"Antithesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ain't here," replied Margaret Bean, and her weak voice seemed by its very antithesis to express the utmost scorn and disgust at the brutality of ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and 1500, a hundred years before its episcopal elevation, and forms a most complete antithesis to Notre-Dame-du-Bourg which it supplanted in 1591. Where Notre-Dame is small, Saint-Jerome is large, where the old church is simple, the newer one is either pretentious or sumptuous, and where the one is Romanesque, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... to the verge of ruin. It was during this period of strain that, in 1895, P. H. Morrissey was chosen Grand Master of the Trainmen. With a varied training in railroading, in insurance, and in labor organization work, Morrissey was in many ways the antithesis of his predecessors who had, in a powerful and brusque way, prepared the ground for his analytical and judicial leadership. He was unusually well informed on all matters pertaining to railroad operations, earnings, ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... virtuous industry, embodying types of many of the trade employments known to humanity, have we not also among these "meadow tribes" our luxurious "idlers" and "exquisites," the butterflies and flower-haunting flies and "dandy" beetles; and, opposed to all these, the suggestive antithesis of the promiscuous marauders, thieves, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... matrimonial aspirations of this kind lay in my new ideas of respectability as a necessary accompaniment to success. Marrying into a well-to-do orthodox family meant respectability and solidity. It implied law and order, the antithesis of anarchism, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... are two sorts of superstition, each of which is the very antithesis of the other. The victim of one believes all kinds of absurdities blindfold, oblivious of evidence or causality. The upsetting of a salt-cellar or the fall of a mirror is to him a harbinger of disaster, entirely irrespective of any possible connection between the cause ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... of the sturdy pioneer virtues, he becomes by necessity the direct antithesis to the riverman. The purchase of a bit of harness, a vehicle, a necessary tool or implement is a matter of close economy, long figuring, and much work. Interest on the mortgage must be paid. And what can a backwoods farm produce worth money? And where can ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy—these are the joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them easy ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Endymion could never see where the joke came in; but the fellow had illustrated it with such a wealth of humorous instances, and had kept his ignorant audience for twenty minutes in such fits of laughter, that he never afterwards approached the antithesis but he skirted it with ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact. The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... have his antithesis in Cezanne—Cezanne whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering sense of the bestial. Not that there is offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... are no classes of people who embark with more regret, or quit a ship with more pleasure, than military men. Nor is it to be wondered at, if we consider the antithesis which is presented to their usual mode of life. Few military men are studious, or inclined to reading, which is almost the only resource which is to be found against the tedium of long confinement and daily monotony. I do not say this reproachfully, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... been a run of twenty-two coups on the red—an occurrence never before known at roulette—so that men spoke of it with astonishment. Naturally enough, many deserted the red after a dozen rounds, and practically no one could now be found to stake upon it. Yet upon the black also—the antithesis of the red—no experienced gambler would stake anything, for the reason that every practised player knows the meaning of "capricious fortune." That is to say, after the sixteenth (or so) success of the red, one would think that the seventeenth coup would inevitably fall upon the ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... than one really is, is a fault that is far too common. It is, nevertheless, less harmful in the long run than the failing which is its exact antithesis. Lack of confidence in one's own powers is the source of every kind of feebleness and ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... in this, as in so many other matters, are at once close kindred and sharp antithesis. Each is mentally crippled by the corruption of its educational system by an official religious orthodoxy, and hampered by a Court which disowns any function of intellectual stimulus. Neither possesses a scientifically educated ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... world." "I am the bread of life." So, too, the author of this Gospel, speaking in his own person: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." So Paul: "The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." "Your life is hid with Christ in God." And last of all, in that antithesis so full of instruction: "The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was ...
— Strong Souls - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... asunder longitudinally is always accompanied by their approach to each other laterally; while the longitudinal squeezing is accompanied by lateral retreat. Each half of the bar of wood exhibits this antithesis, and is therefore double-refracting. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the Allegory of the Day of Judgment, and is said there to represent the wicked rejected Party, yet it seems to be only on Account of their Similitude to the Sheep, and so to represent the just Fate of Hypocrisy and Hypocrites, and in particular to form the necessary Antithesis in the Story; for else, our whimsical Fancies excepted, a Sheep or a Lamb has a Cloven-Foot as well as a Goat; nay, if the Scripture be of any Value in the Case, 'tis to the Devil's Advantage, for the dividing the Hoof was the distinguishing ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... read the sentimental rhyme and giggled over it. Poor Cyrus! His young affections were sadly misplaced. But after all, though Cecily never relented towards him, he did not condemn himself to darkness alone till life was flown. Quite early in life he wedded a stout, rosy, buxom lass, the very antithesis of his first love; he prospered in his undertakings, raised a large and respectable family, and was eventually appointed a Justice of the Peace. Which was all ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... results of the study of consciousness, as it is now studied amongst scientific men. They will no longer, then, regard thought as the product of matter. They certainly will not be prepared to go as far as I now propose to go, and say that the thinking organism is the production of thought—the very antithesis, you will agree, of the other position, but which is vital to the understanding of the unfolding of the powers of consciousness through matter. It is recognised in ordinary biology that the function appears before the organ. There I am on safe scientific ground. It is recognised that the exercise ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... ours. His words, wherein I apprehend this much, are these: "The Papists in prayer kneel to an idol, and in the sacrament they kneel to the sign: we kneel in our prayer to God, and by the sacrament to the thing signified." The analogy of the antithesis required him to say, that we kneel "in the sacrament" to the thing signified; but changing his phrase, he saith, that we kneel "by the sacrament" to the thing signified. Now, if we kneel "by the sacrament to Christ," then we adore the sacrament as objectum ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... anxious to weaken the antithesis between natural and revealed religion. Science may help the former, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the latter. She stands on her own ground, has her own laws, and is her own reward. Christianity is a matter of faith ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Tolstoi's title, War and Peace. I used to think that he wanted to express the antithesis of these two states, but now I ask myself if he did not connect these two contraries in one and the same folly—if the fortunes of humanity, whether at war or at peace, were not equally a burden to his mind. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and self-deceived. He had grown to distrust the emotions of his heart, and so selected a wife with his head. He chose a woman with income, one who was strong, cool-headed, safe and sensible. Miss Milbanke was the antithesis of his mother. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... The antithesis of a word that all men love, and a word which loves all men, though in itself worth little, has much of the spirit of ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... several forms of service. Whence came the oil? From the two olive-trees, which though, as verse 14 shows, they represented the two leaders, yet set forth the truth that their power for their work was from God; for the Bible knows nothing of 'nature' as a substitute for or antithesis to God, and the growth of the olive and its yield ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island of treeless rock lent a unique character to the enclosure. In name, nature, and accessories the property within the girdling wall formed a complete antithesis to everything in its precincts. To find other trees between Pebble-bank and Beal, it was necessary to recede a little in time—to dig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forest of conifers lay as petrifactions, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... relief to turn from such grossness to its antithesis in the shape of two American ladies who sat near us. They were well-preserved, well-bred spinsters under forty. Everything about them was dainty and exquisitely neat. I likened them in my mind to bowls of dried rose-leaves—the freshness gone, the ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... Dogs who are quarrelling with cats assume the appearance of battle—if they are kindly-minded they do the opposite, although this serves no purpose. M. Taylor[1] says, that the gesture language of the Cistercians depends considerably on antithesis; e. g., shrugging the shoulders is the opposite of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... passion runs into poetry; and that this, the most ancient poetry in existence, is in strict unison with the peculiar character of subsequent Hebrew poetry; that peculiarity consisting of the repetition of clauses, containing either the same proposition in a slightly different form, or its antithesis; a rhyme of thoughts, if we may so say, instead of a rhyme of sounds, and consequently capable of being preserved by a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... 1,059.5. Several men of very high specific gravity in the last group had distinguished themselves in athletics. "Workhouse boys are in most cases of poor physique, and one can hardly find a better antithesis than the general type of physique common among the athletic members of such a university as Cambridge."[65] There is no more conclusive evidence of an organic difference between man and woman than these tests of the blood. ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... avoided any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square, for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the most disconcerting divarications ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Art League days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me—so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it's the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn't have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense she would have put in an appearance at ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... It was in full force in the time of the Revolution of 1688. It had not altogether spent itself by the middle of the eighteenth century. The movement has borne the name of Deism. In so far as it had one watchword, this came to be 'natural religion.' The antithesis had in mind was that to revealed religion, as this had been set forth in the tradition of the Church, and particularly under the bibliolatry of the Puritans. It is a witness to the liberty of speech enjoyed ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... conveyed in praise of the past, become tiresome after we have listened to them for five years. We long to hear people talk frankly and directly, instead of saying one thing for the mere purpose of showing that they are thinking of another thing. The Emperor revenged himself on Falloux by his antithesis: "que le desordre les avait uni, et que ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... perfection and grace of the past so many impassable barriers to progress in future. Because the ancients kept to unity of idea in their groups, and attained to most beautiful results by doing so, shall no modern make an antithesis in marble? And why has not a man a right to dramatize in marble as well as on canvas, if he can produce a powerful and effective result by so doing? And even if by being melodramatic, as the terrible word is, he can shadow forth a grand and comforting ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you had passed the sophomoric stage, and it is a shameful waste of dialectic ammunition to throw your antithesis at me. According to your doctrine, America ought to buy up and import all the deformed unfortunates who are annually exposed in China, in order that our people should properly appreciate the superiority of sound limbs, and the value of the five senses; ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the author might have used neve (neu), since from the preceding clause we have to supply ne to et. This is not a very common mode of speaking; but it occurs most frequently when, after a negative clause, et introduces a kind of antithesis, and thus acquires the power of sed. [283] Et non corrects the untrue supposition, that there were no rebels except at Rome. In such a case we can neither use non without et, nor neque. See ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... greatest American statesman since Washington, the statesman who in this absolutely democratic republic succeeded best, was the very man who actually combined the two sets of qualities which the historian thus puts in antithesis. Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter, the Western country lawyer, was one of the shrewdest and most enlightened men of the world, and he had all the practical qualities which enable such a man to ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Mr. Macaulay's principle of art. It is not the elimination of error that he seeks for, but an artistic balance of conflicting forces. And this he pursues throughout: deposing the dignity of the historian for the clever antithesis of the pamphleteer. At last, on this great and important point of religious history—a point which more than any other influences every epoch of English progress, he arrives at this pregnant and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... looks for Her, to read it to double his joy by sharing it. Robert Louis was ever discovering new beauties in his wife and she in him. Eliminate the element of surprise and anticipate everything a person can do or say, and love is a mummy. Thus do we get the antithesis—understanding and surprise. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... land of the Cherokees is in the west, but in these formulas of malediction or blessing the soul of the doomed man is generally consigned to the underground region, while that of the victor is raised by antithesis to the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... determines the order of rank. The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis "good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and "despicable",—the antithesis "good" and "EVIL" is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... daemon, or genius, to whom they sacrificed was called by them Divata, which appears to denote an antithesis to the Deity, and a rebel against him. Hell was called Solad, and Heaven (in the language of the educated people) Ologan * * * The souls of the departed go to a mountain in the province of Oton, ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of unprofitable flowers,—bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis—this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of the Thesmophoriazusae cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to enumerate a few of the actual contrasts that struck me, in matters both weighty and trivial, it is not merely as an exercise in antithesis, but because I hope it will show how easy it would be to pass an entirely and even ridiculously untrue judgment upon the United States by having an eye only for one series of the startling opposites. It should show in a very concrete way one of the most fertile sources of those unfair ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to submit, with what they ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... learned he had digested and forgotten except as a chance word in the universal gospel of art; technically weak, slovenly in style, but eminently successful in telling the story he had to tell. Even then, with my limited knowledge of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,—one too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too negligent and running into indecision; and this judgment still holds. Of Davidson, my immediate teacher, there was only to be got certain ways of doing certain things, limited to the elements of landscape; ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... of G. The rippling, rain-like figure for the left hand is in the nature of a study. The melody is delicate in sentiment, Gallic in its esprit. A true salon piece, this prelude has no hint of artificiality. It is a precise antithesis to the mood of the previous one. Graceful and gay, the G major prelude is a fair reflex of Chopin's sensitive and naturally buoyant nature. It requires a light hand and nimble fingers. The melodic idea requires no special comment. Kullak phrases it differently from Riemann and Klindworth. The latter ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... conventions of democracy, the Constitution is an undemocratic document. The framers believed in representative government, to which they gave the name "Republicanism" as the antithesis to "democracy." The members of the Senate were to be selected by State legislatures, and the President himself was, as originally planned, to be selected by an electoral college similar ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... governments in general were, for the time, the natural enemies of 'reason.' Philosophers who upon any ground sympathised with the movement took for their watchword 'liberty,' which, understood absolutely, is the antithesis to all authority. They then sought to deduce the doctrine of liberty from their own philosophy, whatever that might be. The a priori school discovered that kings and priests and nobles interfered with a supposed 'order of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... church and the state, as corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state the church; but both are from God, and both work to the same end, and when each is rightly understood there is no antithesis or antagonism between them. Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in serving the church. He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith. Civic virtues are themselves religious ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... business—above the petty bargaining business—we have as the antithesis that the spoken word is his bond. I would rather trust the Chinese merely on his word than the Jap with a ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... aid to the great thief. Every section of the trading class was permeated with a profound admiration, often tangibly expressed, for the craft that got away with an impressive pile of loot. The contempt felt for the pickpocket was the antithesis of the general mercantile admiring view of the man who stole in grand style, especially when he was one of their own class. In speaking of the piratical operations of this or that magnate, it was common to hear many business men interject, even while denouncing ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... come, cool, delicious; the change, the metamorphosis in the weather, the disappearance of the azure sky was strange and lovely. Those shifting, hustling clouds, how pleasant they were to look at. The day was the antithesis of its predecessor—the mildest we had had for a long, long time. It was a relief to find that the "hottest day of the year" was a figurative expression used to denote the middle of summer. Our fears of cremation were entirely dissipated—as sometimes happens in the case of ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... first read one of the aphorisms, it strikes you as a sentiment of extraordinary wisdom. But look more closely at it; try to apply it; and you will find that it is merely a trick of words. What flashed upon you as a profound distinction in morals, turns out to be nothing but a verbal antithesis. What was paraded, as a kind of transcendental analogy between things not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,—a solemn quibble,—a ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, because the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school started, with a sharp antithesis between society ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... soft of step, quiet of demeanour, who was either one of those persons who repress all external evidence of internal fires, and bear their crosses in silence, or was as cold blooded as a fish and as heartless as a statue. He found the father the exact antithesis of the daughter: a nervous, fretful, irritable individual (gout had him by the heels at the time), who was as full of "yaps" and snarls as any Irish terrier, and as peevish and fussy as a fault-finding old woman. Added to this, he had a way of glancing all round the room, and avoiding the eye ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... with the ardent insistency of conviction, a special analysis for each. In fact, having observed in almost every type of created thing two separate motions, he assumed, nay, he asserted, their existence in our human nature, and designated this vital antithesis Action ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... stranger's approach. Something wrong somewhere, he reasoned. He had ordered a speed-boat. One that would beat Mascola's. A craft with real lines and bird-like grace like the Fuor d'Italia. The oncoming launch, he observed bitterly, was the direct antithesis of his expectations. Surely there could be no speed in that squatty packet with her sagging bow and queer ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... self-mockery. "I positively did. I labored every day toward becoming one. I lived among books, esteemed that I was doing something of genuine importance as I gravely tinkered with alliteration and metaphor and antithesis and judicious paraphrases of the ancients. I put up with life solely because it afforded material for versification; and, in reality, believed the destruction of Troy was providentially ordained lest Homer lack subject matter for an epic. And as for loving, I thought people ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... One is free there; a member of the family whenever one likes; domesticated; all that's respectable; and only a few steps away, the bachelor snuggery, with all that's——. No, no! I was not going to complete the antithesis, though by your smiling you ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... and full of humour. In short, Haydn is in music what Gellert is in poetry." This comparison with Gellert, who died three years later, was at that date, as Dr Pohl remarks, the most flattering that could well be made. The simplicity and naturalness of Gellert's style were the very antithesis of the pedantries and frigid formalities of the older school; and just as he pioneered the way for the resuscitation of German poetry under Goethe and Schiller, so Haydn may be said to have prepared the path for Beethoven and the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... social inferiority of women stand opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of the sexes that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In the sphere of politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian mind, is the antithesis of the life of a citizen under a limited monarchy, with party government and unfettered political criticism. In the sphere of religion, the hereditary priesthood of India stands over against the British ideal of a clergy trained for their duties and proved in character. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... this night well, for I revelled in its very antithesis to life in England. Everything seemed so strange and quiet; the great black rocks casting their shadows over the phosphorescent waves; the star-studded sky, with the pale round moon, across which a gentle breeze wafted silvery gauze-like clouds; ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... singular, and perhaps I may have been fortunate, but in more than half-a-dozen instances I have found the very parties to whom this character has been given, although high-minded and high-spirited, the very antithesis to the character which has been assigned them. That some do deserve the character is undoubted—but there is no species of calumny to be received with such peculiar caution. It may be right to be on your guard, but it never should be the ground for a positive avoidance of the party accused. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... for weeks and months together, scorching the fertile fields, drying up the life-giving streams, bringing famine and misery to lands of plenty and comfort, almost making the blood to boil in our veins. Its antithesis, the rainstorm, is at times a still more terrible visitant. From the dense clouds pour frightful floods, rushing down the lofty hills, sweeping over fertile plains, overflowing broad river valleys, and, wherever they go, leaving terror and death in their path. We may say the same of the alternation ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Loyalist and a Churchman, I admit that he must have been adverse to the generalizing philanthropy of that admired sentiment, "Education untainted by the bigotry of proselytism," which, if it be any thing more than a brilliant scintillation of wit, intended, by its happy antithesis, to revive the dying embers of festive hilarity, must mean that the ends of education are destroyed if they produce any effect; or, in other words, that though the lower classes are to be taught every thing, great care should be taken that they ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... north of Climping, there is nothing to say, except that popular rumour has it that its minute and uninteresting church (the antithesis of Climping) was found one day by accident ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... complete antithesis between the imagination that has created the clear-cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that whence have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the presentation of the future doctrine of ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... he stopped himself at that. But his voice was enough for me; the unspoken antithesis was stronger than words could have made it. Scales fell from my eyes. "Where on earth did you get ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Word form in deed, to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the antithesis of fraternity, shall abound ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene exhibited. Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our grandmother on ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... preferred the tortuous to the straight path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great master of invective and sarcasm; he could dissect a character in terse and sonorous couplets, brilliant with antithesis; but of dramatic talent he was altogether destitute. If he had written a lampoon on Dennis, such as that on Atticus or that on Sporus, the old grumbler would have been crushed. But Pope writing dialogue resembled—to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... word has a tendency to suggest its antithesis. Notice how the meaning changes by merely putting the emphasis on different words in the following sentence. The parenthetical expressions would really not be needed ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... occasions, assume an air which gave her a certain distinction of carriage and manner which was the direct antithesis of the careless, swaggering, unfeminine creature that Crowheart knew, and as she now came slowly into the ballroom it is little wonder that a buzz went round after the first flattering silence of astonishment, for even a stranger would have singled her out at a glance from the perspiring female ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... delight of the French, who welcomed him with open arms. The political sentiments that the Exposition celebrated were not such as to find general sympathy in monarchical Europe, so that the "crowned heads" were conspicuous by their absence. It was not, of course, by way of theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time. But the contrast was none the less striking and effective. It was felt that, after all, that which the great exposition exemplified at its best—the triumph of genius over matter, over ignorance, over superstition—met with its due ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the word Prose, and synonymous with metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... sorrow beyond the reach of words. How often have I recalled it since! But the son, even while he reddened, relaxed no whit the stern directness of his gaze at her, and it was clear enough that she felt obliged to avert her own eyes lest they should rouse him to defiant anger. Here, in sharp antithesis to one another, the two divergent tendencies and contrasted characteristics of ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... carries a swag." Neither of these books however give the least idea of the true meaning of the expression, which is as fully recognised as an honest word in both Australia and New Zealand as any other combination of letters in the English language. A swagger is the very antithesis then of a swaggerer, for, whereas, the one is full of pretension and abounds in unjust claims on our notice, the swagger is humility and civility itself. He knows, poor weary tramp, that on the favourable impression he makes upon the "boss," depends ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... czardas, resembled some vision of a painter, some embarkation for the dreamed-of Cythera, realized by the fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great lord, here in nineteenth century Paris, close to the bridge, across which streamed, like a living antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, full ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... life. The applause of the lecture-room was a poor substitute for the thunders of the assembly. Hence arose a declamatory tone, which strove by frigid and almost hysterical exaggeration to make up for the healthy stimulus afforded by daily contact with affairs. The vein of artificial rhetoric, antithesis, and epigram, which prevails from Lucan to Fronto, owes its origin to this forced contentment with an uncongenial sphere. With the decay of freedom, taste sank, and that so rapidly that Seneca and Lucan transgress nearly as much ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... to the orient and the occident, to height and depth, and whose mind flashes across the space from the dawn to the sunset, and from nadir to zenith. Space is his playground, and his companions are the stars. Such a man feels and knows more life in an hour than his antithesis could feel and know in a century. To his spirit there are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength to make excursions to the far limits of space and time. Life comes to him from a thousand sources and in a thousand ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... xx. 68.] and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... these bring to earth, is responsible largely for the divine significance bestowed upon light. Darkness very deservingly acquired many uncomplimentary attributes, for danger lurked behind its veil and it was the suitable abode of evil spirits. It harbored all that was the antithesis of goodness, happiness, and security. Light naturally became sacred, life-giving, and symbolic of divine presence. Fire was to primitive beings the most impressive phenomenon over which they had any control, and it was sufficiently ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... and divine forgiveness. The very greatest and best of them, as St. Paul and St. Augustine, have passed through a violent struggle and a radical revolution, and their whole theological system and religious experience rested on the felt antithesis of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fides obstinata, misericordia in promptu: adversus amnes alios hostile odium. Tacit. Hist. v. 4. Surely Tacitus had seen the Jews with too favorable an eye. The perusal of Josephus must have destroyed the antithesis. * Note: Few writers have suspected Tacitus of partiality towards the Jews. The whole later history of the Jews illustrates as well their strong feelings of humanity to their brethren, as their hostility to the rest of mankind. The character ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... complete within itself for this; nevertheless, several tragedies may be connected together in one great cycle by means of a common destiny running through the actions of all. Hence the restriction to the number three admits of a satisfactory explanation. It is the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. The advantage of this conjunction was that, by the consideration of the connected fables, a more complete gratification was furnished than could possibly be obtained from a single action. The subjects of the three tragedies might be separated ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... shadowy Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the disembodied ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... exactly the Javanese and Toradja observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it. The Indian sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja wizards may not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... prolonged conversation on Buddhistic philosophy, in which he explained the doctrines of the "Ku-ge-chu," and the "Usa and Musa." Without attempting to explain them here, I may say that the first is amazingly like Hegel's "absolute nothing," with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and the second a psychological distinction between volitional ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Cecile was his antithesis—sprightly and small-framed, roguish of look and behavior, without an iota of hoidenishness about her. She was inordinately fond of her brother, and she could not understand how the Corner House girls ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... perceptibly, but before he could answer, the door opened, and Culver, the attorney, entered. With ruddy countenance and youthful bearing, in antithesis to the hair, silvered with white, he was one of those southern gentlemen who grow old gracefully. The law was his taskmaster; he practised from a sense of duty, but ever held that those who rushed to court were likely to repeat the experience of Voltaire, who had twice ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion—white dresses, water colour drawings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... house, courtesy, charity, church, comfort, eye, mirth, &c.; his prayers before and after Sermon, with a few poetical pieces of quaint but touching sweetness. His poetry has been censured for its point and antithesis; but he cultivated the poetical art to convey moral and devotional sentiments; others excel him in smoothness of versification, but not in benevolent purpose. Herbert though himself a pattern of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... one of the outstanding personalities in New York, despite her youth, is the antithesis of the two previous examples of successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession than she. People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius of Mr. Morgan's Library, take for granted that ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south. Prussia was ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... esteemed was wholly devoid of excuse. He had the courage requisite to expiate the offence by standing before Mr. Clay's pistol; but he could not stand before his countrymen and confess that his abominable antithesis was but the spurt of mingled ill-temper and the vanity to shine. Any good tory can fight a duel with a respectable degree of composure; but to own one's self, in the presence of a nation, to have outraged the feelings of a brother-man, from the desire ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... influenced by the blindness of our natural hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such contrast exists. The antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The spiritual ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already ... accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. ... In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... The superb antithesis leaves one struggling against that involuntary little gasp which is a reader's first tribute to a fine thought. He could be a great hymn writer, if he would. One of his poems, in fact, has found its way into The English Hymnal, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... of the Portraits might form the subject of a separate study. Abjuring antithesis and epigram on the one hand, pomp and declamation on the other, it has yet none of the limpidity, the rapid flow, the incisive directness, of classical French prose. On the contrary, it is full of shadings and undulations. It abounds in caressing epithets, and in figures sometimes elaborated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... elected to the Supreme Pontificate. It had all been done in a few minutes by the dying man's bedside. The two old men had insisted. The German bad even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy, marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was recorded. He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the year, and was the third of that title. He ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the antithesis of the Guardian as it was possible to conceive. Where the Guardian was conservative, the Salamander was ultra-radical; where the Guardian wrote a million and three quarters yearly in premiums, the Salamander, though its surplus was rather less than that of the other company, wrote ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... audacious assumption that the public knew nothing of the Law of Antithesis. Yet Plato explained that the opposites of things look alike, and sometimes are alike—and that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... ordinary regiments; no professional soldier ever had. But he had a deep distrust of a purely Irish military organization under Irish control. At the back of Lord Kitchener's mind was the determination "I will not arm enemies." This was the very negation and the antithesis of the second view, which ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Belt, I never went at all. Now English travellers expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they are not prepared for the aspects of Boston in the North which are even more so. If we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other the names are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and we recognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill overlooking ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of the dark ages, and the worship of Greek literature. The copious ridicule of the press has no effect upon this serious gathering. Its verbose platitudes and pretentious inanities continue to be repeated, furnishing almost as good an antithesis to science and philosophy as Mrs. Eddy and her disciples. There is no lack of fluency and ingenuity in the use of language, and occasionally there are glimmering and flashes of common sense, but to wander through the first report of the present session, in pursuit ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... hands in surprise is explained ("Expression of the Emotions," 1st Edit., p. 287) on the doctrine of antithesis as being the opposite of listlessness. Mr. Wallace's view (given in the second edition of "Expression of the Emotions," p. 300) is that the gesture is appropriate to sudden defence or to the giving ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... was in, the girl replied, leading us back into the workshop. He proved to be a short man with a bland, open face and frank eyes, the very antithesis of his trade. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... and squadrons into fleets."[11] Here in one sentence the word hovers between the formation of fleets and their strategical distribution. Similar looseness will embarrass the student at every turn. At one time he will find the word used to express the antithesis of division or dispersal of force; at another, to express strategic deployment, which implies division to a greater or less extent. He will find it used of the process of assembling a force, as well as of the state of a force when the process is complete. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... a crusade against it if he dared; for, of course, he would have to join issue with Good Templars, Sons of Temperance, and all the fanatical anti-alcoholists. These zealous reformers are so blindly infatuated with their hatred for alcohol, that tea seems to them its natural antithesis, and they vaunt it as if it were a celestial boon. And such people are a political ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt—the desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... people, went to the bottom of the sea, it would be "all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." If I had not put that snapper on the end of my whip-lash, I might have got off without the ill temper which my antithesis provoked. Thirty years set that all right, and the same thirty years have so changed the theological atmosphere that such abusive words as "heretic" and "infidel," applied to persons who differ from the old standards of faith, are chiefly interesting as a test of breeding, being seldom used ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... speech also should be read that wonderful second Inaugural address which even the hostile London Times pronounced to be the most sublime state paper of the century. This second address—his last great production—contained some of the best illustrations of his fondness for balanced antithesis and rhythmical measurement. There is one sentence which may be rendered ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... most systematic way to produce a series of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or land, exactly as the merchant goes to his office, the mechanic to his shop. He wrote with a watch before him, two hundred and fifty words to fifteen ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the problem of the place to be assigned to the ugly in art. This problem is without meaning for us, who do not recognize any ugliness save the anti-aesthetic or inexpressive, which can never form part of the aesthetic fact, being, on the contrary, its antithesis. But the question for the doctrine which we are here criticizing was to reconcile in some way the false and defective idea of art from which it started, reduced to the representation of the agreeable, with ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... cried. "I have felt it from my boyhood, but never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... explains ourt as 'overt' and observes that it contradicts thight, which he renders 'tight'. But really there is not even an antithesis. Ourt arraie is what a military handbook calls 'open order' and thight is 'well-built', well put together (Bailey's Dictionary). The Saxons were well-built men marching in ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton |
