"Tautology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an idea that I'm a selfish Epicurean, if that isn't tautology—because I'm interested in a form of art, the rest of the world can go hang. You have a prejudice against artists. I wish I really ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... called to—but what of that, d'ye see? perhaps I may know as much as—facts are facts, as the saying is.—I shall tell, repeat, and relate a plain story—matters of fact, d'ye see, without rhetoric, oratory, ornament, or embellishment; without repetition, tautology, circumlocution, or going about the bush; facts which I shall aver, partly on the testimony of my own knowledge, and partly from the information of responsible evidences of good repute and credit, any circumstance known ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... logical form of these sentences is, Hypocrites are not lovers of virtue; Traitors are the vilest of mankind. Impersonal propositions, such as It rains, are easily rendered into logical forms of equivalent meaning, thus: Rain is falling; or (if that be tautology), The clouds are raining. Exclamations may seem capricious, but are often part of the argument. Shade of Chatham! usually means Chatham, being aware of our present foreign policy, is much disgusted. It is in fact, an appeal to ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the principle of valuation employed in column nine is, not the quantity of producing labor, but the quantity of labor commanded. Now, if it is, then the result is childish tautology, as being identical with the premises. For it is already introduced into the premises as one of the conditions of the case Alpha (namely, into column two), that twelve quarters of corn shall command the labor of one man; which being premised, it is a mere variety of expression for the very ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... get on tolerably with facts," said Lettice, "but I'm always marked 'weak' for composition. Miss Farrar says I use tautology and repeat myself, and that my grammar is shaky and my general style poor. She told me to take Macaulay as a model, but I can no more copy other people's ways of writing than I could improve my features by staring at the ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... had no fear of tautology when he wished to strengthen the impression of a word by constant reiteration is given in the Merchant of Venice (Act v, sc. 2), whence we have already quoted a few lines. The passage concerns the disposal by Bassanio of a ring he had received from Portia, and he answers her thus ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... he said; "the omission of paint was to prevent tautology, an offence against the simplicity of the monikin dialect, as well as against monikin taste, that would have been sufficient, under our opinions, even ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... or simply Rhode, would be much more appropriate. As for Rhode Island, it ought to mean nothing but the island; and it is, in fact, an abuse of language to apply it otherwise. In one of his parsing lessons, Sanborn gives us for good English the following tautology: "Rhode Island derived its name from the island of Rhode Island."—Analytical Gram., p. 37. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... us your wine is bad, and that the clergy do not frequent your house, which we look upon to be tautology. The best advice we can give you is, to make them a present of your wine, and ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and the hour runs through the roughest day] I suppose every reader is disgusted at the tautology in this passage, Time and the hour, and will therefore willingly believe that Shakespeare wrote ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... his life repeating the same thought in different words? and why should we be more lenient to the parrot-painter who has learned one lesson from the page of nature, and keeps stammering it out with eternal repetition without turning the leaf? Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and over again with lines, than it is with words? The teaching of nature is as varied and infinite as it is constant; and the duty of the painter is to watch for every one of her lessons, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... all of which make against the theory that Moses is the author of all this Pentateuchal literature. A single author, if he were a man of fair intelligence, good common sense, and reasonably firm memory, could not have written it. And unless tautology, anachronisms, and contradictions are a proof of inspiration, much less could it have been written by a single inspired writer. The traditional theory cannot therefore he true. We have appealed to the books themselves, and they ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... I only say it is not of the most vital importance. Thackeray was a Titan—well, look at his slipshod style in places, his careless grammar, his constant tautology. He knew better, and he could have done better, and it would have been well if he had, I don't deny it; but his work would not have been a scrap more vital, nor he himself the greater. I have seen ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... will request permission to add a few words closely connected with 'The Thorn' and many other Poems in these Volumes. There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology; this is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet's words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling and not measured by the space which they occupy upon ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... all things it seemed necessary to be in a passion; to be as irritated and bitter against him as possible. The copiousness of her vocabulary of abuse surprised herself, and she did not shrink from tautology. She only stopped at last for want of breath, and even then, as though she knew how dangerous was silence, she bemoaned ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... 460. MR. COLLIER says that the passage, "dangerous, unsafe lunes i' the king," is mere tautology, and therefore he follows the old corrector in substituting "unsane lunes." Now it strikes me that there is quite as much tautology in "unsane lunes" as in the double epithet, "dangerous, unsafe." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... memory which should, in this place, leave the reader with the idea that the Chanson de Geste as such is merely monotonous and dull. The intensity of the appeal of Roland is no doubt helped by that approach to bareness—even by a certain tautology—which has been mentioned. Aliscans, which few could reject as faithless to the type, contains, even without the family of dependent poems which cluster round it, a vivid picture of the valiant insubordinate warrior in William ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... We are obliged to Jornandes (de Reb. Get. c. 51, p. 688) for a short and lively picture of these lesser Goths. Gothi minores, populus immensus, cum suo Pontifice ipsoque primate Wulfila. The last words, if they are not mere tautology, imply some temporal jurisdiction.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Tautology, or a continued repetition of the same word, is a disagreeable and inelegant fault in writing, as: "If John will come home, we will all come, but if he fails to come, we will not come until he can ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... had good success: in other questions very moderate. He was a person of indefatigable pains. I have seen sometimes half one sheet of paper wrote of his judgment upon one question; in writing whereof he used much tautology, as you may see yourself, (most excellent Esquire) if you read a great book of Dr. Flood's, which you have, who had all that book from the manuscripts of Forman; for I have seen the same word for word in an English manuscript formerly belonging to Doctor Willoughby of Gloucestershire. ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... rather impertinent one, and, moreover, whether you choose to answer it or not, I hope you will not for the present ask me why I ask it. Now there are a good many 'asks' in that, but as the matter is somewhat important to both of us, I wanted to put the thing plainly, even at the expense of a little tautology." ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... identity, sameness; coincidence, coalescence; convertibility; equality &c 27; selfness^, self, oneself; identification. monotony, tautology &c (repetition) 104. facsimile &c (copy) 21; homoousia: alter ego &c (similar) 17; ipsissima verba &c (exactness) 494 [Lat.]; same; self, very, one and the same; very thing, actual thing; real McCoy; no other; one and only; in the flesh. V. be identical &c adj.; coincide, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and water, and the stone must be thrown into the water; but these suppositions forming part of the enunciation of the phenomenon itself, to include them also among the conditions would be a vicious tautology; and this class of conditions, therefore, have never received the name of cause from any but the Aristotelians, by whom they were called the material cause, causa materialis. The next condition ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Scott an opportunity to discuss the characteristics of Middle-English poetry, but his general thesis, that the Rowley poems exhibit graces and refinements which are in marked contrast to the tenuity of idea and tautology of expression found in genuine works of the period, is supported by an argument which seems to be based on a characterization of the romances rather than on a close acquaintance with other Middle-English poetry. We notice a similar quality in ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... They say that a biographer unconsciously writes his autobiography. That is not tautology. Some one writing of the late Frank N. Mayer said: "The plant hunter and explorer is the unsung Columbus of horticulture." Our next speaker was the one who wrote that in Mr. Meyer's biography. We all recognize it as autobiography. Emerson tells us that every successful institution is the lengthened ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... clear that the former of these two epithets is here employed, not in its widest sense of moral perfectness, or else 'upright,' which follows, would be mere tautology, but in the narrower sense, which is familiar too, to us, in our common speech, in which good is tantamount to kind, beneficent, or to say all in a word, loving. Upright needs no explanation; but the point to notice is the decisiveness with which the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... enumerated powers, the grant of power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the enumerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are or may be necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated, is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, rhetorical declamation, pedantry, egotism, uncouth forms of sentences, and peculiarities in the use of words and idioms. They are unable to discover any unity in the patched, irregular structure. The speculative element both in government and education ...
— Laws • Plato |
