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More "Paradoxical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shakespeare's fame was slow in crossing the English Channel. The French dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived and died in the paradoxical faith that the British drama reached its apogee in the achievement of the Scottish Latinist, George Buchanan, who was reckoned in France "prince of the poets of our day." In Buchanan's classical tragedies Montaigne played a part, while he was a student at ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... went on ski around the bay and back across. Little or no wind; sky clear, temperature -25 deg.. It was wonderfully mild considering the temperature—this sounds paradoxical, but the sensation of cold does not conform to the thermometer—it is obviously dependent on the wind and less obviously on the humidity of the air and the ice crystals floating in it. I cannot very ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... and friendship the same privileges which are undisputably granted to the darker passions of enmity and resentment; such a philosophy is more like a satyr than a true delineation or description of human nature; and may be a good foundation for paradoxical wit and raillery, but is a very bad one for any ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... I wished to be paradoxical, that this doctrine seems strange precisely because it is so common. It is what most people who think at all believe, but what nobody likes to avow. We have become so accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold with unequivocal ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... bearing upon the closing scenes of Christ's history. In its types as well as in its prophecies His death was foreshadowed, and the humiliating and ignominious treatment to which He was subjected minutely described. The predictions involved events that appeared contradictory and paradoxical until their fulfilment furnished the key. He Himself told the disciples again and again that He should be crucified. This form of execution was a Roman punishment reserved for slaves and the vilest criminals; ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... water shoaled (approaching land is like nearing truth in metaphysics), and ere we yet touched the beach, Borabolla declared, that we were already landed. Which paradoxical assertion implied, that the hospitality of Mondoldo was such, that in all directions it radiated far out upon the lagoon, embracing a great circle; so that no canoe could sail by the island, without its occupants being so long ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... to these questions appear paradoxical. The theses of the Apologists finally overcame all scruples in ecclesiastical circles and were accepted by the Graeco-Roman world, because they made Christianity rational without taking from, or adding to, its traditional historic material. The secret of the epoch-making success of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... SIXTH defect the want, in some important cases, of a due responsibility in the government to the people, arising from that frequency of elections which in other cases produces this responsibility. This remark will, perhaps, appear not only new, but paradoxical. It must nevertheless be acknowledged, when explained, to be as undeniable as ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... arguments in favour of a state of nature are plausible, but unsound. I say unsound; for to assert that a state of nature is preferable to civilization in all its possible perfection, is, in other words, to arraign supreme wisdom; and the paradoxical exclamation, that God has made all things right, and that evil has been introduced by the creature whom he formed, knowing what he formed, is as unphilosophical ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... evening, he repeated his usual paradoxical declamation against action in publick speaking. 'Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... appeared La Chalotais's Essai d'education nationale (1763). Rene de la Chalotais, a Solicitor-General for the Parliament of Bretagne, was one of the notable French parliamentarians of the middle of the eighteenth century. Unlike Rousseau's highly imaginary, exaggerated, sentimental, and paradoxical volume, La Chalotais produced a practical and philosophical discussion of the problem of the education of a people. Declaring firmly that education was essentially a civil affair; that it was the function of government to make citizens ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Cross as the means of His glorifying, because it is His throne of saving power. The paradoxical words of our text rest upon His profound conviction that in His death He was about to put forth a mightier and diviner power than ever He had manifested in His life. They are the same in effect and in tone as the great words: 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Now I want you to ask ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... a contradiction to say, that, though these Crinoids were the only representatives of their Class in the early geological ages, while it includes five Orders at the present time, Echinoderms were as numerous and various then as now. But, paradoxical as it may seem, this is nevertheless true, not only for this Class, but for many others in the Animal Kingdom. The same numerical proportions, the same richness and vividness of conception were manifested in the early creation as now; and though many of the groups were wanting that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Paradoxical though it may seem, the leaden hours flew on feathered foot. Dusk fell, then shortly darkness. Night deepened, and the stars came out. From the window I watched the moon rise till it flooded the room with its pale light, my mind at last fallen into the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... up provisions proportionate to the needs of the egg which it is about to lay know beforehand the sex of that egg? Or is the truth even more paradoxical? What we have to do is to turn this suspicion into a certainty demonstrated by experiment. And first let us find out how the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... A paradoxical philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that aphorism of Montesquieu's, 'Happy the people whose annals are tiresome,' has said, 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant.' In which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found some grain ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... should have been, not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other. The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness. He behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders' minds. He set the judgments of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was not. All this ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... with them. We continue, as in the two last ages, to read, more generally than I believe is now done on the continent, the authors of sound antiquity. These occupy our minds. They give us another taste and turn, and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality. It is not that I consider this writer as wholly destitute of just notions. Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the GENERAL SPIRIT AND TENDENCY of his works is mischievous; and the more ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and Normans were of the same great Teutonic family, however modified by the different circumstances of movement and residence, there was no new ethnic element introduced; and, paradoxical as it may seem, the fusion of these peoples was of great benefit, in the end, to England. Though the Saxons at first suffered from Norman oppression, the kingdom was brought into large inter-European relations, and a far better literary culture was introduced, more varied in subject, more ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... for the effect was such as to produce a partial paralysis of the hands and arms to the elbow. Again and again I tried it in every case of extraction and many other experiments, doubting my own senses for a long time at a result so anomalous and paradoxical. I was reminded just here of a phenomenon which gave me additional proof—that of blowing a dull fire to revive it. For a minute or so one blows and blows in rapid succession until, rising from the effort, a sense of giddiness for a few moments so overcomes that the upright position is with ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... later in these papers, but it is useful here to make this passing comment, that with Corot he represents what is best in our modern art; that the greatest quality of our modern art is its steadfast reliance on nature; and that, paradoxical as it may seem, they are alike in taking only that from nature which is serviceable to the clarity of their expression, being in this both at odds with the common practice of modern painting, which usually adopts a more servile attitude towards nature. Corot painted ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... it that this saying of the Apostle's, 'Of whom I am chief,' paradoxical and exaggerated as it seems to many men, is in spirit that which all who know themselves ought to re-echo; and without which there is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Duigenan and his ministerial disciples. Such is that well-earned popularity, the result of those extraordinary expeditions, so expensive to ourselves, and so useless to our allies; of those singular enquiries, so exculpatory to the accused and so dissatisfactory to the people; of those paradoxical victories, so honourable, as we are told, to the British name, and so destructive to the best interests of the British nation: above all, such is the reward of a conduct pursued by ministers towards ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... painter to compose an animal not out of the elements, but out of the entire bodies of several, of an ass, for instance, a cock and a crocodile, so as to produce an outrageous individual, with whom even a duck-billed Platypus would think twice before he fraternized—ornithorynchous and paradoxical though he ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... interesting aspects of hypnosis with a view toward helping you if you are having difficulty responding the way you desire. I have had the following paradoxical situation happen many times. A subject calls my office, requesting to be conditioned for self-hypnosis. He further requests that he be allowed to bring along a member of his family or a friend for the hypnotic session. These ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... indelible marks on the judgment of many well-meaning liberals, that his exaggerated tone of aggressive defence in the Prussian Landtag, the furious onslaught of his harangues, were intended to silence the tongues at court which denounced him as a demagogue and a radical. Paradoxical as it may sound, one may safely assert that nothing more effectually helped King William in his later foreign policy, than the opinion pervading all Europe in 1864 and 1866, that, having lost all hold upon the minds of his people, weakened and crippled in every sense ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... cellar entrances, noisome rears of tottering tenements, to grease-fingered doors as impassive as the stolid faces of guards who drowsed behind them asleep to all save those who knew the deadly pass-word. Paradoxical doors which shut in, instead of out, danger! But Saul knew them and they knew Saul. He knew further the haunts of beginners, where opium is high and the surroundings are fairly clean, he knew the haunts of the confirmed, where opium is cheaper ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... not suppose that I put this before you for the purpose of raising a paradoxical difficulty; the fact is, that the great mass of deposits have taken place in sea-bottoms which are gradually sinking, and have been formed under the very conditions ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... Now this is the very thing which, according to Hamilton, Schelling actually did. Mr. Mill does not attempt to show that Hamilton is wrong in his interpretation of Schelling, nor, if he is right, what were the reasons which led Schelling to so paradoxical a position: he simply assumes that no man could hold Schelling's view, and there is an end of it.[AW] Hamilton's purpose is to reassert in substance the doctrine which Kant maintained, and which Schelling ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... of men in certain states of society who are manly, but not masculine. There is nothing paradoxical in the statement, nor is it a mere play upon the meanings of words. There are men of all ages, young, middle-aged, and old, who possess many estimable virtues, who show physical courage wherever it is necessary, who are honourable, strong, industrious, and tenacious of purpose, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... courses, that was all; a dinner without pretence, where we served ourselves with the pepper-mill. The charming Madame Miraz presided with her bright smile, having her child by her side in a high-chair. She spoke but little, but her sweet and intelligent attention followed our light and paradoxical chat, the good-humored fooling of men of letters; and at the dessert she took a rose from the bouquet which ornamented the table, and placed it in her hair near her ear with a supreme grace. She was indeed that lovely and silent friend whom ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Now, whilst the followers of the Chesterfield kennel sought their foxes without the walls, we always knew where to look for ours within; and, whatever their success, we always found; nay, what may sound somewhat paradoxical, but is true nevertheless, the more we hunted, the more we found. Like their brothers of the "brush," our Reynards were sly fellows too, and would double and dodge, and get away sometimes, just when we thought ourselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the pigeon-shooters' enclosure, the railway station and the foreshore. He was alone, as always. That a man who, since the great folly of his life, had obstinately cultivated solitude should make holiday in Monte Carlo, of all places, is paradoxical enough; but in truth the crowd around the tables, the diners at the hotel, the pigeon-shooters, the whole cosmopolitan gathering of idle rich and predatory poor, were a Spectacle to him and no more. If once or twice a day he ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... acumen and audacity has said, "Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he is."1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear is susceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For death is, in its naked significance, the state of not being. Of course, then, it has no existence save in the conceptions of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... brilliant fellow he is," he whispered. "I never realised before how magnificently paradoxical your Irish minds are. That pose of abject self depreciation which is in reality not wholly a pose but a vehement protest against the shallow judgment of ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... were tending to decay, or were passing into the new form of music. Tasso was at once the representative poet of his age and the representative martyr of his age. He was the latter, though this may seem paradoxical, in even a stricter sense than Bruno. Bruno, coming into violent collision with the prejudices of the century, expiated his antagonism by a cruel death. Tasso, yielding to those influences, lingered out a life of irresolute misery. His nature was such, that the very conditions which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation. What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its "creation out of nothing," and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all times. To remove the enormous evil arising from Augustine's ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... dynamo which worked the pump. Professor Clerk Maxwell thought this discovery the greatest of the century; and the remark has been repeated more than once. But it is a remark which derives its chief importance from the man who made it, and its credentials from the paradoxical surprise it causes. The discovery in question is certainly fraught with very great consequences to the mechanical world; but in itself it is no discovery of importance, and naturally follows from Faraday's far greater and more original discovery ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... increased by farming, and vastly diminished by his open-hearted, swift responsiveness to every sudden or permanent appeal to his purse, the family wardrobe, or the larder. In this excellent and honoured man, whose very piety was as sublime as it was confused, rambling, and paradoxical, we have the quaint original of Dr. Primrose, one of the most lovable characters that has ever lived to charm the page ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... pleased to be paradoxical," Brilliana asserted. Evander put the suggestion aside with a ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... admirers of the great poet whom I have known in these parts. His reverence, his feeling, are thoroughly intelligent. Everything in his mind is well defined; and his horror of the vague, and false, nay, even (suppose another horror here, for grammar's sake) of the startling and paradoxical, have their beauty. I think I could know Mr. G—— long, and see him perpetually, without any touch of satiety; such variety is made by the very absence of pretension, and the love of truth. I found much amusement in leading him to sketch ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the ratification of this proposal by the Unionists. The action at once consolidated the Premier's position. I doubt if in all political history you can uncover a series of events more paradoxical or perplexing or find a solution arrived at with greater skill and strategy. It was a revelation of Smuts with his ripe statesmanship put to the test, and ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... at the meetings of the club has from time to time excited interest because of its connection with a fundamental principle of evolutionary astronomy. This principle, which looks paradoxical enough, is that up to a certain stage, as a star loses heat by radiation into space, its temperature becomes higher. It is now known as Lane's Law. Some curiosity as to its origin, as well as the personality of its author, has sometimes been expressed. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... dear, what I could not have told at the time, but I think you are now old enough to know that such an experience is often the best cure for a man, who thereafter, should he be fortunate in finding the right woman, anchors his affections and proves the most assiduous of husbands. This may sound paradoxical to you—" ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... not by any means "Fixed Stars." During the evening they manage to accomplish the somewhat paradoxical-sounding feat of shining in the same parts, yet in different places and at different times, appearing everywhere with undiminished brilliancy. The Student of the Music-Hall Planetary system, has only by observation to ascertain the exact time and place of the appearance ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... land of the Irish Bull, a paradoxical Bovine whose cross-eyed horns can toss a British commonplace in two ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... scattered the exotic perfumes, emptied his vaporizers, threw in his concentrated spirits, poured his balms, and, in the exasperated and stifling heat of the room there rose a crazy sublimated nature, a paradoxical nature which was neither genuine nor charming, reuniting the tropical spices and the peppery breath of Chinese sandal wood and Jamaica hediosmia with the French odors of jasmine, hawthorn and verbena. Regardless of seasons ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... her bosom rise and fall as she leaned forward with one arm on the mantelpiece, argued it out with myself, and came to the paradoxical conclusion that I could pack her off without a pang to Kamtchatka and the embraces of her unknown husband, but could not hand her over to Dale without feelings of the deepest repugnance. A pretty position to find myself in. I threw ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... type of professor. But knowing the nature of his public reputation, especially in Edinburgh, where the recollection of his daft student days was as yet stronger than the impression made by his recent performances in literature, he was well aware that his candidature must seem paradoxical, and stood little chance of success. The election took place in the late autumn of the same year, and he was defeated, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... piscatorius) has not usurped his rather paradoxical name. He retires to the midst of the sea-weed and algae. On his body and all round his head he bears fringed appendages which, by their resemblance to the leaves of marine plants, aid the animal to conceal himself. The colour of his body also does not ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... all know, formed a new plan, a plan insigne, recens, indictum ore alio, a plan for supporting the freedom of our Constitution by court intrigues, and for removing its corruptions by Indian delinquency. To carry that bold, paradoxical design into execution, sufficient funds and apt instruments became necessary. You are perfectly sensible that a Parliamentary reform occupies his thoughts day and night, as an essential member in this extraordinary project. In his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... appear too great a paradox even for our wise and paradoxical age to endure; therefore I shall handle it with all tenderness, and with the utmost deference to that great and profound majority which is ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... peculiar to all human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according to Bertillon's system. It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder—all ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... without a previous explanation, it might seem paradoxical to say it—that oftentimes under a continual accession of light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for explanation—all ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... people had known, who had gone about Florence for twenty-four years and married a prominent citizen, and whom Dante had loved with the romantic passion of the Middle Ages, only the misplaced ingenuity of paradoxical critics can doubt.[35] Yet at her entry she is escorted by a procession, the members of which represent the books of the Bible, the seven virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; while the car on which she is borne (which itself denotes the Church) ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... doing so indirectly through the denunciation of vice. He has no new secret of morality to reveal, no fresh lights to throw upon problems of conduct; his advice is obvious and straightforward; neither in form nor matter is there anything paradoxical. He was no student of philosophy,[730] though naturally familiar with the more important philosophic creeds and disposed by temperament to fall in with the views of the stern Stoic school. The conclusion of the tenth satire quoted above owes much to ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... is not our purpose to confine these remarks to the loyal States and the Union armies; nor is it at all paradoxical to extend them to the region and the population controlled by the rebel government. Every good citizen, having confidence in the supremacy of right and the destiny of our country, anticipates the reunion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cunning scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always a conscious hypocrite—a form of character, however paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible to good influences than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... pictured as a pietistic sentimentalist with a pedantic respect for the letter of the law, and Napoleon depicted as a romantic idealist, seeking to impose the Social Contract on an immature, reluctant Europe. Though the 'whitewashing' method is probably not less paradoxical than the opposite system, it makes a stronger and wider appeal, inasmuch as it implies a more amiable attitude towards life, and is more consonant with a flattering conception of the possibilities of human nature. A prosaic narrative of established ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... it was when talking about the stolen model that Quarles made the paradoxical statement that facts are not always the best evidence. I argued the point, and remained entirely of an opposite opinion until I had to investigate the case of a pair of pearl earrings, and then I was driven into thinking there was something in Quarles's statement. It was altogether a curious ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... he lived in as "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic."[1] It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron—in a word of the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry in this age was impregnated with politics; ideas for social reform sprang from the ground ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... wonder that has filled me hath arisen from an ordinance that looks like a hyperbole, and from its paradoxical statement for the comprehension of the people. The declaration of the Vedas seems to be untrue. But why should the Vedas say an untruth? It has been said that there are three tracks which constitute ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the general growth and concentration that any shrewd observer might have read in William Ashe?—the pressure—enormous, unseen—of the traditional English ideals, English standards, asserting itself at last in a brilliant and paradoxical nature? It had been so—conspicuously—in the case of one of his political predecessors. Lord Melbourne had begun his career as a person of idle habits and imprudent adventures, much given to coarse conversation, and unable to say the simplest thing without an oath. He ended it as the ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... after listening to Jefferson's brilliant table talk, "Mr. Jefferson loves to excite wonder." Yet Thomas Jefferson, philosopher, was a very different person from Thomas Jefferson, practical politician. Paradoxical as it may seem, the new President, of all men of his day, was the least likely to undertake revolutionary policies; and it was just this acquaintance with Jefferson's mental habits which led his inveterate enemy, Alexander Hamilton, to advise his party associates to elect Jefferson ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... afar, naturally supposes that under so tolerant a sway as that of Pius IX., Jews have thronged from all parts of the world into the Papal States. But see how paradoxical a science is that of statistics. From it we learn that in 1842, under Gregory XVI., during the captivity of Babylon, the little kingdom of the Pope contained 12,700 Jews. We further learn that in 1853, in the teeth of such reforms, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist, it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... changes; for on board ship, as on shore, there exist discontented spirits, whose acquired habit it is to find fault with the existing state of things, be these what they may. To such cantankerous folks a growl of misery would really seem to be the great paradoxical happiness of their lives, and, in the absence of real hardship, it is part of your thorough-bred growler to prophesy. I have seen a middy of this stamp glad to find, on coming below, that some insignificant portion of his dinner really had been devoured by his hungry messmates, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... too, presented a somewhat paradoxical familiarity with the ways of a mysterious Providence. This was exceedingly perplexing to the thoughtful child, whose queries as to justice were too often hushed by parent or teacher. In real life, every child expected, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... was noisy, yet silent,—a paradoxical statement, which will surprise only those to whom the character of country life is still unknown. From all sides came the carts, laden with fragrant fodder. There was something, I know not what, of torpor in the ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... product of intellect and will; and the great founders of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Ampere, Liebig, Fresnel, Faraday, and Mayer, were Christians. "However paradoxical it may sound," says DuBois-Reymond, "modern science owes ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has dis- covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox — and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... naturalists in Europe have been striving to obtain the carcass of the impregnated female Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, for the purpose of ascertaining its mode of gestation, but without success; for it is by dissection alone that the hitherto doubtful and disputed point concerning the anomalous and paradoxical manner of bring forth and rearing its young can be satisfactorily demonstrated. This long-sought-for desideratum is at length attained. Through the kindness of his friend, Lieut. the honourable Lauderdale ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... Somerset in driving off to the spot at which he would be soonest likely to learn what truth or otherwise there was in the newspaper report. From the first he doubted it: and yet how should it have got there? Such strange rumours, like paradoxical maxims, generally include a portion of truth. Five days had elapsed since he last spoke ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... commit outrages, upset order, confident in their triumph because of the protection of their celestial pintakasi. Such is the product not of the schools without god but of god without schools, impossible and paradoxical, whose power manifests itself in capricious methods and in the exercise of prestidigitation. Those individuals are in truth the natural products of that superstition preached, diffused, and presented to the ignorance of people who have come to the point of fearing ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... sons had been slain before him. (84) If prophecies are to be interpreted by their issue, we must make a change of name, and read Jechoniah for Zedekiah, and vice versa (85) This, however, would be too paradoxical a proceeding; so I prefer to leave the matter unexplained, especially as the error, if error there be, must be set down to the historian, and not to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... we regard mysticism as what it very often is, as an antithesis to institutional religion and a revolt against authority and forms, then it may seem at first sight paradoxical to recognise the mystic's claim to the hospitality of Judaism. That a religion which produced the Psalter, and not only produced it, but used it with never a break, should be a religion, with intensely spiritual possibilities, and its adherents capable of a vivid sense of the ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... shrewd in your opinions, Allan," he said; "but dogmatic and paradoxical in one breath, besides being too censorious in your sweeping analysis of character. I should like you to show more charity in your estimate of others. Your diffidence in respect of entering the church I can fully sympathise with, having felt the ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... conditions, they would be compelled to yield; and the same amount of influence would carry the amendment with the voters. But the petitioners for the suffrage are in the minority. There are many obvious reasons for this, and one of them, paradoxical as it may seem, is because so much already has been gained. Woman in general now finds her needs very well supplied. If she wants to work she has all occupations to choose from. If she desires an education the schools and colleges are freely ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... by which our inventor arrives at the seemingly paradoxical conclusion, that the air is destined to be the high-road par excellence, and to serve as the medium of transportation for the heaviest loads, is certainly very ingenious; of its conclusiveness, we must leave our readers to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... begin with the point of view of the highly trained pedantic young builder, the type that, in the past few years, has honored our landscape with those paradoxical memorials of Abraham Lincoln the railsplitter, memorials whose Ionic columns are straight from Paris. Pericles is the real hero of such a man, not Lincoln. So let him for the time surrender completely ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... knowing you. It's a waste of time. You're not for men. You're for lanky youths with whom you can talk nonsense, and laugh at silly jokes. You belong to the type known in England as the flapper—that weird, paradoxical thing with the appearance of flagrant innocence and the mind of an errand boy. Your unholy form of enjoyment is to put men into false positions and play baby when they lay hands on you. Your hourly delight ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... paradoxical situation? Why do we at the same time prepare for war and work for peace? It is simply because many of our statesmen honestly believe that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. It is true that ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... regarded by the Ministers as paradoxical: but I undertake to prove it by the plainest and fairest argument. I shall resort to no chicanery. If I did think that the safety of the commonwealth required that we should violate the Treaty of Union, I would violate it openly, and defend my conduct ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and, being dateless, belongs to future generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr. Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason why The Servant in the House struck so many critics as being strange and new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact that the American knows more of English history and English politics than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United States. This by no means implies that the American knows more of the English character than the Englishman knows of his. On the contrary, the Americans ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... to the large proportion of phosphates contained in it, it may be most fairly compared with bones. It is not now imported, the results obtained from its use being said not to have proved satisfactory, although this statement appears very paradoxical. ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... opinion. The passage of years, I reflected, would increase in me all that the child found least to her taste. I was, as I have said, unable to picture her with tastes changed. But a failure of imagination may occasionally issue in paradoxical rightness, for the imagination relies on the common run of events which the peculiar case may chance to contradict. As a fact, I do not think that Elsa ever did change greatly. I began to be sorry for her as well as for myself. Considered as an outlook in life, as the governing ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... necessary for enabling him to gratify his desire after further attainments. The study of it becomes, of course, an object of importance; it is commenced, and prosecuted with increasing diligence. These premises seem to warrant a conclusion which might at first appear paradoxical, that, by cultivating the Gaelic, you effectually, though indirectly, promote the study and diffuse the knowledge ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... perceptible." The dominance of the interrupted lines in ideation is evidently connected with the more varied and energetic activity which they excited in the contemplating mind. Apparently the attention cannot be held unless (paradoxical as it may sound) it is kept moving about its object. Hence, a certain degree of complexity in an object is necessary to sustain our interest in it, if we exclude, as we must of course in these experiments, extraneous grounds of interest. Doubtless there are ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... every other genus (with the exception of Scalpellum), in the several families, in the three Orders of Cirripedia, are hermaphrodite or bisexual. Why, then, is Ibla unisexual; yet, becoming, in the most paradoxical manner, from its earliest youth, essentially bisexual? Would food have been deficient, and was the seizure of infusoria by another and differently constructed individual, necessary for the support of the male and female organs? ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... "unconscious memorizing" from the neurological standpoint, let us consider it from the psychological standpoint. How are the ideas being modified during the intervals between impressions? Modern psychology has discovered that much memorizing goes on without our knowing it, paradoxical as that may seem. The processes may be described in terms of the doctrine of association, which is that whenever two things have once been associated together in the mind, there is a tendency thereafter "if the first of them recurs, for the other to come with it." After the poem of our illustration ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... impression strong enough to last until next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have invented, was the very thing! I noticed, further, that there was a great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative, antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties," "Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... one aspect of the Renaissance; it was the under-current which in the 18th century became the main stream. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Renaissance in its most modern aspect was a development of the middle ages, and not of the classics. This we call romanticism. As an artistic product it was developed on strictly national and traditional lines, born of the fields as it were, free as a bird and as sweet, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... really knows but very little about his case. He lost his health, and took up the study of medicine to find out what ailed him. It may seem paradoxical, but I think that he is suffering for want of work; his brain is suffering for want of some healthy action. If he would use his brain about something for only half an hour a day, he would find himself improving ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... most of them have that peculiar kind of ingenuity which is one of Mr. PAIN's strong points. Suddenly they land you at a point which is nowhere near to that to which you thought you were travelling. The characters, even when they are engaged in paradoxical and preposterous actions, are real men and women, such as you could meet almost anywhere in a day's walk, and they are set off with Mr. PAIN's fancy so as to become additionally lifelike. Many things have struck me in the reading of this book. One is that Mr. PAIN's new novel is overdue. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... and which He does not in the least owe to us. The question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in the Christian religion? Is it true that there is one Mediator between God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus? In spite of the paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself, and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord. He knew and taught, what they ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... benevolence? If you wish to strengthen it, to increase it and expand it, so as to be the means of saving the United States, and of saving Great Britain, then bring it into exercise. Let the church impart liberally of what she has, both of men and money. She will have the more left, paradoxical as the assertion may at first seem. Let the principle of benevolence be aroused in the churches, and it is literally inexhaustible in its resources, both of money and of men; for the more it exhausts the more it still ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... of all other artistic creations. But no drama yet produced satisfies him, and he tells the reasons why without hesitation. Those who wish to be entertained and set thinking by an author who is in earnest even when most paradoxical, may look at ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Rome and the Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists! It was, no doubt, one of those pasquinades which his customers watched him at work upon, thinking, as he did so, how Rome abounded in paradoxical meetings. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... including the narratives of historians. Now, the natural tendency is to trust writers more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume noble attitudes or ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... a paradoxical process! But what I want you to suggest is something for Miss Rhody—something ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... his heart, and yet, across that dawn there was a cloud which grew momentarily more black, more threatening. Paradoxical as it seemed, Jim was intensely unhappy over the abandonment of the ministerial career. The enduring force of his word as a man was only another evidence of the authentic character of that deep emotional outburst which had pledged him openly to the service of Christ. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... possesses some names that are a trifle paradoxical. For instances, there are the Black Mountains, the grayish red color of which belies their name. Then there is Funeral Range, which, far from being sombre in aspect, is most brilliantly colored. To the southward is Paradise Valley, a plain desert strewn with greasewood and chamiso; and down in the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of words—that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the virginity of language—is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of Ibsen. More! It was an epitome of all the Haymarket plays, a resume of all Mr. Tree's successes. The heroine was a mixture of Ophelia and hysteria, the hero was a combination of Captain Swift, Hamlet, and the Tempter; the paradoxical pessimist was a reminder of Mr. Wilde's comedies, the bishop and scientist were in the manner of Mr. Jones. How clever! Social satire a la Savoy, seance a la salle Egyptienne, sleep-walking a la Bellini, moonlight poetry ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... venal and degrading system. May and I will bear what we must. She wouldn't have me run away from such adversaries. Fancy being governed by the most ignorant, led on by the most dishonest! It's incomprehensible to me how such a paradoxical ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... Dravidians and Aryans were rival and hostile peoples), but all the traits of each deity, even those depicting the old Aryan conception of their deadly combat, are reproduced in America under circumstances which reveal an ignorance on the part of the artists of the significance of the paradoxical contradictions they are representing. But even many incidents in the early history of the Vedic gods, which were due to arbitrary circumstances in the growth of the legends, reappear in America. To cite one instance (out of scores ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... cases, I think it may not be impertinent to put in a reference to what I have previously written elsewhere. Moreover, as, but much more than, in the cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and Murger, there is an argument, paradoxical in appearance merely, for ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... However paradoxical such a prevision may seem at first, it has a fundamental element of truth. Two obstacles bar the way to civilization and the normal development of new ideas, which are the foundation of progress. First of all, there is the naive and boorish ignorance of the common ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... ceaselessly restrained by force and violence. The English Government therefore maintains a strong police. It is so efficient that in the midst of that infamous canaille the most perfect security reigns everywhere, and—what may appear paradoxical to those who do not know the details of the administration of the colony—fewer robberies are committed than in a European town of equal population. As to murder, I have never heard tell of a crime of the kind being committed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... brilliant bloom; an amaryllis bred up from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter; several kinds of fruit trees which withstand frost in bud and in flower; a chestnut tree which bears nuts in eighteen months from the time of seed-planting; a white blackberry (paradoxical as it may appear), a rare and beautiful fruit and as palatable as it is beautiful; the primusberry, a union of the raspberry and the blackberry; another wonderful and delicious berry produced from the California dewberry and the Cuthbert-raspberry; pieplants four feet in diameter, bearing every day ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... Professor Clerk Maxwell thought this discovery the greatest of the century; and the remark has been repeated more than once. But it is a remark which derives its chief importance from the man who made it, and its credentials from the paradoxical surprise it causes. The discovery in question is certainly fraught with very great consequences to the mechanical world; but in itself it is no discovery of importance, and naturally follows from Faraday's far greater and more original discovery ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... reason to doubt that a rise in price will diminish demand, or conversely that a fall will increase it. Since, therefore, in the reasoning by which we deduced the third law, the conclusion will hold good, even if the effects of price-changes on supply are of the above paradoxical kind, provided that they do not continually outweigh the effects upon demand, there is no reason to cast doubt on the solidity of Law III, which, indeed, as we suggested before, commends itself directly to experience. But Law II seems now, perhaps, somewhat ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... has filled me hath arisen from an ordinance that looks like a hyperbole, and from its paradoxical statement for the comprehension of the people. The declaration of the Vedas seems to be untrue. But why should the Vedas say an untruth? It has been said that there are three tracks which constitute the best vows of a man One should never injure; one should always tell the truth; and one should ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... observations with the paradoxical remark that the first great celebrity I ever saw I just missed seeing. This was Louis Kossuth. I was only a small boy when the great Hungarian patriot visited Birmingham in the year 1851. Hearing so much talk about Kossuth I naturally burned with a desire to see him. When the eventful ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... a man to be so sure of himself," Paula replied warmly; "and I never knew a man with half the warrant. I know him. He is a genius—but only in the most paradoxical sense. He is a genius because he is so balanced and normal that he hasn't the slightest particle of genius in him. Such men are rarer and greater than geniuses. I like to think of Abraham Lincoln as ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... when he first plunged into the river, but he did not seem to have lost anything else, for his jacket was buttoned tightly over the little case; but the hot sunshine now, paradoxical as it may sound, began to make him feel chilly—of course, from the great evaporation ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and HE IS ONLY COMPLETELY A MAN WHEN HE PLAYS. This proposition, which at this moment perhaps appears paradoxical, will receive a great and deep meaning if we have advanced far enough to apply it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny. I promise you that the whole edifice of aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of life will be supported by ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... lack of evening dress can make in a man's career, came upon me clearly during the social stir of the Columbian Exposition, for throughout my ten years' stay in Boston I had accepted (with serene unconsciousness of the incongruity of my action) the paradoxical theory that a "Prince Albert frock coat" was the proper holiday or ceremonial garment of an American democrat. The claw-hammer suit was to me, as to my fellow artist, "the livery of privilege" worn only ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of his own cash, and rejoiced accordingly as that colour was brown, white, or yellow. It follows, therefore, that even the poorest and most unlucky dog in the world has experienced monetary sensations. It may appear paradoxical, but it is no less true, that it is the very rich, born to riches, the heirs to great properties, or no end of consolidated stock, who have never enjoyed or feared the sensation to which we allude. To them, money is a thing of course; it pours in upon them with the regularity ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... first expressed sentimental ideas without inconsistency. As early as 1732, anonymous lines in the Gentleman's Magazine advanced what must have seemed the outrageously paradoxical thought that the savage in the wilderness was happier than civilized man. Two years later Soame Jenyns openly assailed in verse the orthodox doctrines of sin and retribution. These had long been assailed in prose; and under the influence of the attacks, within the pale of the Church itself, some ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... this paradoxical plight, she looked with new longing at the shack. She felt that if she were on the other side of that threshold, and it were hers by right, she could stand behind it with some assurance of power against ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... literature, and even grave books of reference. The Japanese governing class has willed it so, and in such matters the Japanese governing class can enforce its will abroad as well as at home. The statement may sound paradoxical. Study the question carefully, and you will find that it ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... of the snow and ice. The days are short—a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often forced to rise before the sun in the morning—besides, the country looks dismal—nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight appear—yet we have verified it by experience—having for many years found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long, warm days of summer are an agreeable and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... that terrible time in the history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Pagoda Trench. The digging was finished in two nights, but there was all the riveting to do as well. Every night the working parties have to pass through a barrage. Our casualties during this period totalled 60 or 70. The moral of the men was very high all the time. The continual shelling, paradoxical as it must seem, hardened and prepared them as much as anything for the great day which every one knew was not ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... interference is conservative in the midst of such a fearful accumulation of evidence as to result in quite the other direction, and that this kind of delay in tissue-change accumulates vital force, is as unscientific as it is paradoxical. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... properly understood, can restore to them. That is its proper task. History draws the outline with a graver, archaeology must fill it in with colour. Understood in this way, history makes the past present. The innovating archaeologist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs and the national life of all the nations of antiquity. The sepulchre has faithfully preserved what the memory of man has forgotten ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... in the ring of Roderick's voice, as he uttered these words, which sent them home with convincing force. He was not talking for effect, or the mere sensuous pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humoredly. He was talking passionately, desperately, and from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother's confidence. His ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... to be both letter and spirit in statutes. This is an elastic shift. Affirmative rights may be negatived by inadequate remedies. Police supervision is paradoxical. While not versed in subtle interpretations, it is alive to the ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... of another attendant at the meetings of the club has from time to time excited interest because of its connection with a fundamental principle of evolutionary astronomy. This principle, which looks paradoxical enough, is that up to a certain stage, as a star loses heat by radiation into space, its temperature becomes higher. It is now known as Lane's Law. Some curiosity as to its origin, as well as the personality of its author, has sometimes been ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... though he did not strike her as a very amiable young man. Perhaps she was a bit tired of amiable young men. His face was thin, and refined, and strong—the strength of level brows, straight nose and square chin, with a pair of paradoxical lips, which were curved and womanish in their sensitiveness; the refinement was an intangible expression which belonged to no particular feature but pervaded the whole face. As to his eyes, she was left to speculate upon their color, since she had not seen them, but she reflected ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... a moment watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own languid, paradoxical self. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... monarchy, may now be considered as settled. We shall therefore proceed to examine the difficulties, of a social and political nature, which still obstruct the advancement of the nation, and render its prosperity problematical. Some of our statements may appear almost paradoxical to travellers, whose hasty glance at distant countries enables them to come to rather more positive conclusions than those who devote years to study the same subject. We shall, however, strive to expose our facts in such a way as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... reality to apparent space. Hence there is no pointwise connexion between the two and it is meaningless to say that the molecules of the grass are in any place which has a determinate spatial relation to the place occupied by the grass which we see. This conclusion is very paradoxical and makes nonsense of all scientific phraseology. The case is even worse if we admit the relativity of time. For the same arguments apply, and break up time into the dream time and causal time which belong ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... after all. For that matter, audiences will stand scenes of still wit—but they like to comprehend it; and the characters in The Way of the World, or most of them, represent a society whose attitude and speech are entirely ironical and paradoxical, a society of necessity but a small fraction of any community. Some sort of study or some special experience is necessary to the enjoyment of such a set. It is not the case of a few witticisms and paradoxes firing off at intervals, like crackers, from the mouths of ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... are trained and accustomed to refrain from saying or doing at all. He has the self-consciousness of a sensitive child; he is for ever thinking of what people think of him, and trying to create an impression. Then, with a paradoxical sincerity, he confesses that the motive of this or that action was simply to create an impression, and thereby destroys the impression. Sometimes he caps this by wilfully letting it appear that the double move was carefully designed to produce the reverse impression of the first—until ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... book that deals with a great number of subjects universal in their scope. The writing is at times too paradoxical, leading to obscurity of thought. There are splendid passages in this book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... those of external nature, from which they differ, but which, properly speaking, do not deserve the qualification of mental, since they are—or at least the best known of them are—laws of the images, and the images are material elements. Although it may seem absolutely paradoxical, psychology is a science of matter—the science of a part of matter which ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... profoundly in the mission of his party, as an organization standing above all for popular government and the preservation of the Union. No ordinary circumstances would justify him in weakening the influence or impairing the organization of the Democratic party. Paradoxical as it may seem, his partisanship was dictated by a profound patriotism. He believed the maintenance of the Union to be dependent upon the integrity of his party. So thinking and feeling he entered upon the most memorable ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... she sat with the rectory cat on her knee—an inferior animal, but the best substitute for Chattie available. So it was, however; and once in her neighbourhood he made another serious effort to get her to talk to him. The Elsmeres had never seen him so conversational. He dropped his paradoxical melancholy; he roared as gently as any sucking dove; and Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm's, as the evening went on, some hesitating commonplaces worthy of a bashful undergraduate on the subject of the boats and Commemoration, had to beat a hasty ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be applied to Zedekiah, whose eyes were dug out after his sons had been slain before him. (84) If prophecies are to be interpreted by their issue, we must make a change of name, and read Jechoniah for Zedekiah, and vice versa (85) This, however, would be too paradoxical a proceeding; so I prefer to leave the matter unexplained, especially as the error, if error there be, must be set down to the historian, and not to any ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... our getting it, she would write and talk against it vehemently. But, as the nation was safe against such a calamity, she was willing to let the talk go on, because the agitation helped her work. "It is rather paradoxical," I said to her, "that the pressing of a false principle can help a true one; but when you get the women all thoroughly educated, they will step off to the polls and vote in ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of Samosata (Syria) may be regarded as the Voltaire of antiquity—witty, sceptical, amusing, even comic. He was primarily a lecturer, wandering like a sophist from town to town, in order to talk in vivacious, animated, nimble, and paradoxical fashion. Then he was a polygraphic writer, producing treatises, satires, and pamphlets on the most diverse subjects. He wrote against the Christians, the pagans, the philosophers, the prejudiced, sometimes against common sense. Amongst his works were The Way to Write History, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... noisy, yet silent,—a paradoxical statement, which will surprise only those to whom the character of country life is still unknown. From all sides came the carts, laden with fragrant fodder. There was something, I know not what, of torpor in the scene. Veronique walked slowly and silently ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... from agreeing on all points; but, gifted both with sincerity and good-nature, we found almost as much pleasure in arguing as we did in agreeing. That epicurean is a thinker; his thought, always generously inclined, has assumed, in the solitude where it has developed itself, a peculiar and paradoxical turn. I wish I could give you an idea ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... policy:" the East African has never dreamed it in the moments of his wildest imagination. Pre-eminent liars, they are, curious to say, often deceived by the falsehoods of others, and they fairly illustrate the somewhat paradoxical proverb: ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... brought him into notice. But it was entirely eclipsed by his Divine Legation of Moses, of which the first part appeared in 1737, and the second in 1741. The work, though learned and able, is somewhat paradoxical, and it plunged him into controversies with his numerous critics, and led to his publishing a Vindication. It, however, obtained for him the appointment of chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales. In 1739 W. gained the friendship of Pope by publishing a defence of The Essay ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... which their wealth and power are built; and yet Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure. No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations. Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence which pervades all classes have kept her eternally young. She is as far from ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Irish! Always witty! Always sparkling, paradoxical, brilliant! I shall tell the Prime Minister what you say. He'll enjoy it. What should we do without you Irish? Life would be dull indeed. What is it the poet says? Wordsworth, I think. 'Turning to mirth, All things of earth, As only boyhood can.' You are all boys. That is why we love you. ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... country involved, the Socialist movement was sharply divided by the war. Paradoxical as it seems, in spite of the great revival of revolutionary hope and sentiment in the first half of the year, the Socialist parties and groups were not strong when the war broke out. They were, indeed, at a very low state. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... surely nothing either "temerarious" or paradoxical in a statement like this. The growth of a nation is like that of an individual; its tone of voice and subjects for speech vary with its age. Each age has its own propriety and charm; as a boy's beauty is not a man's, and the sweetness of a treble ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win from his sardonic gloom one of his quick, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... attempt was made by later writers to weave a scheme of thought which should serve to satisfy the cravings of mortals for some definite solution of the puzzle of life. Lao Tz[)u] himself had enunciated a criterion which he called Tao, or the Way, from which is derived the word Taoism; and in his usual paradoxical style he had asserted that the secret of this Way, which was at the beginning apparently nothing more than a line of right conduct, could not possibly be imparted, even by those who understood it. His disciples, however, of later ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... wonderful energies that flow from that death for man's salvation, we see the divine strength made perfect in the human weakness of Jesus. The Gospel of Christ 'is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.' There is divine power in its noblest form, in the paradoxical shape of a dying man; in its noblest effect, salvation; in its widest ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... exaggeration to say that in our time it is only artists who get real pleasure out of art, because it is only artists who approach art from the side of work and bring to it work's familiar attention and habitual energy. Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound, art has remained alive during the nineteenth century, and will remain alive during the twentieth, only and solely because there has been a ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... at the same time that it fiercely persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as incredible, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say,—of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... housemaid, of course, to try to black the extra pair to keep John out of trouble, but she might have been more discriminating. It was not necessary for her to polish, until they shone like Claude Lorraine glasses, two right boots, one of which, paradoxical as it may seem, was consequently the wrong boot; so that when Thaddeus came to dress for the evening's diversion there was nowhere to be found in his shoe- box a bit of leathern gear in which his left foot might appear ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... primary contemplation of itself as simply Being necessarily makes its presence universal and eternal, and consequently, paradoxical as it may seem, its independence of Time and Space makes it present throughout all Time and Space. It is the old esoteric maxim that the point expands to infinitude and that infinitude is concentrated in the point. We start, then, with Spirit contemplating itself simply ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... superficial phenomena peculiar to all human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according to Bertillon's system. It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder—all its species, subspecies, ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... performed, and no deviation, however slight, should be attempted from the directions laid down. By rigid adherence to them, far more than average proficiency in shooting is attainable without the expenditure of a single ball-cartridge. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is nevertheless strictly true. It is only, however, to be accomplished by a course ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... evil; because that is not seemly, and would appear to accuse God of lack of goodness. He believes, therefore, that in these matters telling the truth is not advisable. He would be right if the truth were in the paradoxical opinions that he maintains. For indeed it appears that according to the opinion of this writer God has no goodness, or rather that that which he calls God is nothing but the blind nature of the mass of material ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... for ages, and which lost nothing but the right of destroying themselves by continual wars, the empire was such an era of prosperity and well-being as they had never before experienced; and we may add, without being paradoxical, that it was also for them an era of liberty. On the one hand, a freedom of commerce and industry, of which the Grecian state had no conception, became possible. On the other hand, the new regime could not but be favorable to freedom of thought. This freedom is always greater under a monarchy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... suppose that I put this before you for the purpose of raising a paradoxical difficulty; the fact is, that the great mass of deposits have taken place in sea-bottoms which are gradually sinking, and have been formed under the very conditions I ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... evident, therefore, that in the matter of religious liberty the present attitude of the government is paradoxical, granting in one breath, what, in an important respect, it denies in the next. But throughout all these changes and by means of them we see more and more clearly that even religious tolerance is a matter of the prevailing social ideas and of the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... thorough love and enjoyment of travel from interfering with the love of home, that perhaps no one can thoroughly enjoy his home who does not sometimes wander away. They are like exertion and rest, each the complement of the other; so that, though it may seem paradoxical, one of the greatest pleasures of travel is the return; and no one who has not roamed abroad, can realize the devotion which the wanderer feels for Domiduca—the sweet and gentle goddess who watches over ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... was pleased with these changes; for on board ship, as on shore, there exist discontented spirits, whose acquired habit it is to find fault with the existing state of things, be these what they may. To such cantankerous folks a growl of misery would really seem to be the great paradoxical happiness of their lives, and, in the absence of real hardship, it is part of your thorough-bred growler to prophesy. I have seen a middy of this stamp glad to find, on coming below, that some insignificant portion of his dinner really had been devoured by his hungry messmates, while he himself ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau, past the rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the downs, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an ordered Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English, Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth mingle there with Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in queer fur caps who work in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... atmospheric temperature in the washer, and at that temperature it cannot carry with it more than a certain fixed proportion of moisture. The notion of partially drying a gas by causing it to pass through water may appear paradoxical, but a comprehension of physical laws will show that it is possible, and will prove efficient in practice, when due attention is given to the facts that the gas entering the washer is hot, and that it is subsequently to be stored over ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his heart, rather than with his head,—which, however, he did,—but that he thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... capricious, unreasonable action. To behave according to caprice is to oscillate mechanically between two or more ready-made alternatives and at length to settle on one of them; it is no real maturing of an internal state, no real evolution; it is merely—however paradoxical the assertion may seem—bending the will to imitate the mechanism of the intellect. A conduct that is truly our own, on the contrary, is that of a will which does not try to counterfeit intellect, and which, remaining itself—that is to say, evolving—ripens gradually into acts which the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the true bottom when I see it? asks the inexperienced digger. Well, nothing but long experience and intelligent observation will prevent mistakes at times, particularly in deep ground; but as a general rule, though it may sound paradoxical, you may know the ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... part, and that even in the successful cases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to secure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained and supported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of making thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We must observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective do ideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of invention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius or vital premonition and groping which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... plundered farms and broken households. Some at least of the raiders behaved with wanton brutality. Smashed pianos, shattered pictures, slaughtered stock, and vile inscriptions, all exhibit a predatory and violent side to the paradoxical Boer character. [Footnote: More than once I have heard the farmers in the Free State acknowledge that the ruin which had come upon them was a just retribution for ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in India the result was felt to be fantastic and sophistical and it is not surprising if after the lapse of a few generations a new system of idealism became fashionable which, although none too intelligible, was abstruse rather than paradoxical. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was wet and slippery from the salt water dripping off my reel. I could not get any footing. The bend of that rod downward, the ceaseless tug, tug, tug, the fear of sharks, the paradoxical loss of desire now to land the tuna, the change in my feeling of elation and thrill to wonder, disgust, and utter weariness of spirit and body—all these warned me that I was at the end of my tether, and if anything could be done it ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... its degree and special circumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, represents the utmost that human consciousness can do of itself towards the achievement of union with Reality. To some it brings joy and peace, to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of the lowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at last can measure itself by the august standards of the Infinite. Though the trained and diligent will of the contemplative can, if control of the attention be really established, recapture this ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... this saying of the Apostle's, 'Of whom I am chief,' paradoxical and exaggerated as it seems to many men, is in spirit that which all who know themselves ought to re-echo; and without which there is little strength in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... what may, perhaps, appear paradoxical to some of our readers that the division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time. A short account of its practical application, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Government scheme for its complexity and then immediately proposing another which would involve not one but a dozen partitions and make the political map of Ireland look like a crazy quilt. He advised the House to reject Mr. ASQUITH'S advice and pass the Bill, even though it should have the paradoxical result, for the moment, of leaving Nationalist Ireland under British administration while providing Unionist Ulster with a Home Rule Parliament for which it has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... to one who has seen this whole set of phenomena in active operation. To me they have been for many years so familiar in the Alpine valleys, and their aspect in those regions is so identical with the facts above described, that paradoxical as the statement may seem, the presence of the ice is now an unimportant element to me in the study of glacial phenomena; no more essential than is the flesh to the anatomist who studies the skeleton of a ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... truth, as "the right joining or separating of signs, i.e., ideas or words." The object of knowledge is neither single ideas nor the relations of ideas to things, but the relations of ideas among themselves. This view was at once paradoxical and pregnant. If all cognition, as Locke suggests in objection to his own theory, consists in perceiving the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, are not the visions of the enthusiast and the reasonings of sober thinkers alike certain? are not ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to state the general lines of the arguments by which Berkeley arrived at the apparently paradoxical conclusion "that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth—in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world," have an existence only so far as they are in a perceiving mind. And he proceeds at length to explain the immense importance ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... thousand authors quoted, that these required years to accumulate, and yet the matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and particular persons; thus the very formation of this mighty volume seems paradoxical. The secret history of this book is as extraordinary as the book itself, and is a remarkable evidence how, in a work of immense erudition, the arts of a wily sage involved himself, and whoever was concerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... rather, insuded, to coin a paradoxical word for a sensation which seems to enter at every pore—the profound quiet and its suggestive fancies for the space of half an hour, when the wind fell at the going down of the sun, and the humming mist of mosquitoes arose again. Returning to the town, we halted at the top of the common to watch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... be seen that the friends of Nikita were altogether wrong in suggesting that those who voted for the Republicans or Communists were opposed to the union with Serbia in Yugoslavia. Both Republicans and (paradoxical though it sounds) the Communists resented this insinuation very bitterly; and considering that the leaders of both parties are pronounced antagonists of the old regime, and were indeed severally condemned to death by Nikita, it would have been strange if they now ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... indeed, amongst themselves, with regard to the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Jehovah himself appears to be on the decline and his unity is steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical trinity. But we are progressing, for in 1300 years no new prophet has arisen, and no new divine revelation is perturbing our race; the old ones, however, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... wage, but beside these is the multitude of plain and simple duties. Now, while in the great encounters our equipment is generally adequate, it is precisely in the little emergencies that we are found wanting. Without fear of being misled by a paradoxical form of thought, I affirm, then, that the essential thing is to fulfil our simple duties and exercise elementary justice. In general, those who lose their souls do so not because they fail to rise to difficult duty, but because they neglect ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... phrase and in such an accent. The image returned to him, by way of contrast, of Dorsenne, alert and foppish, the dandy of literature, so gayly a scoffer and a sophist, to whom antique and venerable Rome was only a city of pleasure, a cosmopolis more paradoxical than Florence, Nice, Biarritz, St. Moritz, than such and such other cities of international winter and summer. He felt that for the first time that soul was strained to its depths, the tragical death of poor Alba had become in the mind of the writer the point of remorse ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... friendship the same privileges which are undisputably granted to the darker passions of enmity and resentment; such a philosophy is more like a satyr than a true delineation or description of human nature; and may be a good foundation for paradoxical wit and raillery, but is a very bad one for any ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... good fortune to secure a young lawyer of little experience but of much principle, who was utterly bewildered by the mystery of the case, and the apparently paradoxical scruples of his client, but who worked diligently and hopelessly for him. He saw the flaw in the indictment and pointed it out to Charlton, but told him that as it was merely a technical point he would gain nothing but time. Charlton preferred that there should ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... Filled with hunger)—Ver. 471. This paradoxical expression is similar to the one used in the Aulularia, 1. 45, "inaniis oppletae," ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage ... the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood ... yet within the recesses ... a universal silence appears to reign ... such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he (a naturalist) ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... least, to be able to do the will of the immortal gods. And even if he had, I doubt if he could do much to suit them in America. O, my greatest enemy and benefactor in the whole world is this dumb-hearted mother, this America, in whose iron loins I have been spiritually conceived. Paradoxical, this? But is it not true? Was not the Khalid, now writing to you, born in the cellar? Down there, in the very loins of New York? But alas, our spiritual Mother devours, like a cat, her own children. How then can we live with ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... literary symbol and the chance of an allegorical interpretation, every cultivated amateur is eager to spy out an adroitly placed anecdote or shaft of pictorial satire; only with great pains is any one induced to regard a picture as an independent creation of form. In so literary a society it seems paradoxical almost to believe in pure painting; and, in despair, we cry out that no country can be expected to excel, at one time, in two arts. We forget Athens and Tuscany; we also forget France. For more than two hundred years France has led the visual art of Europe; and if English painting were ever to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... produces. A mile or two lower down we had those spontaneous plant-animals appearing out of nowhere, while right down by the sea, plants and animals were tumbling over one another. Now, if all this is connected in some mysterious way or other with your Faceny, it seems to me he must have a most paradoxical nature. His essence doesn't start creating shapes until it has become thoroughly weakened and watered.... But perhaps both of us ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Robertson, forgetting Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature. Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not paradoxical; they ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... illustration, if thoughtfully applied, might yield a justification for the paradoxical historian. Much more, therefore, might it yield a justification for us at home, who, sitting at ten thousand miles' distance, take upon us to better the Indian reports written on the spot, to correct their errors of haste, or to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... reprobation the King and the deputies, have found no lack of subjects for the pencil in the ridicules and rascalities of common life. We have said that public decency is greater amongst the French than amongst us, which, to some of our readers, may appear paradoxical; but we shall not attempt to argue that, in private roguery, our neighbors are not our equals. The proces of Gisquet, which has appeared lately in the papers, shows how deep the demoralization must be, and how a Government, based itself on dishonesty (a tyranny, that is, under the title ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... impression made thereby, and the inference drawn therefrom. The inference was almost trivial—merely that Luke Tweezy had come from Marysville, the town where he lived and had his being. But triviality is frequently paradoxical and always relative. If Dundee had not raised an arm to urge his troopers on at Killiekrankie the world would know a different England. A single thread it was that solved for Theseus the ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... ill at ease, that would rise up fiercely like a hissing snake, and strike the black apostate to the earth: these all, doubtless, had their pleasant influences, adding to the lucky finder's bliss: but there was another root of misery most unlooked for, and to the poor who dream of gold, entirely paradoxical. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the Statesman may be conveniently embraced under six or seven heads:—(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest; (3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which can hardly be assumed without proof, since ...
— Statesman • Plato
... The paradoxical character of this general observation lies in the fact that a low temperature retards development, and hence should be expected to have the opposite effect from that mentioned by Chun. Recent investigations have led to the result that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... hills as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a round-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with human mountaineers, irrespective of their breed. This is almost certainly to overrate the effects of environment. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she rated ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has not a head of its own,—an intelligence,—a meaning,—a certain virtue, I was going to say,—but that might, perhaps, sound paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all body and tail. So I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to arraign Warbleton as Mr. Lewis was then arraigning Gopher Prairie; Miss Gale, instead of heaping up a multitude of indictments, categorized and docketed, followed the path of indirection which—by a paradoxical axiom of art—is a shorter cut than the highway of exposition or anathema. Her story is as spare as the virgin frame of Lulu Bett; her style is staccato in its lucid brevity, like Lulu's infrequent speeches; her eloquence is not that of a torrent ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... or Mary Allen, would be lonesome, and then further cheered himself with the reflection that if he had Mary Allen with him he wouldn't miss the crowd, or that if he had a crowd he'd not for a moment miss Mary Allen, all of which made it rather a cheerful if paradoxical world. Now that he had escaped the clutches of the irate militants of Yimville, it wasn't such a bad predicament ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... other words can the same associations be attached. We cannot explain them adequately on principles of utility; in attempting to do so we rob them of their true character. We give them a meaning often paradoxical and distorted, and generally weaker than their signification in common language. And as words influence men's thoughts, we fear that the hold of morality may also be weakened, and the sense of duty impaired, if virtue and vice are ...
— Philebus • Plato
... complex than simple form—emotion is thus most quickened, and memory impressed. The beauty and charm of form lie greatly in its bringing ideas closer together, and succinctness implies fulness of thought. Thus a vast number of paradoxical expressions have been generated, which are far more agreeable than plain language. We speak of "blushing honours," "liquid music," "dry wine," "loud" or "tender colours," "round flavour," "cold hearts," "trembling stars," "storms in tea-cups," and a thousand ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... forest primeval and stood upright on two legs, he has never assumed that position for nothing. [Laughter.] My own private opinion, which I confide to you, knowing it will go no further, is that he assumes that tone, as a rule, to draw sovran woman. [Laughter.] Mere man is a paradoxical creature—it is not always possible to distinguish between his sober earnest and his leg-pulling exercises. [Laughter.] One has to be on one's guard, and woe be to the woman who in these days displays that absence of the sense of humor which is such a prominent characteristic ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of his, the Mangeromas, conserved his life when they found him almost dying, not, strange as it may appear, for selfish banqueting purposes, but merely that he might return to his own people. It seems rather paradoxical that they should have loved one stranger so well as to spare him with suspicious kindness, and love others to the extent of making them into table delicacies. The explanation probably is that these Mangeromas were the reverse of a certain foreign youth with only a small stock of ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore, the race exists for the production ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... his general principles of judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... coffee-tray. Madame de Montcornet perceived that the princess and Madame d'Espard had a word to say to each other, and she drew around her d'Arthez, Rastignac, and Blondet, amusing them with one of those clever paradoxical attacks which Parisian women understand ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... anticipations, for the effect was such as to produce a partial paralysis of the hands and arms to the elbow. Again and again I tried it in every case of extraction and many other experiments, doubting my own senses for a long time at a result so anomalous and paradoxical. I was reminded just here of a phenomenon which gave me additional proof—that of blowing a dull fire to revive it. For a minute or so one blows and blows in rapid succession until, rising from the effort, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... tending to decay, or were passing into the new form of music. Tasso was at once the representative poet of his age and the representative martyr of his age. He was the latter, though this may seem paradoxical, in even a stricter sense than Bruno. Bruno, coming into violent collision with the prejudices of the century, expiated his antagonism by a cruel death. Tasso, yielding to those influences, lingered out a life of irresolute misery. His nature was such, that the very conditions ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... say, if I wished to be paradoxical, that this doctrine seems strange precisely because it is so common. It is what most people who think at all believe, but what nobody likes to avow. We have become so accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold with unequivocal ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... unheeded, and your brows gather into a frown black as the robe that isn't there.... I believe that you would insist that Christ Himself should ascend into Heaven in a black robe, and you would send the goats to hell draped in samite and white linen.' Her paradoxical imagination of the ascent into Heaven and the judgment-seat amused her, and the glimpse she had caught of her brother's portentous gravity curled her up like a cigarette paper. But he was too shocked for speech, and Mildred strove ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... faculties; true of sight, hearing, speech. The wonder, I think, with the wise man will be, not that there are deaf and dumb persons to be found here and there among us: but that the average, nay, the majority of mankind, are not deaf and dumb. Paradoxical as this assertion may seem at first, a little thought I believe will prove ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... one's vanity not to be of the same opinion as the common herd. This, however, is not possible with things which are evident, and beauty which is incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for the esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical beauty belongs, so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It only unveils ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the meagre tactics of the 'Systeme de la Nature;' or to the pellets of logic which Condillac has cast in the foundry of national vanity, and tosses about at hap-hazard—self-persuaded that he is proceeding according to art. The Spaniards are a people with imagination: and the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau, and the flippancies of Voltaire, are plants which will not naturalise in the country of Calderon and Cervantes. Though bigotry among the Spaniards leaves much to be lamented; I have proved that the religious habits of the nation must, in a contest ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... continue, as in the two last ages, to read, more generally than I believe is now done on the continent, the authors of sound antiquity. These occupy our minds. They give us another taste and turn, and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality. It is not that I consider this writer as wholly destitute of just notions. Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the GENERAL SPIRIT AND TENDENCY of his works is mischievous; and the more ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
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