"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who were both of unusual ability and somewhat eccentric. Both these tendencies became in him more concentrated. He was born with, as it were, a congenital antipathy to the commonplace, a natural love of paradox, and he possessed the skill to embody the characteristic in finished literary form. At the same time, it must not be forgotten, beneath this natural attitude of paradox, his essential judgments on life and literature were usually sound ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... far with my reader, in all the sober seriousness which the matter-of-fact material of these memoirs demands, I fear lest a seeming paradox may cause me to lose my good name for veracity; and that while merely maintaining a national trait of my country, I may appear to be asserting some unheard-of and absurd proposition,—so far have mere vulgar prejudices gone to sap our character as ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... think fine plays? Lots of people enjoy his entertainments. I don't myself, for I agree with you that Shakespeare and Phillips are tiresome. I notice, by the way, that you even begin to gibe at the scenery and suggest that it is not beautiful because it is too pretty, which is a mere paradox, and of course absurd. Why do you keep howling against ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "I may be crazy, but I know something," with which paradox he turned on his heel and walked into the moonlit meadow toward that dim, white form ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... quite right in wishing to preserve slavery intact forever, surely those are in the wrong who would make war on it for wishing to secede from a government which tolerates attacks on legalized institutions! What a precious paradox have we here? Yet these virtual justifiers of the South in the great cause of the war, claim to be zealous and forward in punishing that secession which, according to their own ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... discussion of tragedy, chose to lay stress upon the plot, the story. On the other hand, to complete the paradox, in the epic he makes the characters all-important, not the story. Without the tragic plot or fable, the tragedy becomes a series of moral essays or monologues; the life of the drama is derived from the original idea of the fable which is its subject. Without dramatic ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... of Emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no one should venture upon Emerson. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... our efforts for our own spiritual improvement or that of others, just as if we could do nothing ourselves, we must do every thing that is possible ourselves, just us if nothing was to be expected from Divine power—may be called the Christian paradox. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do." It would seem, it might be thought, much more logical to say, "Work out your own salvation, for there is nobody to help you;" or, "It is not necessary to make any effort ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Macquarie Island signalled that they had run short of provisions. The message was rather a paradox: " Food done, but otherwise all right." However, on August 11, we were reassured to hear that the 'Tutanekai', a New Zealand Government steamer, had been commissioned to relieve the party, and that Sawyer through ill-health ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... passages between the islands into the Yellow Sea, when it was perceived how very little advantage it was likely to derive from the Chinese pilots. One of them, in fact, had come on board without his compass, and it was in vain to attempt to make him comprehend ours. The moveable card was to him a paradox, as being contrary to the universal practice with them, of making the needle traverse the fixed points, and not the points described on the card to move (by the needle being attached to the card), as in those of Europe. The other was furnished with a compass, about ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... then, found something more real than a "Culprit Fay." Occasionally, a thornless blackberry is heralded, and not a few have reason to recall the "Hoosac," which was generally found, I think, about as free from fruit as thorns. We have, also, the horticultural paradox of white blackberries, in the "Crystal," introduced by Mr. John B. Orange, of Albion, Illinois, and some others. They have ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... going down and going up, and has been going up and down, in all sorts of places and to all sorts of distances, through all recorded time. Geologists would be quite right in maintaining the seeming paradox that the stable thing in the world is the fluid sea and the shifting thing is the solid land. That may sound a very hard saying at first, but the more you look into geology, the more you will see ground for believing that it ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... said Abe, "then I'll fall, but it shall be at the feet of Jesus." Ah, that is the best way to stand; fall at the feet of Jesus. It may seem a paradox in terms, but it is not in truth; it is on the Apostolic principle, "When I'm weak, then am I strong." So poor Abe laid himself down in order that he might not fall, and this is a plan which others might try in times of spiritual peril, and so ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that paradox of his position, by which he supports that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... two special occasions on this month, my wedding day on the 10th, and the anniversary, to use a paradox, of the commissioning of the hut on the 17th, and each time the commissariat officer relaxed his hold to the extent ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... they are in a majority; that the majority is entitled to rule; and that they have only to organize to come into their heritage. These sycophants, who, as Aristotle of old pointed out, bear the greatest resemblance to the court favourite of the tyrant, ask the people to believe the silly paradox that the united wisdom of the whole people is greater than that of the wisest part. The truth is that no people is fit to exercise equal political rights which is not sensible enough to choose the wisest part to carry on the government, providing only ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... this war, as the master mind of all the ages said of adversity, that "its uses are sweet," even though they be as a precious jewel shining in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. While the world-war has brutalized men, it has as a moral paradox added immeasurably to the sum of human nobility. Its epic grandeur is only beginning to reveal itself, and in it the human soul has reached the high water ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... This paradox, however, may, I suppose, be easily over-stated. The change that continually agitates Nature consists in the movements of masses or molecules, and such movements of things are compatible with a considerable persistence of their qualities. Not only are the molecular changes always going ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... The paradox, that there is more good land on the Trinity than on the Mississippi, is one which will be readily sustained by those who are acquainted with the subject.—Texas ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... too strongly. This has been called his "pessimism," a phrase to which some admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else words ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Agora with doves in his bosom, and an apple in his hand; Murat, bedizened in gold lace and furs; and Demetrius, the City-Taker, who made himself up like a French marquise, were all pretty good fellows at fighting. A slovenly hero like Cromwell is a paradox in nature, and a marvel in history. But to return to my cornet. We were rich; he was poor. When the pot of clay swims down the stream with the brass-pots, it is sure of a smash. Men said Digby was stingy; I saw he was extravagant. But every one, I ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fact throughout this entire period a remarkable paradox in the social mind of the North with regard to the Negro, for we find everywhere the strongest antipathy to the Negro personally and general discriminations against him socially and politically, united with the greatest enthusiasm for his rights in the abstract. Even the best ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... support, by supplying him abundantly with what he most wanted. It had been said that those stupendous masses of ice, called islands or mountains, melted into fresh water, though Crantz, the relator of that paradox, did not imagine they originated from the sea, but that they were first formed in the great rivers of the North, and being carried down into the ocean, were afterwards increased to that amazing height by the snow that fell upon them*. But that all frozen sea-water would thaw into ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... added to the peat will break it down rapidly and make it more available as a fertilizer, but until the decomposition reaches a certain point; its effect is to impoverish rather than to enrich the mixture. This seeming paradox can perhaps best be explained by some experiments I have been making with sawdust. A number of plots were prepared and given various treatments, including mixing one surface-inch of sawdust with the soil, and wheat was ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... paper-money may be issued to an unlimited extent, and {194} its full value maintained without its being convertible at pleasure into hard cash. This supposed principle has been proved again and again to be a mere fallacy and paradox; but it always finds enthusiastic believers who have plausible arguments in its support. It appears, indeed, to have a singular fascination for some persons in all times and communities. It might seem an obvious truism that under ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... travellers, historians, and statistical observers, in all ages and quarters of the world, it is, that the possession of property in land is the first step in social improvement, and the only effectual humanizer of Savage Man. Rousseau's famous paradox, "The first Man who enclosed a field, and called it mine, is the author of all the social ills which followed," is not only false but decidedly the reverse of the truth. He was the first and greatest benefactor of his species. Subsequent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... communal institutions. It was quite easy to understand the change that came with Russia's industrial awakening, how the development of factory production gave an impetus to the Marxian theories. And, though it presents a strange paradox, in that it comes at a time when, despite everything, Russian capitalism continues to develop, it is really not difficult to understand how and why pre-Marxian conceptions reappear in that great land ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... his great contemporary Cervantes died on April 23 of the year 1616, it strangely happens that Cervantes had been dead ten days when Shakespeare expired. This apparent paradox is due to the fact that while in Spain the Gregorian calendar had already been introduced, the "Old Style", or Julian reckoning, was still used in England; indeed, it was not totally abandoned until 1752, in the reign of George II, 170 years after the first use of the Gregorian reckoning ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... founder and first President of the Linnaean Society, ought not to be forgotten. Of Taylor himself Mackintosh wrote: 'I can still trace William Taylor by his Armenian dress, gliding through the crowd in Annual Reviews, Monthly Magazines, Athenaeums, etc., rousing the stupid public by paradox, or correcting it by useful and seasonable truth. It is true that he does not speak the Armenian or any other tongue but the Taylorian, but I am so fond of his vigour and originality, that for his sake I have studied and learned the language. As the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... all that the word seeming is intended to convey, hence seeming is superfluous. "This was once a paradox but time ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... with Luther, who was a dogmatist and wanted to debate his ninety-five theses. Erasmus laughed at all religious disputations and called them mazes that led to cloudland. Very naturally, people said he was not sincere, since the mediocre mind never knows that only the paradox is true. Hence Erasmus was hated by ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... just as they do now; the criticism is almost invariably the work of beginners. A youth who has acquired a smattering of learning, who has caught up the slang of the studios, and pretends to have a system or to defend a paradox, is chosen to write an account of the Salon. I was that youth, that novice. And after all, how become a workman unless you work? how become expert if you do not study, recognize your mistakes and repair them? Beneath our mistakes truth ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... No amount of paradox would induce us to believe that the combining proportions of hydrogen and oxygen had altered, in a specified experimenter's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... owing to his profession or his temperament, was a man who, if the paradox may be allowed, was not surprised at surprises. Accordingly when he himself emerged from the bedroom to which he had retired, took the path across the meadow from the inn towards the river, and directed ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... purely artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the most beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it might be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true heir of Rome; that the new world is nearer—by apparent paradox—to ancient Rome than is Europe. Among the most important facts, however little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should number this: that the Republic, the human state considered as the common property of all—the great political ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... that the state of Balaam's mind was this: he wanted to do what he knew to be very wicked, and contrary to the express command of God; he had inward checks and restraints which he could not entirely get over; he therefore casts about for ways to reconcile this wickedness with his duty. How great a paradox soever this may appear, as it is indeed a contradiction in terms, it is the very account which the Scripture gives us ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... hardly allows enough for the point of view. These actors and actresses are not literary. (They should be, I know.) They look at an author's work as a man looks at the universe—a small part at a time. That trite old paradox that, to the actor, the part is greater than the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, too, how "touchy," as he calls it, they must be, in the nature of things. Their touchiness, their affectation, their lack of culture—all are inherent in them. Their success is always ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... pre-eminence as the land of paradox. Among the hunger-strikers recently released from Mountjoy prison were (by an accident) several men who had actually been convicted. The House learned to its surprise that these men cannot be re-arrested, but are out for good (their own, though possibly not the community's); whereas the untried ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... jockey her with the screws as well," says Captain Hodgson, and, unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on to the floor. Here we find Fleury's Paradox of the Bulk-headed Vacuum—which we accept now without thought—literally in full blast. The three engines are H.T.&T. assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3000 to the Limit—that is to say, up to the point when ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... uniformities of Lyell and Darwin; they saw little proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to them, catastrophe was the law of change; they cared little for simplicity and much for complexity; but it was the complexity of Nature, not of New York or even of the Mississippi Valley. King loved paradox; he started them like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost; but they delighted Adams, for they helped, among other things, to persuade him that history was more amusing than science. The only question left open to doubt ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... find the true conception of Intellectual Freedom. It is the freedom of the individual to follow his star and reach his goal. That star binds him down to certain lines and his freedom is in exact proportion to his fidelity to the lines. The seeming paradox may be puzzling: a concrete example will make it clear. Suppose a man, shipwrecked, finds himself at sea in an open boat, without his bearings or a rudder. He is at the mercy of the wind and wave, without freedom, helpless. But give him his bearings and ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... one supreme law of progress by British economists and statesmen. The economic conditions of the time fostered a sturdy individualism on the one hand, expressing itself in a policy of laissez faire, which, paradoxically, they as surely destroyed. The result was the paradox of a nation of theoretic individualists becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially through the vast body of industrial legislation which developed in spite of theories of laissez faire, a nation of ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... to verify this as it is difficult to determine the measure and the manner of the influence for each group. And yet the understanding of it turns altogether on this point. To call Pharisaism or the Gospel or the old Jewish Christianity Hellenic is not paradox ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the word Ireland. Perhaps that is most important of all. You will hear lots of Americans—good men, too—damning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing, unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you. Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always damns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom of it is paved with the bones ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan's hand. And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... particular statements is confined to the use of a single method, which, by a curious paradox, is the study of the universal conditions under which documents are composed. The information which is not furnished by the general study of the author may be sought for by a consideration of the necessary processes of the human mind; for, since these are universal, they must ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... to the sect of the beans (which are by a happy paradox both broad and evangelical). The apple-trees bear the same message in their unpruned branches—unpruned owing to a long absence from home during the winter. It is an amazing fact—I speak as an amateur—but it is an amazing fact, ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Kingdom of God is to be on Earth. But because this doctrine (though proved out of places of Scripture not few, nor obscure) will appear to most men a novelty; I doe but propound it; maintaining nothing in this, or any other paradox of Religion; but attending the end of that dispute of the sword, concerning the Authority, (not yet amongst my Countrey-men decided,) by which all sorts of doctrine are to bee approved, or rejected; ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... paradox that, if you would care for yourself you must disregard yourself in your loving care ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... likes to talk about statistics and his physical ailments, and as he gained his reputation as a wit from a single repartee made at a dinner twenty years ago, he finds it hard to fulfil his part. He is simply funny because he isn't. It's a strange paradox." ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... himself head foremost into the revolution. Blood calcined by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged, an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox, barefaced sophism, and murderous lying—all these perilous ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled and fermented long and silently ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... paradox men are taught by monotony as well as by newness. Ours is a world where the words, "Blessed be drudgery," are full of meaning. Culture and character come not through consuming excitements nor the whirl ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... partner of his bosom, can still eat six plates of alamode beef, must have a most excellent stomach. Gentlemen, beware of giving heavy damages in this case, or otherwise you will unconsciously be the promoters of great immorality. This is no paradox, gentlemen; for I am credibly informed that if the man succeed in getting large damages, he will immediately take his wife home to his bosom and his van, and instead of exhibiting her, as he has hitherto done, for one penny, he will, on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... reached the street. To be out of doors in the air was something, though there was no wind, but a motionless still atmosphere which nothing disturbed. The streets, indeed, were full of movement, but not of life—though this seems a paradox. The passengers passed on their way in long regulated lines,—those who went towards the gates keeping rigorously to one side of the pavement, those who came, to the other. They talked to each other here and there; but ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... not improve her pupil, she did improve herself, for the more of love and truth we impart to others, the more we have for ourselves; making the very pretty moral paradox, that the more of love and truth we subtract from our store, the more we have ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... The metallic voice went on. "Let us return to Macbeth for our concluding quotation. The weather, fortune, many things are implied in Macbeth's opening speech. He says, 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen.' The paradox is both human and appropriate. One day you will understand this even more. Repeat the quotation after me, please, and ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... Times: "Paradox worked up with intense dramatic effect is the salient feature of 'The Gadfly'; ... shows a wonderfully strong hand, and descriptive powers which are rare; ... ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... by this time, become so polemical, that every time he opened his mouth out flew a paradox, which he maintained with all the enthusiasm of altercation; but all his paradoxes favoured strong of a partiality for his own country. He undertook to prove that poverty was a blessing to a nation; that oatmeal was preferable to wheat-flour; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... flash Joan understood all this and its paradox, looked all the way back along the faithful, unappreciated years, and being no longer a child was stirred with a strange maternal fellow feeling that started her tears. Nature is merciless. Everything is sacrificed to youth. Birds build their nests and rear their young and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... ODIOUS, NOBLE and DESPICABLE, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented these terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience. So that nothing can be more superficial than this paradox of the sceptics; and it were well, if, in the abstruser studies of logic and metaphysics, we could as easily obviate the cavils of that sect, as in the practical and more intelligible sciences of politics ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Shelley in his essay "On Paradox and Commonplace" in Table Talk; but he does not make this remark there. Perhaps he said ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... boundaries among peoples, and gives to every fighter the belief that he is contending against brute force. Veblen (97) says that patriotism is the only obstacle to peace among the nations. MacCurdy (37) speaks of the paradox of human nature seen in the fact that the loyalty we call patriotism, which may make a man a benefactor to the whole race, may become a menace to mankind when it is narrowly focussed. Novicow says that what shall be foreign is a purely conventional matter. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... and found in the study of Irish history the explanation of the paradox, that a people with so many gifts, so amiable, naturally so submissive to rulers, and everywhere but in their own country industrious, are in their own country bywords of idleness, lawlessness, disaffection, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... criticism which applies adversely to Chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often—and I rather fear he likes being so—obscure. He is brilliant in an original manner, he is original in a brilliant way; scarcely any thought of his is not expressed in paradox. What is orthodox to him is heresy to other people; what is heresy to him is orthodox to other people; and the surprising fact is that he is usually right when he is orthodox, and equally right when he is heretical. An essayist naturally has points of view which he expresses ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... was but slight, and thus no familiarity with the tweed knickerbocker feminine took off the edge of my delight on first beholding Nicolete clothed in like manhood with ourselves, and yet, delicious paradox! looking more ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... firmness and dignity, and perhaps she was right. Nor had she failed to notice that one or two small, straight pieces of grey hair could now be seen near the temples. He looked a little older, a little more brisk, a little more firm, and distinctly more cheerful since his reverses. It is no paradox to speak of cheerfulness in sorrow, or to say that the whole nature may be happier in grief than in the days of apparent pleasure. It is not only in those who have acquired deep religious peace that this may be true, for even in gaining energy and a balance ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... for Mauleverer to ask that question, for during the whole of the earl's recital the dark face of his companion had literally burned with rage; and here we may observe how generally selfishness, which makes the man of the world, prevents its possessor, by a sort of paradox, from being consummately so. For Mauleverer, occupied by the pleasure he felt at his own wit, and never having that magic sympathy with others which creates the incessantly keen observer, had not for a moment thought that he was offending to the quick the hidden pride of the lawyer. Nay, so little ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... version of the verse yields no sense. The meaning, however, is this: Atichccheda or Atichcchanda implies a hyperbolic statement, Ativaua means a paradox. It is said that by gift of even a palmful of water one may attain to a place which is attainable by a hundred sacrifices. This ordinance, which looks like a hyperbole, and its statement by Vedic teachers that looks like a paradox, fill me with wonder. The Vedas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... with the feeling of being in itself obligatory; and when a person is asked to believe that this morality derives its obligation from some general principle round which custom has not thrown the same halo, the assertion is to him a paradox; the supposed corollaries seem to have a more binding force than the original theorem; the superstructure seems to stand better without, than with, what is represented as its foundation. He says to himself, I feel that I am bound not to rob or murder, betray or deceive; but why am I ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... are thinking perhaps, without saying so, that I am maintaining a hard paradox. To look for the source of liberty of conscience in religion, is not this to forget that the Christian Church has often marked its passage in history by a long track of blood rendered visible by the funereal light of the stake? I forget nothing, Sirs, and I beg of you not to forget anything ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... The first paradox of this phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth rate iconoclasts, has triumphed completely in the legislatures of the country. With every new volume exposing the gruesome mainsprings ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... do with a face I thought I knew. Love sat there careless of the issue, full of delight. Love proclaimed that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all over—she had met him, alas, in too narrow a place—and I marvelled at the paradox with which he softened every curve and underlined every vivid note of personality in token that it had just begun. He sat there in great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—-could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... yet subdued and humble, since this paradox may be at times in human hearts, was Richard Kendrick, as he stood waiting in the vestibule of St. Luke's, on Christmas morning, for a tryst he had made. Not with Roberta, for it was not possible for her to be present to-day, but with Ruth Gray, that young sister ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... however, left without the means of correcting the wild blunders into which some minds were hurried by national vanity and others by a morbid love of paradox. There are extant three computations which seem to be entitled to peculiar attention. They are entirely independent of each other: they proceed on different principles; and yet there is little ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing JEHAN for JEAN, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can do in despite of circumstances. Most peaceful of warriors, a magnificent monarch whose ideal was quiet happiness in home life, bent to obscurity yet born to greatness, the loving father of children who died young or turned out hateful, his life was one paradox. That nothing might lack, it was in camp before the face of the enemy that he passed away and went to his ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... of Israel, was a good deal to blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and naively worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... representation. Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of form. Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal Academicians: it is a little higher than that of Sir Edward Poynter and a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton. That this is no paradox let the cave-drawings of Altamira, or such works as the sketches of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear witness. If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy (Musee St. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... facts, it is no paradox to say that the ignorance, the decadence of science, of the arts, commerce and agriculture, the depopulation and poverty of Spain, are ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... The paradox, however, was made plain to her by Hellyer, who did not seem to trouble himself much about the mishap, remaining seated on the hamper, which he had placed by the after sponsing of the starboard paddle-box. The coastguardsman, indeed, appeared as unconcerned throughout all the fuss as if he were ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Victorian Age. In fact, he applied to his subject the wrong method, in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken him at his word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but I hope that many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom, endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make converts. The ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... but he flushed. I saw that Mrs. Pethel also had faintly flushed, and I became horribly aware of following suit. In the sudden glow and silence created by Mrs. Pethel's paradox, I was grateful to the daughter for bouncing back among us, and asking how soon we should ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. In the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answering questions which, after all is ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... encroachment from whatever quarter. This question it decided emphatically in the affirmative. Faithful to logic and to its theory, the book did not shrink from applying them to the external case of the Irish Church. It did not disguise the difficulties of the case, for the author was alive to the paradox which it involved. But the one master idea of the system, that the State as it then stood was capable in this age, as it had been in ages long gone by, of assuming beneficially a responsibility for the inculcation of a particular religion, carried him through all. His doctrine ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... "Paradox, all paradox!" exclaimed Albert. "Not so paradoxical as you imagine," I replied. "You allow that we designate a disease as mortal when nature is so severely attacked, and her strength so far exhausted, that she cannot possibly recover her former condition under ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... dread of ambush, the swift flight; the fierce pursuit of men wild as Bedouins and as fleet, the willingness to deal sudden death, the pain of poison thorn, the stinging tear of lead through flesh; and that strange paradox of the burning desert, the cold at night, the piercing icy wind, the dew that penetrated to the marrow, the numbing ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... sensation in the literary world. If it were accepted and proved true, it was one of the most curious romances in the history of literature. But was it true? To most critics the antecedent improbability of the theory put forth by Sir Frederick was so great as to relegate it to the domain of extravagant paradox; but the name and fame of its supporter were too high to allow of its being dismissed without refutation. For two or three years no one ventured to enter the lists against so formidable a champion who had staked his reputation upon the issue. At last another great specialist, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... even awfulness, when awe was needed. Remember that, if, again, the Gospels are to be believed. He alone, of all personages of whom history tells us, solved in His own words and deeds the most difficult paradox of human character- -to be at once utterly conscious, and yet utterly unconscious, of self; to combine with perfect self-sacrifice a perfect self-assertion. Whether or not His being able to do that proved Him to have been that which ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... that public statues are decreed as a reward for merit that the original may gladden his heart by looking on them. What else is the significance of statues and portraits produced by the various arts? You will scarcely maintain the paradox that what is worthy of admiration when produced by art is blameworthy when produced by nature; for nature has an even greater facility and truth than art. Long labour is expended over all the portraits wrought by the hand of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... not necessary to show the unreasonableness of the inference, because the assertion from which it is deduced cannot be proved. That the excessive use of distilled liquors cannot be prevented, is a very daring paradox, not only contrary to the experience of all past times, but of the present; for the law which is now to be repealed, did in a great degree produce the effects desired from it, till the execution of it was suspended, not by the inability of the magistrates, or obstinacy ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... the proper place to explain the paradox of method in a critique of practical reason, namely, that the concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law (of which it seems as if it must be the foundation), but only after it and by means of it. In fact, even if we did not know that the principle of morality ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... was away three years. Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life. Do you scout the paradox? Listen. I commenced my school; I worked—I worked hard. I deemed myself the steward of his property, and determined, God willing, to render a good account. Pupils came—burghers at first—a higher class ere ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... rather short in stature, markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier with every mark of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never regard him as academical. Yet he had that ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... content," she said hastily, "and pull me no more lugubrious faces to fright me. Lord! What a vexing paradox is this young man who sits and glowers and gnaws his lips in the very moment of his victory, while I, his victim, tranquil and happy in defeat, sit calmly telling my thoughts like holy beads to salve my new-born soul. Ai-me! There are many things ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... a flinching from tragic episode breathe the true French sentiment, what, we are moved to ask, is the significance of the unqualified regard which Ducis and his countrymen profess for Shakespearean drama? There seems a strange paradox in the situation. The history of France proves that Frenchmen can face without quailing the direst tragedies which can be wrought in earnest off the stage. There is a startling inconsistency in the outcry of Ducis's French clients against the terror of Desdemona's murder. For the protests ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the Allies, and demanded that the whole body of European States should at once meet in open Congress. The four Courts held to their determination, and began their preliminary sittings without Talleyrand. But the French statesman had, under the form of a paradox, really stated the true political situation. The greater Powers were so deeply divided in their aims that their old bond of common interest, the interest of union against France, was now less powerful than the impulse that made them seek ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the excess legitimately and not hoard it. He knew that in the end he should gain thereby, since the ministering to new wants only begets others."[237] If there are theoretic economists who still hold that "a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour," they may be reminded that a paradox is not necessarily true. In fact, this particular paradox is seen to be sustained by a combination of slipshod reasoning and moral prejudice. The growing opinion of economic students is veering round to register in theory the firm empirical judgment from which the business world has never ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... to make my peace with my mother was not surprising, but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing its weakness, and yet he wrote to ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge. For a minute he paused, wondering if there were other continuums or only this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tipped the bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran down into the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of the ocean. He poured until the bottle was empty and all the ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... "give," "lead us not"— Speak them by Him, O man the unaware, Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what, Shuddering through the paradox ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... in the meadow, and the birds hopped on its corners and the dew touched and spangled its twigs. And I remembered that there are two kinds of fires, the Bad Fire and the Good Fire the last must surely be the meaning of Bonfire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things, of things that we do want; like all that wealth of wood that might have made dolls and chairs and tables, but was only making ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... evanescent; and once more he began to reflect—not to hope—no! Hope, they say dies but with life: but that is a paradox. He still lived, but hope had died. Hope of escape there was none. He was too well guarded. His exasperated enemies, having experienced the difficulty of his capture, were not likely to leave him the slightest ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... moral air of New York City is in certain respects the purest air a man can breathe. This may seem a paradox. New York City is not often quoted as an example of purity. To the philosopher her atmosphere is cleaner than that of a country village. As the air of a contracted space may grow poisonous by respiration, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... A paradox, as a self-contradictory statement, arrests the attention in the initial sentence of an article. Although not always easy to frame, and hence not so often employed as it might be, a paradoxical expression is ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... try every questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... truth, something of a paradox. He was an artist, and yet was rich; he had inherited large wealth, and yet had formed habits of careful industry. The majority of his young acquaintances, who had been launched from homes like his own, were known only as sons of their fathers, and degenerate sons at that. ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... you may hope. A paradox, but a paradox that is a truth in the case of Christians whose memory is of a God that has loved and blessed them whose hope is in a God that changes never; whose memory is charged with 'every good and perfect gift that came down from the Father ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in perplexity. The old paradox came back—the contrasting sexual characteristics in her person. Her bold, masterful, masculine egotism of manner seemed quite incongruous with the fascinating and disturbing femininity of her voice. A startling idea flashed ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... bravado to find pleasure in what is so commonly condemned. Here is a smart fellow, you may say, who sets up a paradox—a conceited braggart who professes a difference to mankind. Or worse, it may appear that I try my hand at writing in a "happy vein." God forbid that I should be such a villain! For I once knew a man who, by reading these happy books, fell into pessimism and a sharp decline. He had wasted ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... scenes of turbulence and violence which were acted in every part of the nation, appeared to them to present an awful and doubtful state of things, respecting which no certain calculations could be made, and the idea that a republic was to be introduced and supported by force, was, to them, a paradox in politics. Under the influence of these appearances the apprehension was entertained that, if the ancient monarchy should not be restored a military despotism would be established. By the many, these unpopular doubts were deemed unpardonable heresies, and the few ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... prelude of a mind growing in power, we have in it the promise of a fine poet.... In 'The Wandering Soul,' the verse describing Socrates has that highest note of critical poetry, that in it epigram becomes vivid with life, and life reveals its inherent paradox. It would be difficult to describe the famous irony of Socrates in more poetical and more accurate words than by saying that he doubted men's doubts away."—Spectator, February ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... p. 272. Chronique normande, in Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes, second series, vol. iii, p. 116. D. Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, p. vi, proofs and illustrations. G. Save, Jehanne des Armoises, pp. 6, 7. It is well known that Gabriel Naude maintained the paradox that Jeanne was only burned in effigy. Considerations politiques sur les coups d'etat, Rome, 1639, in 4to. G. Lefevre-Pontalis, La fausse ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... will be a little startled at its real doctrines and intentions. The author has the most supreme and avowed contempt for liberal ideas in Church and State; and for every good-natured axiom about toleration and representative government he spurns from his path as a novelty and paradox. There is nothing dominant in England which he does not oppose. The Whig party he deems the avowed enemies of loyalty, order and religion. The Conservatives, with Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington at their head, he conceives destitute of principle, and the destroyers of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... hesitated for a moment, and, then, bracing himself against the shock, he touched his finger gently to this rude old paradox. There was no shock, and, reassured, he leaned across the table and tried with both hands to lift ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... "A paradox of literary genius. It is not a history, and yet has more of the stuff of history in it, more of the true national character and fate, than any historical monograph we know. It is not a novel, and yet fascinates us more ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... blasphemy—begins by being an apology for folly, and ends like other apologies in becoming tiresome by iteration; and that Klesmer, though very susceptible to it, should have a passionate attachment to Miss Arrowpoint, was no more a paradox than any other triumph of a manifold sympathy over a monotonous attraction. We object less to be taxed with the enslaving excess of our passions than with our deficiency in wider passion; but if the truth were known, our reputed intensity is often the dullness of not knowing ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... strictly true, but they had misunderstood her and she knew it. To make matters worse, she had deliberately constructed her sentences that they might be deceived and yet she was telling the truth. Taking it all in all, it was a paradox. She hated deception, and Hester had placed her in such a position that she had been compelled to put a ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... they "plausibly discourse of news of the Court and of courtiers of this day, and of many other matters of delight," is full of Falstaffian paradox, and reminiscent of Justice Shallow's ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... glances with a somewhat blithe and naive inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the burden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the "children in the market-place" repeat to each other. His very language is forced and broken ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... self-defense he talked with an animation he seldom displayed. Evelyn was evidently much taken by him, and, fired by her manifest interest, he indulged in fantastic paradox and wild flights of fancy. Seemingly his exuberance stimulated Forbes, himself a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... that the book may have been a mere paradox,(404) the effort of a young mind going through the process through which all young men of thought pass, and especially in an age like Toland's, of trying to understand and explain what they believe. But students who are ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Which paradox, being too much for her in the heat of the day, she put aside in favor of the insinuating thought of her beetle man. Whatever else he might or might not be, he wasn't alike. She was by no means sure that she found this difference either admirable or amiable. But at least ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Ogilvie, of the British Royal Artillery, had met his fate by his side, and there was something soldierly in the way he bore himself in his vanity of dress. Not that I think the dandies are the best soldiers—that is merest popular paradox. To me it is as ridiculous for a man to array himself in fine clothes when he is going to kill or be killed, as it would be for him to put on gewgaws when he was going to be hanged. As Leader disappears from my account of Carlist doings after this—we were associated with different ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... sixteenth, and seventeenth century are in existence. Then there is the extraordinary fatigability of the muscles which occurs in the thymus types, who nevertheless have large well-rounded muscles, a paradox of contradiction between anatomy and physiology. Such a type, for instance, may be picked out by a football coach for an important position in a line-up, simply on the tremendous impressiveness of the muscle make-up, only to see him bowled over and out in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... toward this earth; an icicle is of course an expression of gravitation—and, if water melting from ice should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the ice does not, because the ice is heavier—that is, in masses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... prefigures. Long though the list is, it does not contain a large proportion of thoroughly respectable names: Plautus rarely introduces us to people, male or female, whom we should care to have long in the same house with us. A real lady seldom appears in these comedies, and—to approach a paradox—when she does she usually comes perilously close to being no lady; the same is usually true of the real gentleman. The generalization in the Epilogue of The Captives may well be made particular: ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... not only in the body, but in the spirit. Everybody remarked it. The fierce fires of war seemed to have burnt away his old confident egotism. In giving himself to France he had found more than he had lost; for, by a strange paradox, in the midst of death he ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... inside Adam's laboratory, a huge apartment filled with queer apparatus and cages of live animals. The room was a strange paradox. Part of the equipment, the walls, and the floor was glistening with newness, and part was moulding with extreme age. The powers of disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring certain spots of the room. Here, in the midst of bright marble, was a section of wall that seemed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... fully explored what is behind the traverses to the right and left of you. The delivery of a bomb serves as a very effective notice of ejectment. The back of the trench is protected by a ridge of earth commonly known as a parados. My servant, whose vocabulary was limited, called it a paradox, and was not very wide of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the enforcement of which, in Modern Painters, long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily. But it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after long years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the upper table-land midway, where all appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure; which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of delusion. It is no paradox. They may be publicly useful in a small way. I do not deny it at all. They must be near the gates of life—the opening or the closing—for their minds to be accessible to the urgency of the greater questions. Otherwise the world presents itself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... approach of the weapon, the horror upon the face became unspeakable. The eyes were starting, the mouth working painfully. Resolved to be rid of life, yet terrified to die, the wretch was writhing. There never was seen so loathsome a paradox. Cowardice was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... salvation which means the final glory. "Once, only once"—this is the sublime law of that Sacrifice and that Offering. As death for us men comes "once," and then there follows "judgment," so the death of Christ, the "offering" of Christ, comes "once," and then comes, in a wonderful paradox, not judgment but "salvation," for them that are found ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... the hill, towered a cathedral. The size of it turned the city into a close. Its site, its bulwarks, however, turned the church into a castle. Here was an abbot filling the post of constable. The longer you gazed, the stronger the paradox became. Pictures of peace and war became inextricably confused. Men-at-arms mumbled their offices; steel caps concealed tonsures: embrasures framed precious panes: trumpets sounded the Angelus: mail chinked beneath vestments: sallies ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... concurred, and did alike conspire his remove and ruin. But into Ireland he went, where he did the Queen very great and many services, if the surplusage of the measure did not abate the value of the merit, as after-time found to be no paradox to save the Queen's purse, but both herself and my Lord Treasurer Burleigh ever took for good service; he imposed on the Irish the charge for bearing their own arms, which both gave them the possession and taught them the use of weapons; which provided in the end to a ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... world over; visions of old age and yawning almshouses are not for him. He owns himself—he does what he wishes, he says what he thinks, and neither priest nor politician dare cry, hist! So we get the paradox: the only perfect freedom is to be found in a monarchy. "A Republic," says Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many—that is to say, by the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... foreshortening! I wish I were like that Hindu god with a dozen arms; and even then I couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy what my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas.... It's a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I'm perfectly cool, too, which seems a paradox but isn't. And all the while, inside me, is a constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every brush stroke with an 'I told you so!'—if you know what I'm trying to ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... this point was venial and not mortal. For the positive tabernacle-system of "the man who sailed to India" there was never much support; his work was soon forgotten, though it has been called by some paradox-makers "the great authority of the Middle Ages"—in the face of the known facts, that this was the real position of Ptolemy and Strabo, that no one can speak of the "Middle Ages" in this unqualified way any more than of the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... civilian, who had had some little military training in his youth, but who had had no experience of war,[55] whose proper functions were diplomacy and administration, but who, under the stress of circumstances in the Land of Paradox, had to be ultimately responsible for the maintenance, and even, to some extent, for the movements of an army of some 25,000 ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Hall, Burlington, Nebo, Rush; plate of mixed, imported varieties; Seedling walnuts, Paradox walnut, black walnuts and rupestris, (Texas); two plates Chinquapins; chestnuts, Giant Japanese; shellbarks: LaFeuore, very good, large, Weiker, fair; two seedlings: Paradise nut; two plates filberts; Lancaster Co. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... message, that while a State has no right to secede, the Union has no right to coerce, has been universally condemned as a paradox. The popular estimate of Mr. Buchanan's proposition and arguments was forcibly presented at the time by a jesting criticism attributed to Mr. Seward. "I think," said the New York Senator, "the President has conclusively ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... thoughts which a great prose writer embodies; the rhyme eternally cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature, which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophizing corollaries which may be drawn from them. Thus, though it would seem at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... if there is one thing I have a penchant for, it is common sense! A paradox I detest with my ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... nearly as much precision, when I gazed on it with earnest, direct and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone. I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the center of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... parents had made him. Without being able to think it out in scientific terms he was able to expound the why of like. It was one of the inexorable rules of heredity. To his parents he owed everything and nothing. He reflected on this paradox until it became perfectly clear to him. They—his parents—had given him life, and that was all. He owed them thanks for that, or he would have owed them thanks if he considered his life to be worth anything. But he owed them nothing because they had spoiled ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... seem a paradox to say that no musician is so little known as Berlioz. The world thinks it knows him. A noisy fame surrounds his person and his work. Musical Europe has celebrated his centenary. Germany disputes with France the glory of having nurtured and shaped ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... at her fortieth mile-stone; and she effected the paradox of looking both younger and older than her age. Younger, because she had always taken excellent care of herself. Her form had still much of the roundness of youth, and her step was sprightly and firm. She looked older than her age, because of the strong lines in her ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... darkness by the time he reached the highway. Approximately half an hour later he would reach the highway again. However, the seeming paradox did not disconcert him in the least: this was far from being the first time he had backtracked ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... laughing, thinking it a paradox, or a little piece of affectation, which they excused. To be hailed, like Bongrand, with the name of master—was that not the height of bliss? He, with his arms resting on the back of his chair, listened to them in silence, leisurely puffing his pipe, and renouncing ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the same. Meat's cast away upon him; It never thrives. He holds this paradox, Who eats not well, can ne'er do justice well. His stomach's ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... best policy in general not to explain any remark he had made, but to say the right thing better next time instead. I suppose he believed, with another friend of mine, that "when explanations become necessary, they become impossible," a paradox well worth the consideration of those who write letters to newspapers. But Lady Bernard understood him well enough, and was only unwinding ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... lines of descent, may have become adapted to similar conditions, and thus have assumed a close external resemblance; but such resemblances will not reveal—will rather tend to conceal their blood-relationship. We can thus also understand the apparent paradox, that the very same characters are analogical when one group is compared with another, but give true affinities when the members of the same group are compared together: thus the shape of the body and fin-like limbs are only analogical when whales are compared ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... FRIEND: I have so little to do, that I am surprised how I can find time to write to you so often. Do not stare at the seeming paradox; for it is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... dialogues appended to The Natural Son His second play, The Father of the Family (1758) One radical error of his dramatic doctrine Modest opinion of his own experiments His admiration for Terence Diderot translates Moore's Gamester On Shakespeare The Paradox on the Player Account of Garrick On the truth of the stage His condemnation of the French classic stage The foundations of dramatic art Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama No Diderotian school Why the Encyclopaedists could not replace ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley |
