"Self-contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "doctrines," we see how the "Scripture" theologians were the very ones who threatened the faith with the greatest corruptions. As the exegesis of the Valentinian schools became the mother of numerous self-contradictory Christologies, so the same result was threatened here—"doctrinae inolescentes in silvas iam exoleverunt Gnosticorum." From this standpoint Origen's undertaking to subject the whole material of Biblical exegesis to a fixed theory appears in its ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... attained by considering abstract quantity is corroborated by considering concrete and discrete quantities. Such expressions as infinite sphere, radius, parallelogram, line, and so forth, are self-contradictory. A sphere is limited by its own periphery, and a radius by the centre and circumference of its circle. A parallelogram of infinite altitude is impossible, because the limit of its altitude is assigned in the side which must be parallel to its base in order to constitute it a parallelogram. In brief, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... man or prophet, had taken upon him the punishment, than that God himself should have done so. For, supposing even that He became incarnate, He would not be like one of us.—It is altogether impossible and self-contradictory that God should assume a body; for God is the first cause, infinite, and omnipotent. He cannot, therefore, assume flesh, and subsist as a finite being, and take upon himself man's punishment, of which ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... clear hospitable smile, which seemed almost to ask that he would come and help her to entertain some of her visitors. To such suggestions, however, he opposed but a stiff impatience. He wandered about and waited; he talked to the few people he knew, who found him for the first time rather self-contradictory. This was indeed rare with Caspar Goodwood, though he often contradicted others. There was often music at Palazzo Roccanera, and it was usually very good. Under cover of the music he managed to contain himself; but toward the end, when he saw the people beginning ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... wit and wisdom, and have enough for the whole world. But people who have wit enough for the whole world, have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph. And you can seldom get through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant, or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If you have something to teach us, teach it to us now. If you propose to convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you have conquered us? As it is, we cannot believe ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... valid may well be doubted. But Kant undoubtedly deserves credit for two things: first, for having perceived that we have a priori knowledge which is not purely 'analytic', i.e. such that the opposite would be self-contradictory, and secondly, for having made evident the philosophical importance of ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... years old? Are all those ages of past {17} history, when the earth and the sun were but nebulae, a mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass come into existence thousands or millions of years afterwards when Kant or Laplace first conceived that it had existed? The supposition is clearly self-contradictory and impossible. If Science be not a mass of illusion, this planet existed millions of years before any human—or, so far as we know, any animal minds—existed to think its existence. And yet I have endeavoured to show the absurdity ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... book is to set out the relation between explanations and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show exactly why Bergson must use self-contradictory terms if the explanation of reality which he offers is to be ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... retraced their steps, there were but two paths to take—either to admit priests consecrated by a Church they had condemned, or to dispense with the clergy, who alone could celebrate the rites in defence of which they had revolted. There was little to choose between the two self-contradictory courses, and each had its partisans. This first check split the schism into two groups, whose hostility has not been allayed by the lapse of two centuries. According to some, as Christianity cannot exist without a priesthood, its complicity with Nikon's heresy has not deprived ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology,[50] they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their souls, and they will set themselves simply ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... crucifixion of his boyish pride it must have been to see her on the stage. It was no answer to say that with his intellectual concept of the ideal relations between men and women, he shouldn't have felt like that. Shouldn't have felt! The phrase was self-contradictory. Feelings weren't decorative abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and sent home. They were things that happened to you. In this case, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... not infrequently represented as men who have gone up to the sky; this is a natural way of accounting for their superterrestrial abode. Savage conceptions of the origin and history of such figures are usually vague, and their theologies fluctuating and self-contradictory; but there are two points as to which opinion is firm: the god is like men in everything except power, and his functions are universal. He represents not a monotheistic creed (which takes the whole world as the domain ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Gallilee proceeded, speaking in the oddest self-contradictory voice, if such a description is permissible—a voice at once high in pitch and mild in tone: in short, as Mr. Le Frank once professionally remarked, a soft falsetto. When the good gentleman paused to make his little effort of memory, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the manner of his kind, amazed and speechless. Man's saving faculty of logic was in him, but tongue-tied; and he could not express his intuitive recognition of the self-contradictory. Such natures frequently make reason articulate through a blow—a rough way of knocking her into shape, but commonly effectual. Jack, however, was evidently a large gentle swain of the dumb-suffering type—one of those unresisting leviathans ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the actions of Caligula lies in a certain nervous haste, which led him spasmodically from one obsession to another, often of a self-contradictory nature; moreover, he had the dangerous habit of wanting to do everything himself. Caligula seems to have a great fondness of the sea. The strolling-player side of his character was by no means limited to his military performances. He was ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... the constitution of deserts which is almost always utterly misconceived in Europe. Most people at home picture the desert to themselves as wholly dead, flat, and sandy. To talk about the fauna and flora of Sahara sounds in their ears like self-contradictory nonsense. But, as a matter of fact, that uniform and lifeless desert of the popular fancy exists only in those sister arts that George II.—good, practical man—so heartily despised, 'boetry and bainting.' The desert of real life, though less ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... baffled in the meshes of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something to indicate retrospectively the character and tenor of that life. The life of Judas, under a German construction of it, as a spasmodic effort of vindictive patriotism and of rebellious ambition, noble by possibility, though ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... easy matter to give in short compass an account of Lamarck's biological philosophy. He is an obscure writer, and often self-contradictory. ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When at Athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall and short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a man), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as well have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief from his ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James |
