... ago, how infinitely unimportant, seemed all those convolutions of trail and argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and Ferrier entered, with Marsham and the butler behind him. Mr. Ferrier, in his London frock-coat, appeared rounder and heavier than ever but for the contradictory vigor and lightness of his step, the shrewd cheerfulness of the eyes. It had been a hard week in Parliament, however, and his features and complexion showed signs ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of industry and finance, the motive of power and the craving for certain states of consciousness all exist together, and to some extent antagonize one another. The present practical desire is confused by the traditional object. The will of a nation is a composite will, and its history is full of contradictory impulses, and also full of surprises. Nations often think they are fighting for economic reasons when their real motives are plainly to gain military distinction. The reputation is quite as satisfying as any material prosperity gained. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea: ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... overlook this. It's mad to go on. It's mad anyway. If you knew how I've lied to myself, how I've struggled and fought and twisted to keep this back from you! And here it is, confused and grotesque and contradictory and wrong. If I could look at you and say it, I could get it right. If I could look at you—if I could see you. Give me a chance. Then I'll go away again—if you say so. I had to give you warning—it didn't seem square not. And I've bungled it like this! I tell you I can't help ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... city of which one hears the most contradictory accounts. The mere traveller not uncommonly pronounces it "disappointing, uninteresting, less foreign than most Continental capitals,"—"everything to be seen at best second-rate France," etc., etc. The Museo, of course, must be admired,—even the most ignorant know that ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... shalt not lust, thou shalt not swear; into that which is completely abolished, such as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, being tainted with unrighteousness, and having the same work of unrighteousness, and these are taken away by the Saviour because contradictory (for those things which are contradictory are mutually destructive), "For I say unto you that ye in no wise resist evil, but if any one smite thee turn to him the other cheek also;" and into that part which is changed and converted from that ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... environment at all, and consequently could have no recognition of our own existence. The confusion of thought involved even in the attempt to state such a condition shows it to be perfectly inconceivable, for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory and self-destructive. On this account it is clear that our own existence and that of the world around us necessarily implies the presence of a Universal Mind acting on certain fixed lines of its own which establish the basis for the working of all individual minds. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... that, as Bullinger remarks, "they perceived he expected never to return home again." Even his horse seemed to have a foreboding of evil. He shied, as Werner Steiner relates, and as many saw with terror, backwards. Too sagacious not to observe that he must encounter contradictory measures, the lukewarmness of allies, and secret treachery, which he more than once predicted; too manly to retire now in the hour of need; too full of confidence in God, not to believe that He would protect ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration, and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would be exposed to a danger the ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... in order of review—a pursuit of a far more ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my second brother's whimsical, self-contradictory character to view with the profoundest contempt the learned profession by which he gained his livelihood, and he is now occupying the long leisure hours of his old age in composing a voluminous treatise, intended, one of these days, to eject the whole body corporate of ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... reach the newspapers are regarded with suspicion, not only because they come exclusively through British channels, but on account of their contradictory character. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ventured no farther than to inform them privately, that they would do him an acceptable service if they chose John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, for their primate [e]. The election of that prelate was accordingly made without a contradictory vote; and the king, to obviate all contests, endeavoured to persuade the suffragan bishops not to insist on their claim of concurring in the election; but those prelates, persevering in their pretensions, sent an agent to maintain their cause before Innocent; while the king and the convent ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... accentuated communal jealousies and gave external form and substance to the struggles of town with town. So far distant was the possibility of confederation on a grand scale that every city strove within itself to establish one of two contradictory principles, and the energies of the people were expended in a struggle that set neighbor against neighbor on the field of war and in the market-place. The confusion, exhaustion, and demoralization engendered by these conflicts determined the advent of the Despots; and after 1400 Italy could ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... developed into a very personal thing. And with that thought came also the conception of what a powerful antagonist he would be. For it improves some men to wear glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue. It was allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet playful, bold yet reverential. Many a time I have longed for Clovelly's tongue. Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without his art; and of this ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... would thus interpret Lord Roberts's delay and his contradictory orders to Lord Methuen, but it was rather galling not to be able to ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... consolation used to be setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated bores especially—Me. de Stael or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis; he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set, I don't mean personally, but less tiresome, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to everything and everybody. Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in summer, he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... meaning. When Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same way—frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... (England), said he, "the laws are numerous, but then one is always found to be a key to the other. In Ireland it is just the contrary; your laws so perpetually clash with one another, and are so very contradictory, that I protest I don't understand them."—"True, my lord," cried Harwood, "that ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... the East nor of the West but rather international in its universality, yet India is specially fitted to make great contributions. {FN8-5} The burning Indian imagination, which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is held in check by the habit of concentration. This restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... manifestation that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... that the Council could do was to heap honors and emoluments on the family of Nuncomar; and this they did. In the meantime the assizes commenced; a true bill was found; and Nuncomar was brought before Sir Elijah Impey and a jury composed of Englishmen. A great quantity of contradictory swearing, and the necessity of having every word of the evidence interpreted, protracted the trial to a most unusual length. At last a verdict of guilty was returned, and the Chief Justice pronounced sentence of death on ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the passions and vices. Yet he felt himself irresistibly dragged along by the uncommon vivacity of action in this wild Drama; and at the same time powerfully attracted by the depth, the tenderness and fulness of true feeling manifested in it: so that, at last, out of those contradictory emotions of his, a clear admiration and pride for his Son's bold and rich spirit maintained the upper hand. By Schiller's friends and closer connections, especially by his Mother and Sisters, all pains were of course taken to keep up this favourable humour in the Father, and carefully ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Farquharson," Mrs Crow turned to him. "An' how reely BE ye? We've heard better, an' worse, an' middlin'—there's ben such contradictory reports." ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... it stands, but this is very bad.) It is a mistake to think of it as a first article. The article itself is in the main a mistake. Firstly, the subject requires the greatest discretion and nicety of touch. And secondly, it is all wrong and self-contradictory. Nobody can for a moment suppose that "sporting" amusements are the sports of the PEOPLE; the whole gist of the best part of the description is to show that they are the amusements of a peculiar ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... His real nature and qualities, and dishonoring Him. A very good definition, if you only know what His nature and qualities are. But that is not revealed; for, studying Him through the medium of the bible, we find Him illimitably contradictory. He commands us not to work on the Sabbath day, because it is holy. Yet God works himself on the Sabbath day. The sun, moon and stars swing round in their orbits, and all the creation attributed to this God goes on as on other days. He says: "Honor thy father and mother," ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the last order of the people, that was law? Nay, certainly they all knew it; and they therefore obeyed the Aemilian law, rather than the old one, under which the censors had been at first created; because it was the last order; and because, when two laws are contradictory, the new always repeals the old. Do you mean to say, Appius, that the people are not bound by the Aemilian law? Or, that the people are bound, and you alone exempted? The Aemilian law bound those violent censors, Caius Furius and Marcus Geganius, who showed what mischief that office might do ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... earth, meeting with but little success. The allegorical idea cannot be followed without weariness, and, in fact, the intentions of the writer are by no means clear, the allegory being frequently involved and contradictory. The beauty of the poem lies in its detached passages, its occasional poetic touches, its graphic pictures, biting satire, and withering denunciation of fraud, corruption, and tyranny. The measure adopted is the unrhymed alliterative, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... were mild, good natured, and full of contradictory characteristics. Despite their usual good nature, they were capable of great bursts of passion, particularly over public affairs. They often looked dirty, because their white clothes soiled easily; yet they probably spent more time and money over external cleanliness than ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... long in a spin"—"too much length in the limbs for a light weight; bone's always awfully heavy"—"dark under the eye, been going too fast for training"—"a swell all over, but rides no end," with other innumerable contradictory phrases, according as the speaker was "on" him or against him, buzzed about him from the riff-raff of the Ring, in no way ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... The love of action, the impatience of abstraction, the equity which leads us to desire that every one may have a fair hearing, the reserve which had rather detect personal experience than have it announced— tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading to results the most contradictory, yet capable of the noblest cultivation—seem to explain the fact, that writers of this kind should have flourished so greatly among us, and that scarcely any others ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... public is well aware that each doctor has something different to say or prescribe. I have a personal case in point. During eighteen months I consulted seven different doctors, and got seven different contrary diagnoses as well as contradictory modes of treatment, and this, too, in the city of Munich, which is hardly secondary to any other city for its medical talent. Is there any cause to blame the public for running to the magnetizers? I should do so myself if my magnetic susceptibility ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... moment of his agony, came inspiration. He must save them all with a lie! Queer that, queer and contradictory! Yes, after practicing the truth, he must save them all ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the mythological system should collapse when once the spontaneous play of imaginative thought gave place to self-conscious, systematising reflection. The mass of incoherent, and often contradictory myths, in which the true was so strangely blended with the false, the beautiful with the ugly or revolting, fell almost by its own weight. The more solid materials it contained were first transmuted into allegories, and then expressed in the language of science ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... it, every word, and in his contradictory heat and flurry and despair he felt as if there were no words at his call which were strong enough to ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most of them finished their career. It is an instructive fact that no ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... their green and yellow and red lamps, held a whispered consultation on the manner of conciliating these contradictory demands. Then, after a minute's hesitation, the violins began the prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popular in Venice—the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patrician Gritti, the music by an ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... have to those of the body: but, overlooking all that they say as of little consequence, I shall treat only of the thing itself. Let us, then, understand perturbation to imply a restlessness from the variety and confusion of contradictory opinions; and that when this heat and disturbance of the mind is of any standing, and has taken up its residence, as it were, in the veins and marrow, then commence diseases and sickness, and those aversions which are in opposition to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a science, much research has been made to determine its effect, if any, upon plant growth. The earlier investigations gave in many cases contradictory results. Whether this was due to a lack of knowledge of the science on the part of the one performing the experiments, or some defect in the technical applications, we are not prepared to say; but this we do know, that such men as Jolabert, Nollet, Mainbray and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... in the making of yearly instead of permanent appropriations for the civil list and military establishments, yet when the House desired to strengthen public credit it had rendered the appropriation for those objects permanent and not yearly. It was, therefore, "contradictory to suppose that the House was bound to do a certain act at the same time that they were exercising the discretionary power of voting upon it." The debate determined nothing, but it is of interest as the first declaration in Congress of the supremacy ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... is," said Durtal, who thought over again the contradictory declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most attractive and the most atrocious life; "the fact is that the good God deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... peculiarly alive to the generosity that leans towards the weak and the wronged; the engaging mixture of mildness and gaiety with which she tended her peevish and sneering uncle, convinced him of her better and more enduring qualities of disposition and womanly heart. And even—so strange and contradictory are our feelings—the very remembrance that she was connected with a family so hateful to him made her own image the more bright from the darkness that surrounded it. For was it not with the daughter of his foe that the lover of Verona fell in love at first sight? And is not that a common type ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... containing water at this time. He described to Hamd its situation, and the way to it, with a view of persuading him to go and fetch some water for us; but his description was so confused, and I thought contradictory in several circumstances, and withal so pompous, that I concluded it to be all a story, and told him he was a babbler. "A babbler!" he exclaimed; "min Allah, no body in my whole life ever called me ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... Lost," and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book. She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness. Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well. She remembered people's ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered dates and suggested agreeable ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... malignant delusion maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by an absolute determination and even a fanatic zeal not to receive one new idea. Tenets involving the most palpable impossibilities, and asserted in self-contradictory terms, must stand inviolable to all question or controversy; literature must be scouted as a profane folly; not a principle of true philosophy is to be admitted; hardly is an application of the plainest mechanics to improve a machine or implement to be tolerated; ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... of that light unreflecting sex: varium semper et mutabile. And then her Fine-ladyism, though a purseless one: capricious, coquettish, and with all the finer sensibilities of the heart; now in the rackets, now in the sullens; vivid in contradictory resolves; laughing, weeping, without reason,—though these acts are said to be signs of season. Consider, too, how she has had to work her way, all along, by flattery and cajolery; wheedling, eaves-dropping, namby-pambying; how she needs wages, and knows no other ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... connected with the line so as to be receptive of a call at any time while the telephone is not in use. The requirements also demand that no conducting path shall normally exist between the two sides of the line. These two apparently contradictory requirements are met by placing a condenser in series with the ringer so that the ringer will be in a path that will readily transmit the alternating ringing currents sent out from the central-office generator, ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... angler take fyshe, surely thenne is there noo man merier than he is in his spyryte!!" Yet Isaac Walton called this art, "The Contemplative Man's Recreation." But a book-fisherman, like myself, must not presume to reconcile such great and contradictory authorities.] ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... friend, I myself was the happy man. My first name was Francis as well as his; and I had found Clara so gentle, so confiding, so flatteringly cordial in her intercourse with me, that, once within my power, and prevented from receding by shame, and a thousand contradictory feelings, I had, with the vanity of an amoureux de seize ans, the confidence to believe I could reconcile the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... arrangements to that effect before leaving home. Rosa's reference to my desire to go back to my clients was sheer badinage"—smiling mournfully. "You have heard her talk often enough to understand how little of earnest there is in the raillery." More insincerity! For, contradictory as it may appear, Mrs. Sutton felt constrained to believe his unsupported word, in opposition to his wife's written assertion that he designed to return to ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... claim a few words later on, has been exhaustively threshed out; and in view of the contradictory statements for and against the habit of opium smoking, it is recognized that any conclusion, satisfactory to both parties, is a very remote possibility. The Chinese themselves, who are chiefly interested in the argument, have lately come to a very definite conclusion, which is that opium has to ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... forth two distinct and contradictory theories of the functions of natural selection. According to the one theory natural selection is selective or preservative, and nothing more. According to the other theory natural selection creates the variations(!) ... It certainly seems absurd to speak of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... technicalities. Every legal subterfuge was exhausted by the quartet of talented and high-priced attorneys provided by Belle Cora's questionable fortune but unquestioned affection. The trial proved a feast of oratory, a mass of contradictory evidence. Before it began a juror named Jacob Mayer accused L. Sokalasky with offering him a bribe. Sokalasky, brought into court, denied the charge. And there it ended, save that thenceforth the "twelve good men and ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... life up to the Eighteenth Century were very contradictory; there were even a few attempts to give him a supernatural parentage; and certain good men, as if to hold the balance true, denied that he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... therefore from the former doctrine, that that God whose words they are, is able to make a reconciliation and most sweet and harmonious agreement with all the sayings therein, how obscure, cross, dark, and contradictory soever they seem to thee. To understand all mysteries, to have all knowledge, to be able to comprehend with all saints, is a great work; enough to crush the spirit, and to stretch the strings of the most capacious and widened soul that breatheth on this side glory, be they notwithstanding ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... determined not to do so again. Thus two hungry souls, thirsting for each other's love, acted the cold part of casual acquaintances. Could the veil have been lifted, could the barriers have been broken down, what misery might have been spared! but it is ever thus. Humanity is contradictory and the heart's ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... only just missed the final shaping which turns epic material into epic poetry. For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the same thing as epic poetry. Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely related, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively small size, with no intention beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap of excellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face of stubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some great structure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producing ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... stared at her, dismayed. All his confused contradictory impressions assumed a new aspect at this announcement; and to hide his surprise he added lightly: "Ah—then you will have Paris, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Merodach were sons of Hea or Hoa. Many deities, however, are without parentage, as not only Il or Ra, but Hea, San (the Sun), Ishtar, and Nergal. Sometimes the relationship alleged is confused, and even contradictory, as in the case of Nin or Ninip, who is at one time the son, at another the father of Bel, and who is at once the son and the husband of Beltis. It is evident that the genealogical aspect is not that upon which ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... it seemed somewhat flat to make the same preparations a second time over, but as no contradictory message had been received, it did not appear possible that a second disappointment could supervene. The tea- table was set out with special care, and a supply of home-made cakes placed on the three-storied brass stand. Once more Miss Briskett donned her best gown, and sat gazing ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... They were young men with money and friends to back them, who, having taken to literature as soon as they chipped the university shell, were already in the full swing of periodical production, when Tom, to quote two rather contradictory utterances of his mother, ruined his own prospects and made Letty's fortune by marrying her. I can not say, however, that they had found him remunerative employment. The best they had done for him was to bring him into such a half sort of connection with a certain weekly paper that now and then ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the petty cares which obscured the morning of my life," Mary declares through her heroine,—"continual restraint in the most trivial matters, unconditional submission to orders, which as a mere child I soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory. Thus are we destined to experience a mixture of bitterness with the recollection of our most innocent enjoyment." Edward, as the mother's favorite, escaped her severity; but it fell upon Mary with double force, and was with her carried out with a thoroughness ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... comers, and make himself necessary and indispensable. Under that placid exterior he conceals, I believe, a boundless ambition, and hatred and jealousy lurk under his professions of esteem and political attachment. His is one of those contradictory characters, containing in it so much of mixed good and evil, that it is difficult to strike an accurate balance between the two, and the acts of his political life are of a corresponding description, of questionable utility and merit, though always marked by great ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... I found myself much embarrassed to fulfill so many pressing and contradictory duties, the consequences of my imprudence; had I been in my natural situation, after the proposition and refusal of the journey to Geneva, I had only to remain quiet, and everything was as it should be. But I had foolishly made of it an affair which could not remain in the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... instincts. If a single point is in accordance with their nature, he labors to twist all the others to his purpose, although it may involve a fundamental principle impossible to reconcile. Some one else succeeds in another point, and proceeds to recommend something altogether different. False and contradictory assertions are made either through ignorance, or interest. Interest may blind the judgment, ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... medical men of sound judgment, and long experience, is that the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less, if all diseases were left to themselves, than it now is under the multiform, reckless, and contradictory modes of practice, with which practitioners of diverse denominations carry on their differences, at the expense of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... we had a very welcome north-east breeze; with the help of the sails we could now increase the not very reckless speed that the motor was capable of accomplishing. Before we sailed, the most contradictory accounts were current of the Fram's sailing qualities. There were some who asserted that the ship could not be got through the water at all, while with equal force the contrary view was maintained — that she was a notable fast sailer. As might be supposed, the truth as usual lay about half-way ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... really the feelings of this man? Is this the man who only two short months before proposed to suckle his child with his setter? Yes, I answer, the very same man; nor, in fact, is there, to the eye of reason, any thing contradictory in his ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... what aspect she would appear, she whose nature seemed to him so varied and contradictory, and whose face was the index to these changing phases. She came in quietly, a young girl, pale, inquiring, yet saying no word; but there was a sparkle in her gaze that made the blood leap for a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... what was going on in Europe; he could only sense it day by day. He had always been taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. The invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as he knew it in his friends and neighbours. He still cherished the hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid people would apologize and right ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... of bitterness against her for having indirectly caused that great unhappiness, and at the same time so keenly resent her sympathy, which she could not easily express without speaking indignantly of Miss Starbrow—this seemed so strange, so almost incongruous and contradictory, that if the case had not been so sad she would have burst into a laugh. As it was she only burst into tears, and threw her arms ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... went on to tell me something which might seem to a great many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said—and she said it with the most profound conviction. She told me that your husband has fallen ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... optimism, implied in the phrase that "God is all," turns at once into a pessimism. For, as soon as we inquire into the meaning of this "all," we find that it is only a negation of everything we can know or be. Such a pantheism as this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all things upwards to a manifestation of the divine, it really levels all downwards to the level of mere unqualified being, a stagnant and empty unknowable. It leaves only a choice between akosmism and atheism, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... be supposed, however, from the above remarks, about the multiform and self-contradictory character of the amorphous thing called Hinduism, that it is therefore impossible for us to understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite tendency, an underlying philosophy and pervasive fundamental ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... as on neutral ground. Auguste passed through the rooms without finding the woman who now exercised so mighty an influence on his fate. He entered an empty boudoir where card-tables were placed awaiting players; and sitting down on a divan he gave himself up to the most contradictory thoughts about her. A man presently took the young officer by the arm, and looking up the baron was stupefied to behold the pauper of the rue Coquilliere, the Ferragus of Ida, the lodger in the rue Soly, the Bourignard of Justin, the convict of the police, and the dead ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Miss Abbott, and closed her eyes wearily. Each moment her difficulties were increasing. She wished that she was not so tired, so open to contradictory impressions. She longed for Harriet's burly obtuseness or for the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... that I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... seen by this retrospect how difficult it is to seize all the shifting subtleties of this remarkable character. His sophisms even, when self-contradictory, are so adroit that they are often hard to parry. He made a great merit to himself for not having originated the new episcopates; but it should be remembered that he did his utmost to enforce the measure, which was "so holy a scheme that he would ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... division was brought up between 9 and 10 o'clock and posted on Bate's left, Johnson's line and the line of Bate's refused brigade paralleling the pike at a distance of not more than 150 yards. Many contradictory statements have been made relative to the distance of that part of the Confederate line from the pike. The owner of the land pointed out to me a small plantation graveyard as being just inside their line that night. He said that the position of their line was marked, after they had gone in the ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger
... be dislodged or disturbed by the inhabitants of a Territory even though ninety-nine out of every hundred were opposed to it. In the Territorial Legislatures laws might be passed to protect slavery but not to exclude it. From such contradictory constructions in the same party, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary, it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world. Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... then hypocrisy is one of the great pillars of civilization, and how does it matter what the heart says while the lips are silent? The Recording Angel can alone read hearts, and he must often find them singularly contradictory and ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the professor led Peppino into giving me a great deal of information about the evil eye in which he swore he did not believe. It was all rather indefinite and contradictory, partly, no doubt, because those who believe in it most firmly are the analfabeti and ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes of collection; the obscurity of numerous and contradictory laws; the tedious and expensive forms of judicial proceedings; the partial administration of justice; and the universal corruption, which increased the influence of the rich and aggravated the misfortunes of the poor. A sentiment of patriotic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
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