"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrived a short time ago from Stockholm, and did not contain any thing of importance, but that matters stand well. The German mail has not come, and, in general, the news was so contradictory that nobody ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... sense Kant distinguished an analytic from a synthetic judgment, as one in which the predicate is involved in the essence of the subject. Such judgments are also known as verbal, as opposed to real or ampliative judgments. The processes of synthesis and analysis though formally contradictory are practically supplementary; thus to analyse the connotation is to synthesize the denotation of a term, and vice versa; the process of knowledge involves the two methods, analysis being the corrective ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the Lord's supper, there is really and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of Christ, and that the whole substance of the bread is turned into his body, and the whole substance of the wine into his blood; which conversion, so contradictory to our senses, they call transubstantiation, but at the same time they affirm, that, under either kind or species, only one whole entire Christ, and the true sacrament, is received. But why are those words, "This is my body," to be taken in a literal sense, any more ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... a curious contradiction. Half of it consisted of tremendous generalities, which made the hearer gasp with a kind of mental deflation. The other side consisted of specific statements of the most meticulous kind. And these contradictory forms of attack upon the intelligence with whom he was in conversation were mixed together in the most admired disorder. I remember well a lady who met Mr. Townsend for the first time at a luncheon-party ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... how to act. At last he bowed to Philip, and begged that he would consider himself at liberty; and, continued he to Krantz, "I shall be most happy at an immediate explanation of this affair, for everything appears so contradictory." ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... ever witnessed. Scores of members were on their legs at the same time; men hitherto quiet, composed, and good-natured, began to raise cries hoarse with rage, and finally four or five hundred voices were united in producing the deafening and discordant din of angry and contradictory voices. Nor was this all. In some parts of the House men began directly to assail each other—to exchange language of taunt, and insult, and defiance; and, in more than one corner, there were the signs of impending physical conflict. The one relief of the situation was that some men kept ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Davies's little squad, halted as ordered, was now isolated from all, far over on the east side of the jagged spur, over whose crest their lieutenant had just disappeared from their sight, with Murray in attendance, riding wearily back to find his captain, disturbed by contradictory orders and dishearted to see him in march full a mile farther away than he supposed, and diverging from the point of direction of his own party with every step. Time and again had Devers, still fuming with nervous tension and mingled wrath and pain,—hungry and savage, too, it must be borne ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... conception of a separated voice—'The viewless spirit of a lonely sound,' plaining in the woods as if seeking for some incarnation it cannot find, and saddening the spring groves by a note so contradictory to the genius of the season. In reference to the note of the cuckoo we find the following remarks among the fragments from the commonplace-book of Dr Thomas Brown, printed by Dr Welsh:—'The name of the cuckoo has generally been considered as a very pure instance of imitative harmony. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... secreted, using it when he dared, a sixpence at a time; the case, with its papers, he buried in the spot where his master afterwards found it. With all this upon the young man's conscience, no wonder he was a little confused and contradictory in his statements to Pike: no wonder he fancied the ghost of the man he could have saved and did not, might now and then be hovering about him. Pike learned the real truth at last; and a compunction had come over him, now that he was dying, for having ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... up, and, overhearing the question, declares that her mistress's hand has already been promised,—a statement which Eva modifies by adding that her future bridegroom is yet to be chosen. As these contradictory answers greatly puzzle Walther, she hurriedly explains that her father, the wealthiest burgher of the town, wishing to show his veneration for music, has promised his fortune and her hand to a Master Singer, the preference being given ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... will prosper, and if he objects with full arguments, his adversaries have a perfect right to claim that he himself sets a poor example and that his psychology helps still more to increase that noisy discussion which he denounces as ruinous to the community. But in this contradictory situation the circle must be broken somewhere, and even at the risk of adding to the dangerous tumult which he condemns, the psychologist must break his silence in order to plead for silence. I shall have to go into all the obnoxious detail, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... masterpieces. In short, with all due respect to the entire sincerity of this magnificent writer, it must be said that those who would enjoy and appreciate him rightly, should ignore his philosophico-religious treatises, which are contradictory and confusing to the last degree. As an illustration, let me cite the case of the famine in Russia of 1891-92. Great sums of money[45] were sent to Count Tolstoy, chiefly from America, and were expended by him in the most practicable and irreproachable manner—so ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped after luncheon. There were pleasanter pastimes, even for the women, contradictory as this may seem. By eleven o'clock Courtlandt had finished the reading of his mail, and was now ready to hunt for the little lady of the Taverne Royale. It was necessary to find her. The whereabouts of Flora ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... began to spread. Helgi, who alone knew the truth, held his peace for Estein's sake, even when the ale flowed most freely. The others who had sailed with them laid no such restraint on their tongues, and stories of a spell and an Orkney witch, vague and contradictory, but none the less eagerly listened to and often repeated, went the round of the country. The king at last began to take alarm, and one day he called Earl Sigvald to him ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... is all c'llected in the middle of his visage, an' bunched up like they's afraid of Injuns or somethin' else that threatenin' an' hostile—them sort of countenances you notes carved on the far ends of fiddles. We-all is averse to Ryder. An' this yere Ryder himsc'f is that contentious an' contradictory he won't agree to nothin'. Jest to show you about Ryder: I has in mind once when a passel of us is lookin' at a paper that's come floatin' in from the States. Thar's the picture of a cow-puncher into it who's a dead ringer for Dave Tutt. From y'ears to hocks that picture is Tutt; an' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... skeptics never dream of reproaching themselves; they pass their lives in reasoning against reason. In short, Count Kostia respected nothing but facts, and believed that, properly viewed, there was nothing else, and that the universe, considered as an entirety, was but a collection of contradictory accidents. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... end of his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them, his force being small. The Government had assured Colonel Starr that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to arrange; that ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to waste away with hunger at home, because she imagined that she was suffering from a serious complaint of the digestive organs, but who nevertheless began to eat when she was taken elsewhere. However, that is but one circumstance, and there are so many contradictory cases." ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as if she were sorry. Indeed, she thought she was glad too. That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed contradictory. And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to relieve her suddenly and to take from her ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... By their contradictory statements, ever-increasing embarrassment, and unveracious assertions, the jury were soon convinced of their guilt. The unhappy youth was their brother, and had inherited property from their mother, he being her child by a second husband. So these monsters murdered him for revenge ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... he perceived that Guillaume was now very pale and had closed his eyes. Had even he, with his faith in science, felt the doubt which is born of contradictory theories, and the despair which comes when one sees the fight for truth resulting in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... must be aware that the accounts which you gave of yourself last night were very contradictory. Even at the best, you are, according to your own statement, a newspaper correspondent, which in our eyes is the same as a spy. But more than this, you confess yourself to be an American, which makes it still worse. And so, senor, you ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... word-portrait as I could of the French lieutenant; and—I suppose on account of that same perversity—I felt no surprise whatever when he assured me that I had faithfully described to him the arch-pirate who had left him and his crew to perish in the flames. Indeed, in my then contradictory state of mind I should have been disappointed had he said otherwise. The man's conduct—his stealthy but searching scrutiny of the ship; his endeavour, as I regarded it, to mislead us with his broken English; and his excessive curiosity, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... forgiven to men of genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with most of us. An eager imagination—a vivid sense of beauty—quick readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral loveliness—these were palliations, the old clergyman held, of much that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... 1738 is more extensive, although somewhat contradictory, and exhibits a strong element of dissention. Oglethorpe admitted the difficulties under which the people labored, ascribing them to the Spanish alarms, but reports that John Mohr Macintosh, pursuant to ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... we have already said of this singular work, the criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only allege in excuse the fact that the book ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... roused by some great calamity that people bestir themselves; and then there is such a variety of plans proposed to avert similar cases of distress, that to attempt to concoct a rational plan out of such a crude, ill-digested, and contradictory mass of opinion, requires more labour and attention than most people are inclined to give it, unless a regular business was made of it. In Paris the corps of military firemen are so well trained, that although their apparatus is not so good as it should be, the amount of ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... of witchcraft was tried in 1711, before Lord Chief Justice Powell; in which, however, the jury persisted in a verdict of guilty, though the evidence was of the usual absurd and contradictory character, and the enlightened judge did all in his power to bring them to a right conclusion. The accused person was one Jane Wenham, better known as the Witch of Walkerne; and the persons who were alleged to have suffered from her witchcraft were two young women, named ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... its want of literary research, is not likely to be soon supplied, than Thomas Erastus, whose theological, philosophical, and medical celebrity entitle him to rank with the greatest men of his century. At present we have to collect all that is known of his life from various scattered and contradictory sources. John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, contrary to the usual candour and fairness of his judgments, speaks slightingly of Erastus. There was, however, a sufficient reason for this. Erastus had shown up the empiricism of Webster's ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... qualities differing from His real nature and qualities, and dishonoring Him. A very good definition, if you only know what His nature and qualities are. But that is not revealed; for, studying Him through the medium of the bible, we find Him illimitably contradictory. He commands us not to work on the Sabbath day, because it is holy. Yet God works himself on the Sabbath day. The sun, moon and stars swing round in their orbits, and all the creation attributed to this God goes on as on ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... moody, walked restlessly about, held consultations with his officers, gave contradictory orders in this shrill clamour pervading the whole empty edifice. Sometimes there would be long and awful silences. Several times he had entered the torture-chamber where his sword, horsewhip, revolver, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most of them finished their career. It is an instructive fact that ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... that their counsels were contradictory, and their promises were distant, and the lord of the castle was impatient and bewildered in mind. For meantime the manifold voices of the town went up around him like smoke, and he knew that underneath it some fires of trouble ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... by this retrospect how difficult it is to seize all the shifting subtleties of this remarkable character. His sophisms even, when self-contradictory, are so adroit that they are often hard to parry. He made a great merit to himself for not having originated the new episcopates; but it should be remembered that he did his utmost to enforce the measure, which was "so holy a scheme that he would sacrifice ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... belongs his Almansor, a dramatic poem which has suffered the most contradictory criticism. In my opinion, it has usually been misunderstood. Almansor is intelligible only if regarded from a Jewish point of view, and then it is seen to be the hymn of vengeance sung by Judaism oppressed. Substitute ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... his irritation died away, and something wholly contradictory took its place. He felt a rush of self-pity, and then of trust. What if he called on her to help him—unveiled himself to this kind and charming woman—confessed to her his remorse about Phoebe—his secret miseries and anxieties—the bitterness ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mind, is variously called the evil or carnal mind, the mind of the flesh, the old man, the serpent, the devil, the adversary. It is simply the opposite or contradictory of the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... inclination to receive proof. Hamlet is sent to sea just to get such proof as will not only thoroughly satisfy himself, but be capable of being shown to others. He holds now in his hand—to lay before the people—the two contradictory commissions. By his voyage then he has gained both assurance of his duty, and provision against the consequence he mainly dreaded, that of leaving a wounded name behind him. 272. This is the shaping of his ends—so exactly to his needs, so different from ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... circumference nowhere,' that I am not prepared to say what may or may not be found within it. You will ultimately think with me that, though an earnest and profound thinker, your master is no Memnon, waking only before the sunlight of truth. His utterances are dim and contradictory." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... that I am very much in want of information, and can think of no unprejudiced individuals to whom to apply for the facts as really existing in other parts of India. As for books, when I look into them for any information, I am at once met by quantities of unlimited condemnations, or a host of contradictory statements. And, as an instance of the latter, I may mention that in Kerr's "Domestic Life of the Natives of India" we are informed, at page 31, that "alms are given to the poor without distinction of caste," while at page ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... we could not form the conception of any environment at all, and consequently could have no recognition of our own existence. The confusion of thought involved even in the attempt to state such a condition shows it to be perfectly inconceivable, for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory and self-destructive. On this account it is clear that our own existence and that of the world around us necessarily implies the presence of a Universal Mind acting on certain fixed lines of its ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... notes. Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... returns to the charge. He observes (as I have also observed) the often contradictory nature of our evidence. Here I may offer an anecdote. The most celebrated of living English philosophers heard that I was at one time writing a book on the 'ghostly' in history, anthropology, and society, old or new, savage or civilised. He kindly dictated a letter to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... overlapping of these laws, so contradictory in principle, it may happen that securities held by taxpayers residing in other states than those of the issue are taxable two or three or more times; but few if any loans of this kind are made except by ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... as Fitz and Luke came into the room. Luke's eyes were only for her. Fitz, with the unconcealed absorption which was often his, absolutely ignored her presence. And the little incident roused something contradictory in Agatha—something evil and, alas! feminine. She awoke to the very matter-of-factness of the present moment, and she determined to make a conquest ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... him. "When to go up and when to come down!" he repeated with the same idiotic drawl and contradictory gesture. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... her afterward that she must have had two simultaneous and contradictory ideas as to who he was. She knew,—she must have known, instantly—that he was Anthony March, but his uniform suggested Rush and drew her over toward him just as though she had actually believed him to be her brother. And then as he became aware of her ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... shoulders, and that the two arms may be visible to right and left of the body. The contours of the trunk are best modelled in a three-quarters view, whereas the legs show to most advantage when seen sidewise. The Egyptians did not hesitate to combine these contradictory points of view in one single figure. The head is almost always given in profile, but is provided with a full-face eye and placed upon a full-face bust. The full-face bust adorns a trunk seen from a three-quarters point of view, and ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... The legal is extremely complex, laws being infinite in number and character. Sometimes the letter is to be observed, sometimes the spirit. Sometimes we get at its meaning by comparison, or induction; sometimes its meaning is open to the most contradictory interpretations. Hence there is room for a far greater display of diverse kinds of excellence in the legal than in the rational department. Thus the declamatory exercises called suasoriae, which are confined to rational considerations, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... on intoning their dreary Latin doggerel? Priestcraft and Sham! There's no escape from it anywhere, not even in the wilds of Caucasus! I wonder if the man I seek is really here, or whether after all I have been misled? There are so many contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems incredible that he should be a monk; it is such an altogether foolish ending to an intellectual career. For whatever may be the form of faith professed by this particular fraternity, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of all moral authority by persistent efforts to procure their indirect repeal through contradictory enactments. They had been practically abrogated by the legislation attending the organization of Utah, New Mexico, and Washington. If any vitality remained in them it would have been taken away, in effect, by the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... awakened by the repeated avowal of the unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity, which was but another form of his egotism, was so complete as to baffle ordinary malicious cunning, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... fairly of the circumstances attending the advent of painless surgery. The committee decided unanimously that Doctor Wells did not carry his experiments far enough to reach a decided result; that Doctor Jackson's testimony was contradictory and not much to be depended on; and that the credit of discovering painless surgery properly appertained to Dr. W. T. G. Morton. They recommended an appropriation of a hundred thousand dollars to be given to Doctor Morton in return ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... a snug Party Club prove a trifle too free, Or give an equivocal "treat," or hat-ticket; A seven years' nursing of Slopville-on-Slime, A well-fought Election and Glorious Victory (Crowed o'er by proud Party prints at the time) May—lose you your Seat. It does seem contradictory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... now touched on what seem to me the salient points in both of the volumes by these two famous statesmen. I have, I hope, brought out sufficiently the fact that on their own showing they were pursuing contradictory policies, and that it was the consequent failure to follow a policy that was consistent and continuous that in the end led Germany to the slippery slope down which she glided into war. The circumstances of the world before and ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... miserable, because he had two hundred thousand dollars, and she had not as many hundreds. All this strangely conflicted with Betts' preconceived opinion of a French woman's selfishness, and, while he was disposed to believe his adored perfection, he almost feared it was a trick. Of such contradictory materials ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... dissatisfaction of Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians, and Germans. Republicans taking full advantage and liable, in order to garner disaffected vote, to make absolute issue against League, Reaction intensified by your absence and lack of publicity from your end and confusion caused by contradictory statements and explanations of Quote so-called compromises End Quote. Simonds' article appearing in certain American newspapers Sunday, admirable, explaining reasons for Saar Valley and French ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... of government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,—this is the only reality of government and politics. How shall this absolute liberty, synonymous ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... too by the tendency of character to grow permanent. And when we are told that God "willeth all men to be saved," and that God can do everything, we are forced to ask, Can God do contradictory things? Can God make a door to be open and shut at the same time? Can God make a thing to be and not to be at the same time? Can God make a man's will free to choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall certainly choose good at the last? One ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park, her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given back to her the self-respect ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said he had often expostulated with his old comrade of the "Beagle" for entertaining views which were contradictory to the First ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... take every care to avoid a confusion between the manifest and the latent content, for I ascribe all the contradictory as well as the incorrect accounts of dream-life to the ignorance of this latent content, now first ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... on the floor of the United States Congress, fifteen years afterward, an apologetic denial of what appears from the evidence of those who escaped,—taken by the Congressional Committee,—and also contradictory to the confederate General S. D. Lee's report, in which he fails to convince himself even of the inaccuracy of the reports of brutality, as made by the few who escaped being murdered. ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... satisfaction, these things are all true. But heaven is not lying upon couches and eating of a feast. There is another use of this metaphor in this same Gospel, which, at first sight, strikes one as being contradictory to this. Our Lord said: 'Which of you, having a servant ploughing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, go and sit down to meat, and will not rather say unto him, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... truly!" returned Alida, half tempted, by the wild and excited eye of her companion, not withstanding all the contradictory evidence which surrounded him, to believe she was addressing one of the very rovers in question. "The book was lent me by a brave seaman, who holds himself in readiness to repress their depredations; and while reading of so much wickedness, I endeavor to recall the devotion ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and we firmly believe that they are practicable, and binding on every Christian, and that, in the life to come, every man will be rewarded according to his works. And, further, it is our belief that, in order to enable mankind to put in practice these sacred precepts, many of which are contradictory to the unregenerate will of man, every man, coming into the world, is endued with a measure of the light, grace, or good spirit, of Christ, by which, as it is attended to, he is enabled to distinguish good from evil, and to correct the disorderly passions and corrupt ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world, which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration—'It did not weigh as much as I expected, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... explained" to me before I went to Pulaski, and "properly appreciated," instead of upon what I had gathered from General Thomas's orders to Stanley and subsequent orders to me about fighting Hood at Pulaski, absolutely contradictory to that stated in his report, "without risking a general engagement," and his assent to my radically different suggestions made after I assumed command at Pulaski, as stated in my report. It is not incumbent upon ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... 'How contradictory is this!' said Emily;—'but we may be overheard. My recollection of it shall depend upon yours; I will endeavour to forget, or to recollect it, as you may do. Let us join the Count.'—'Tell me first,' said Valancourt, 'that you forgive the uneasiness I have ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... sensation was one of joyous self-confidence, which sensation had been produced in her by the remarks and the attitude of Musa. She had always known that she was both shy and adventurous, and that the two qualities were mutually contradictory; but now it appeared to her that diffidence had been destroyed, and that that change which she had ever longed for in her constitution had at ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... and prettier, Pip?" And when I said yes (for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella's moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like "Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... men, in the absence of contradictory evidence, seem adequate in support of Aristotle's point that social contacts are indispensable for human development. The story by Helen Keller, the talented and celebrated blind deaf-mute, of her emergence from the imprisonment of sense deprivation into the free life of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... contemplates commercial aloofness nor any other aloofness contradictory to the best American traditions or loftiest human purposes. Our fortunate capacity for comparative self-containment affords the firm foundation on which to build for our own security, and a like foundation on which to build for a future of influence and importance in world commerce. Our trade ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that the enemies attack those travellers with doubts as to the possibility of ever reaching the mountain's top, and with scores of questions about apparently conflicting passages of Scripture, and contradictory experiences of Christian people; and, alas! with only too frequent success, for the whole plateau seems to be strewn with the records of broken resolutions relating to the renouncements of evil habits, tempting ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... that a Jew might drink them or wash in them. Their dwellings were clean, so that he might enter them, and eat or lodge in them. Their roads were clean, so that the dust of them did not defile a Jew's feet. The Rabbis even went so far in their contradictory utterances, as to say that the victuals of the Cuthites were allowed, if none of their wine or vinegar were mixed with them, and even their unleavened bread was to be reckoned fit for use at the Passover. Opinions thus wavered, but, as ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Rajas, there is Tamas, and there is Sattwa, the third. There are again three states of the understanding, viz., waking, dreaming, and sound sleep. The Soul has knowledge of the pleasures and pains, which are all contradictory, of those states, and which partake of the nature of the threefold attributes first mentioned.[677] The Soul enters the senses like the wind entering the fire in a piece of wood.[678] One cannot behold the form of the Soul by one's eye, nor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... understand," said a third—very judiciously, however—"that our author has the good sense to rely more on his chisel than on the Muses." The lessons taught were of a sufficiently varied, but, on the whole, rather contradictory character. By one writer I was told that I was a dull, correct fellow, who had written a book in which there was nothing amusing and nothing absurd. Another, however, cheered my forlorn spirits by assuring me that I was a "man of genius, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... this significance of the oscillation of the birth-rate, though he expressed it in a somewhat peculiar way, as the social capillarity theory. It is the natural and universal tendency of mankind to ascend, he declared; a high birth-rate and a strong ascensional impulse are mutually contradictory. Large families are only possible when there is no progress, and no expectation of it can be cherished; small families become possible when the way has been opened to progress. "One might say," Dumont puts it, "that invisible valves, like those which direct ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... to be sure, certain conventional anecdotes, which prove that Pope consulted various friends, whose classical attainments were sounder than his own, during the undertaking; but it is probable that these examinations were the result rather of the contradictory versions already existing, than of a desire to make a perfect transcript of the original. And in those days, what is called literal translation was less cultivated than at present. If something like the general sense could be decorated with the easy gracefulness of a ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... afraid our talking might disturb my aunt," she said, and on her way back to him she picked up the photograph case and brought it to the light. "These are my father and mother. We live at Yonkers; but I'm with my aunt a good deal of the time in town—even when I'm at home." She laughed at her own contradictory statement, and put the case back without explaining the third figure—a figure in uniform. Dan conjectured a military brother, or from her indifference perhaps a militia brother, and then forgot about him. But the partial Yonkers ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of men and acts, and things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the one prepared by the association. The author of the third believed that women could obtain suffrage only through a constitutional amendment, which was what his bill called for. The women received such contradictory advice on this point as to awaken much anxiety. However, they read in their meetings a copy of the statutes of Colorado, and possessing only plain common sense and not the legal ability which would have qualified them for a place in the Supreme Court, concluded that the referendum to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... sincerity, and always was amenable enough to counsel, was doubtless much confused by such contradictory diagnosis of his case. The question, Poetry or Prose? became more and more pressing, more and more insoluble. He decided, at last, to appeal to the public upon it;—got ready, in the late autumn, a small select Volume of his verses; and was ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... mystery, and remains so to the last. We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye—only thus CAN we judge of him; and this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... "Paradise Lost," and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book. She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness. Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well. She remembered people's ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... contradictory figures and statements, the deficit alone came out clearly. M. de Brienne promised important economies, the Assembly voted a loan: they were not willing to accept the responsibility of the important reforms demanded by the king. The speeches were long and vague, the objections endless. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... old man was exceedingly troubled, and bewailed the misery of those licentious times, and seemed to wonder (save that the times were such) that any should write, or be permitted to publish any error so contradictory to truth, and the doctrine of the Church of England, established (as he truly said) by clear evidence of Scripture, and the just and supreme power of this nation, both sacred and civil. I name not the books, nor their authors, which are ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... This leaning toward individual caricature nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail. Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of hair, grew out of the contradictory effort to restrain and render uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... expositions—especially as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work,—a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former views ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... regarded as a peculiarly interesting portion of scripture: a blessing being promised those who read, hear, and keep the things which are written therein. It has been subjected to so many contradictory interpretations, that any attempt to comprehend its meaning is often regarded with distrust; and the impression has become very prevalent, that it is a "sealed book,"—that its meaning is so hidden in unintelligible symbols, that very little can be known ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... support of anything that is at variance with uniform experience,[10] will be rejected at once by all sound reasoners. Let us then consider what sort of a story it is that is proposed to our acceptance. How grossly contradictory are the reports of the different authorities, I have already remarked: but consider, by itself, the story told by any one of them; it carries an air of fiction and romance on the very face of it. All the events are great, and splendid, and marvellous;[11] great ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... training has also so much. One cultivated and honest man has an enthusiastic and most real love and enjoyment of Gothic architecture, and an absolute hatred for that of the classic revival; another man, equally cultivated and honest, has tastes which are the logical contradictory of these. No one can doubt the ability of Byron, or of Sheridan; yet each of them thought very little of Shakspeare. The question is, What suits you? You may have the strongest conviction that you ought to like an author; you may be ashamed to confess that you don't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... lay thus busied with contradictory thoughts and feelings, the soldier who stood sentinel upon his quarters announced to the Marquis that two persons desired to speak with ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... first reached us through the newspapers was meagre and contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother left us no room for doubt. The sickness was in the city. The hospitals were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the stricken place by every steamboat. The unsettled state ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a few contradictory dates and statements in this precious document, and for the occasional flights of a pious imagination in the biographer or his subject, we arrive at the following historical basis: Rahere was a man of humble origin, who had found his way to the Court of Henry I, where he won favour by ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... preserving the fish for the grampuses and seals;—in short, the evidence regarding both their habits, and the best mode of catching them, having in view the preservation and increase of the breed, is so completely contradictory as to leave a doubt in the mind of every one who reads it, and has no other means of forming an opinion. I will endeavour to show in some instances which of the testimonies is correct, and it will be for my ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gathering, where all were in some degree noble, the distinctions drawn by the boys themselves between lineage and wealth, political prestige and the quiet conservatism of lofty birth, were so arbitrary, so contradictory, so innately Russian, that the very masters, who, from Becker down, were German, did not pretend to understand the system, but blindly followed the lead of the scholars and their truculent head. And, to those who ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped away the characteristics which mark a special era; what is there essentially and everlastingly good—in the true sense "classic"—in virtue of which these particular writers renew for themselves with every generation ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... they had received of the state of this country, had been so contradictory, that no opinion could be formed as to the real condition, or the number of its inhabitants. They had been told that the sheik's soldiers were a few ragged negroes, armed with spears, who lived ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... making, from which the distinctive Lutheran doctrines were eliminated. And in order to conciliate the protesting conservatives, the General Synod in the same year passed the resolution, adopted 1856 by the Pittsburgh Synod, which served the contradictory purposes of condemning Lutheran doctrines plainly taught in the Augustana, and, at the same time, acquitting the Confession of harboring these doctrines. Thus the General Synod, though unwilling to commit herself to the Platform as ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a projected thought of scientific content; ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and perhaps I can more graphically set J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks before my readers by a few incidents which show his contradictory characteristics in action than by verbal diagrams, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... historians, whose records contain nearly all the particulars of the early life of Caesar which are now known, give somewhat contradictory accounts of the adventures which befell him during his subsequent wanderings. They relate, in general, the same incidents, but in such different connections, that the precise chronological order of the events which occurred can not ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... proper knowledge of this little pronoun it, many grammarians have been greatly puzzled how to dispose of it, or how to account for its multiform, and, seemingly, contradictory characters. It is in great demand by writers of every description. They use it without ceremony; either in the nominative or objective case; either to represent one person or thing, or more than one. It is applied to nouns in the ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... puzzled by some current English slang. One of the passenger prisoners—the hero of the kerosene porridge—was known among us as the "hot-air merchant." This was simple enough, but when we said he also suffered from cold feet, the Spanish Captain admitted defeat. Such a contradictory combination seemed inconceivable. "If a man were full of hot air, how could he have cold feet?" he said. Lieutenant Rose, however, was au fait with the latest English slang, and always used ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... an—undertaker's pathos is better than none at all—he was not a single-minded aspirant to our social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes, was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the man's nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man who gives frequent and bigger dinners, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which seem to imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed,—a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the inconsistencies hitherto observed in the religion of the ancients will disappear so soon as we obtain a clearer knowledge of their chronology; and events which now seem contradictory will be satisfactorily explained when placed in their proper order with regard to date. Religion, like everything else, is constantly shifting its position to accommodate itself to the changed mental conditions of its adherents; hence, ideas which at any given time in the past were perfectly ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... back Eleanor refused to be serious about anything. The mischievous, contradictory, incalculable little devil that always lurked in her took full possession. She teased Quin, and laughed at him, leading him on one minute and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... the honour of the family, and overtopping his elder brother. He had a natural ductility of mind, without much warmth of affection, or elevation of sentiment; and therefore readily complied with every variety of caprice; patiently endured contradictory reproofs; heard false accusations without pain, and opprobrious reproaches without reply; laughed obstreperously at the ninetieth repetition of a joke; asked questions about the universal decay of trade; admired the strength of those heads by which the price of stocks ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... spectacular pageantry, nor as hymners of the achievements of the principal actors in the story, but as participants. They heard unwonted accents from these actors and saw them behave in conduct which from moment to moment appeared strangely contradictory. There were mutterings of popular discontent, which, under threats, gave way to jubilant acclamation in the first great scenes in the beginning of the opera. There were alternate mockeries and adulations in the next scene in which the people figured; ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's 'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter? It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his Excellency's ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... his time and country, but truthful quite beyond the limits of a mere negative virtue. But he was also, what seems almost incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness, excessively self-conscious and morally attitudinising, a thin-skinned poseur. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory characteristics, to become what he wished to appear, to pose as what he was, to make himself up (if I may say so) as himself, to intensify what he recognised as his main characteristics and efface all his other ones, now became to Alfieri a sort of unconscious ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... one of the most prolific and popular novel and playwrights now living in Germany. As to his last work, Die Ritter vom Geiste (The Knights of the Spirit), of which only the first volume has been published, the critics entertain the most contradictory opinions. Some exclaim at its great length, which indeed is rather terrific: there are to be nine books, and the first occupies the whole of the first volume. Others are charmed with the skill with which the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Rome, as I write, I look back through forty years of worldly changes to behold Keats's dear image again in memory. It seems as if he should be living with me now, inasmuch as I never could understand his strange and contradictory death, his falling away so suddenly from health and strength. He had that fine compactness of person which we regard as the promise of longevity, and no mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling. I cannot summon a sufficient reason why in one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and riveted ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Great care was used in apportioning the parts, for there was no disposition to let anybody win but the Americans. Seesaw Simpson was usually made commander-in-chief of the British army, and a limp and uncertain one he was, capable, with his contradictory orders and his fondness for the extreme rear, of leading any regiment to an inglorious death. Sometimes the long-suffering house was a log hut, and the brave settlers defeated a band of hostile Indians, or occasionally were massacred by them; but in either case the Simpson ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Few Biblical characters manifested such contradictory elements of character. Early in life he manifested an earnest, conscientious and religious spirit. He was prayerful and sought above all else wisdom and that for the good reason that he might be able to ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often apparently insincere—still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger's legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Saul began to talk of the document left by his ancestor, among the many eyes looking at him two pairs sparkled passionately, with, however, quite contradictory sentiments. They were the eyes of the melamed, who laughed softly and maliciously, and the eyes of Meir who drew himself up in his chair and looked into his grandfather's face with ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... but universally to all men, "Go therefore and tell all nations, baptising them," &c. Matt. xxviii. 19. "Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," Mark xvi. 15. Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God, he will have all saved, and not all, how can this stand together? be secure then, believe, trust in him, hope well and be saved. Yea, that's the main matter, how shall I believe or discern my security from carnal presumption? my faith is weak and faint, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... turned to the young man and gave him, in the excitement of her triumph, a look in which mischief was mingled with an expression of love. Their brows cleared, joy flushed each agitated face, and a thousand contradictory thoughts rose in their hearts. Madame du Gua noted in that one look far more of love than of pity in Mademoiselle de Verneuil's intervention; and she was right. The handsome creature blushed beneath the other ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... vain. Many an expelled man, more unjustly treated than Selwyn, has talked of appeal in vain. Appeal to whom? To what? Appeal against men who never acknowledge themselves wrong, and who, to maintain that they are right, will listen to evidence which they can see is contradictory, and which they know to be worthless! An appeal from an Oxford decision is as hopeless in the present day as it was in Selwyn's. He wisely left it alone, but less wisely insisted on reappearing in Oxford, against the advice of all his friends, whose characters were lost if ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... at once enchanted and cast down; radiant with joy, and filled with sorrow; in a seventh heaven of ecstasy, and in the depths of despair. He laughed and he wept alternately, swayed by the most tumultuous and contradictory emotions. The intense happiness of at last knowing himself beloved by his adored Isabelle made him exultant and joyful, while the terrible thought that she never would be his made his heart sink within him. Little by little, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... and am not responsible for either: but people who are given to moods act as I have described; sometimes they like one person and sometimes another." Perhaps she was thinking not so much of moody natures as of those contradictory characters who have inherited the traits of very dissimilar ancestors. She wrote another novel which she herself liked much better and had great hopes of, which was lost in some miraculous way by her publisher Mr. Fields. He paid her for it what many people would consider a handsome compensation—exactly ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... number. D'you mind?' And I held out my Field Note-book, having turned over the page." (There are not many people who can say 'No' to B——.) "He didn't mind, So he wrote it down. Naturally I took care of those pages. Next day old Macassey must have remembered that he had issued two contradictory orders in the same day. Ordered me to expand and contract at the same time, like the third ventricle. And he knew that I had first-class documentary evidence, and that I guarded his autographs as though I were ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... one, and morphology was in an unsound state so long as it rested upon the mere perception of the analogies which obtain between fully formed parts. The unchecked ingenuity of speculative anatomists proved itself fully competent to spin any number of contradictory hypotheses out of the same facts, and endless morphological dreams threatened to supplant ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... she had no one particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... military movements behind the Germans' front in Belgium are contradictory and too bragmentary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Wingfield, chosen first president of the governing council in Virginia, found himself removed from office, imprisoned, and sent home by the spring of 1608, all as a result of charges brought against him that for the most part were petty and contradictory. Pettiness and contradictions, in this instance, were rooted in the miserable conditions which the colonists had to endure their first summer: famine and sickness not only demoralized the colonists but were killing them faster ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... and every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life;—to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... to make some observations on the Laws of Ireland. "In my country" (England), said he, "the laws are numerous, but then one is always found to be a key to the other. In Ireland it is just the contrary; your laws so perpetually clash with one another, and are so very contradictory, that I protest I don't understand them."—"True, my lord," cried Harwood, "that ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... to overlook this. It's mad to go on. It's mad anyway. If you knew how I've lied to myself, how I've struggled and fought and twisted to keep this back from you! And here it is, confused and grotesque and contradictory and wrong. If I could look at you and say it, I could get it right. If I could look at you—if I could see you. Give me a chance. Then I'll go away again—if you say so. I had to give you warning—it didn't ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... Nairobi the first matter to be decided was the district to be worked. The choice lay between the Sotik and the Kapeti Plains. According to the usual batch of contradictory stories in such cases, the game was said to be equally plentiful, or equally scarce, in both districts. Both had been shot over considerably of late, and, anyhow, no one could really tell us where the most game was to be found; because, as one informant explained, the game everywhere shifted so ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... in early life a prominent figure among the French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and contradictory definitions of the word romantisme that were current in the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... instance, if I held no communication with you for a year, would it not be a wonderful proof of your love to and faith in me, if you kept on writing me and telling me your joys and trials? To go back—I have been a good deal confused by the contradictory testimony of different Christians, and am driven more and more to a conviction that human beings, at the best, are very fallible. We must get our light directly from on high. At the same time we influence each other for right or for wrong, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... impossible to a person who had a really good heart and a gentle nature. The manners of a young man of fashion who keeps his hat on when speaking to a lady, who would smoke in her face, and would appear indifferent to her comfort at a supper-table, who would be contradictory and neglectful—such manners would have been impossible to Thomas or John Carlyle, reared as they were in the humblest poverty. It was the "London swell" who dared to be rude in their ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the one hand you are annihilated as an individual; on the other, you are and remain everything. That is what I meant when I said that after your death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to find a more precise answer to your question and at the same time be brief. The answer is contradictory, I admit; but it is so simply because your life is in time, and the immortal part of you in eternity. You may put the matter thus: Your immortal part is something that does not last in time and yet is indestructible; but there you have another contradiction! ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon." Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, "Take me to her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, "I don't know her. I ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... this 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 ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... the conduct of our priests in many other points, makes freethinking unavoidable; for some of them own, that the doctrines of the Church are contradictory to one another, as well as to reason; which I thus prove: Dr. Sacheverell says in his speech at his trial, That by abandoning passive obedience we must render ourselves the most inconsistent Church in the world: Now 'tis plain, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... our eyes to see the unworthy means employed by sacerdotal policy to stifle the dawning reason of men. During their infancy they are taught tales which are ridiculous, impertinent, contradictory, and criminal, and to these they are enjoined to pay respect. They are gradually impregnated with inconceivable mysteries that are announced as sacred truths, and they are accustomed to contemplate phantoms before which they habitually tremble. In ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... conditions for telescopic observation. At such times there is revealed to the astronomer a surface which is covered with an amazing number of shadings and markings which as yet have been incompletely interpreted. The faint nature of these indications has led to very contradictory statements as to their form; no two maps which have been drawn agree except in their generalities. There is reason to believe that Mars has an atmosphere; this is shown by the fact that in the appropriate ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... winter of the King's execution, and the long frost, when he, Reuben, was last in London. His evidence was confused and confusing; and he drew upon himself much good-natured ridicule from the junior who opened the case. Out of various muddle-headed answers and contradictory statements the facts of Lord Fareham's unexpected appearance at the Manor Moat, his account of his lady's illness, and his hurried departure, carrying the young madam with him on horseback, were elicited, and the story of the ruse by which Mrs. Angela Kirkland had ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of exhaustion and depravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it back from this twofold departure. But how can the cultivation of the fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten a spring and loose it; and if it cannot produce this double effect, how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... ignorant, and it is only from the arrieros, or muleteers, and the correos, or runners, that any knowledge of this kind can be obtained, and then only in a very confused form, and with most preposterous and contradictory estimates of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... know of whom you have borrowed this new spirit. And yet the seeds of it must be in your heart, or it could not all at once shew itself so rampant. It would be doing Mr. Solmes a spite to wish him such a shy, un-shy girl; another of your contradictory qualities—I leave you to make out what I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... title of Pater Patriae. This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of homespun for the habit ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is composed of the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... "The contradictory views in which woman is represented are as pitiful as varied. While the Magnificat to the Virgin is chanted in all our cathedrals round the globe on each returning Sabbath day, and her motherhood extolled ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... weighted under some grievous responsibility, and this night, back there at Tuxtla, she had been true to it. And whatever it was, it exacted imperatively that no Confederate aid should reach Maximilian. Such was Napoleon's wish, however contradictory to official instructions. But the marshal was sufficiently a disciple of the little Napoleonic statecraft to beware of meddling. He fretted under methods whereby the whisper of the Sphinx reached him through private ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... like ordinary men; not that they are of the common mould, but seem so because their uncommon qualities are not then called forth. Superiority requires an occasion. The common man is helpless in an emergency: assailed by contradictory suggestions, or confused by his incapacity, he cannot see his way. The hour of emergency finds a hero calm and strong, and strong because calm and clear-sighted; he sees what can be done, and does it. This is often a thing of great simplicity, so that we marvel others did not see it. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... in dealing with the Bible so superior! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are, because Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. But ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... candle again, and went away hastily to her room. She said to herself that she was keeping Fletcher up, and that this was unkind. But, as a matter of fact, she was not thinking about Fletcher. There had sprung up in her soul a fear which was twofold and contradictory. If one of those alarms was justified, then the other would be fallacious; and yet the existence of the one doubled the force of the other. One of these elements of fear—the contradiction, the new terror—was ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... a fighting man," retorted the young minx with no contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a red-headed person: all that I know ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... denying the naturalness of his goatherds and fishermen, in a word, his genuineness. Mahaffy wavers between two statements, that the Idylls are an affectation for Alexandria, and sincere for Sicily. The two statements are by no means contradictory. Much the same thing is true of Canticles, the Biblical Song of Songs. It is unreasonable for anyone who has seen or read about a Palestinian spring, with its unique beauty of flower and bird and blossom, to imagine that the author of Canticles ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... degree sanction the principle that man could hold property in man; that the slaves were our equals by creation, and for their salvation, equally with ours, did Christ leave the right hand of the Father to suffer on the cross. I told them that contradictory as it might seem to them, the man who was now paying money for slaves, had such a detestation of the system, that he deemed it a duty to abstain from eating or wearing any of the products of slavery. This seemed to them ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... differences has reference to the nature of the eternal or self-existing substance. Both theories agree that there is such a substance; but on the question whether this substance be mental or material, the two theories give contradictory answers, and logically so. For, if mind as we directly know it (namely, in ourselves) is taken to be a cause of motion, within our experience mind is accredited with priority; and hence the inference that elsewhere, or universally, mind is prior to motion. Furthermore, as motion cannot take ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... builder left it not only the most lofty in England then and since, but in actual effect the most lofty in the world. This is claimed in spite of its 404 feet being exceeded by Amiens (422 feet), and Strasburg (488 feet), and although it might appear special pleading to urge such a theory against contradictory facts, yet since at Amiens the nave roof is 208 feet high, against the 115 feet of Salisbury, it is obvious that the apparent height of the latter exceeds its French rival. At Strasburg the excess of elaboration in the ornament is detrimental ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... bread and brown bread; on the other hand, the flours, mixed with bran, made a brownish, doughy, and badly risen bread, and it was therefore concluded that the bran, by its color, produced this inferior bread. From this error, accepted as a truth, the most contradictory opinions of the most opposite processes have arisen, which are repeated at the present day in the art of separating as completely as possible all the tissues of the wheat, and of extracting from the grain only 70 per cent of flour fit for making white bread. It is, however, difficult for the observer ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... espoused the same sentiments.—Lord Kaims, a Scottish writer of great reputation, whose authority in this case ought to have the more weight, as his countrymen have not the most worthy ideas of liberty, speaking of the feudal law, says, "A constitution so contradictory to all the principles which govern mankind, can never be brought about, one should imagine, but by foreign conquest or native usurpations." Brit. Ant. p. 2.—Rousseau speaking of the same system, calls it, "That most iniquitous ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams |
