"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep of the fold of Poe. But alas, she was but a woman, without money and without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable and contradictory rumors afforded. That was, after all, what she most needed—a clue. If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she would follow it to ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... about the same time, and uniformly pursued the same system, we may discover reason to suspect that they acted under the direction of some acknowledged though invisible leader. The nobility and gentry, intimidated by the hostility of their tenants, and distressed by contradictory reports, sought security within the fortifications of their castles. The only man who behaved with promptitude and resolution was Henry Spenser, the young and warlike Bishop of Norwich. In the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge, and Huntington ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... absurdum is a variety of analysis. Starting from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove, we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in various ways as reductio ad absurdum, proof per impossibile, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... comes about that the first results are often so contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots are being marked and they count up the Liberals and Conservatives in different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and carelessly that ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same way—frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they were ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... year 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 orders from the Trust, had disposed of a part of the servants ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... 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 than ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... towards the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them—having regard to the prevalent habit of keeping ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... words respecting the revolt of the Venetian States, which, in consequence of the difference of political opinions, has been viewed in very contradictory lights. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... entered, with Marsham and the butler behind him. Mr. Ferrier, in his London frock-coat, appeared rounder and heavier than ever but for the contradictory vigor and lightness of his step, the shrewd cheerfulness of the eyes. It had been a hard week in Parliament, however, and his features and complexion showed signs of overwork and ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... LETTER ALPHA}) Origen plainly teaches that prayer before justification is a good work. "Though you are sinners," he says, "pray to God; God hears the sinners."(231) The seemingly contradictory text John IX, 31: "Now we know that God doth not hear sinners,"(232) is thus explained by St. Augustine: "He speaks as one not yet anointed; for God also hears the sinners. If He did not hear sinners, the publican would have cast his eyes to the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... the elevated style, purity of diction, and easy flow of language, frequently exhibited, will appear unaccountable and contradictory, in view of his want of early mental culture. But to the thousands who have listened with delight to his speeches on anniversary and other occasions, these same traits will be noted as unequivocal evidence of originality. Very few men present in their written composition, so perfect ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... unfortunately, simultaneously at the 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 he was ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in this field hitherto. The proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires him to seek. Men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any science of the forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces will seek,—'it is their nature to,'—whether in man, or in any other form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of declamation that is ever going to stop them. The power that is in everything that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... satisfactory response concerning her own home. She maintained she was just 17 and had come to Chicago to make her own way in the world. After some account of herself, the details of which were somewhat contradictory, it was inferred that she might be Agnes W. She vehemently denied it, but being the same age and some likeness being discerned, the questioning was continued. Various matters of Agnes W.'s antecedents were gone into and after a time Inez ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and morbid dissociability of psychic activity. A single idea is sufficient in a hysterical subject, to produce the realization of what it represents. The passionate imagination may lead to opinions and actions which are absolutely contradictory. Love and hatred often alternate by transformation. According to the influences to which she is exposed, the same hysterical woman may become a ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... those days an exorbitant and inconvenient power, ordering the justices of the king's court, in suits about lands, to turn out, put, and keep in possession, which of the litigants they pleased; to send contradictory orders; and take large sums of money from each; to respite proceedings; to direct sentences; and the judges, acting by their commission, conceived themselves bound to observe such orders, to the great delay, interruption, and preventing of justice; ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... 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 make ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... obstinate objection to the presence of a medical man at his bedside. Generally speaking, he appeared to be in a delicate state of health. His nervous system was out of order—he was at once timid and contradictory. When I spoke to him in English, he answered in Italian; and when I tried him in Italian, he went back to English. It mattered little—the malady had already made such progress that he could only speak a few words at a time, and those in ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... to suffer more than the evening before. His complaints were curious and contradictory. A million pins were pricking him. There was a weight under the skin; a cold, wet animal was crawling over him. Then there were other creatures on ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... himself among the precursors of Darwin. In some passages of the second edition of his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1826), he certainly talks evolution and anticipates Prof. Weismann in denying the transmission of acquired characters. He is, however, sadly self-contradictory and his evolutionism weakens in subsequent editions—the only ones that Darwin saw. Prof. Poulton finds in Prichard's work a recognition of the operation of Natural Selection. "After inquiring how it ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... 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 ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... morbid gloom of Siva-worship, the colourless negativeness of Buddhism, and the childish intricacy of ceremonies which formed the religion of the mass of ordinary Hindus, still we cannot find much to admire in it. There seems to be something almost contradictory in representing the highest and purest emotions of the mind by images drawn from the lowest ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... Argyll, and Lanark had actually retired. On October 22, from their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy, by nobles and others in the king's favour, to cut their throats. The evidence is very confused and contradictory: Hamilton and Argyll were said to have collected a force of 5000 men in the town, and, on October 5, such a gathering was denounced in a proclamation. Charles in vain asked for a public inquiry into the affair ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... a more elaborate discussion of this prophecy, and an ample defence of this interpretation, are referred to "Levi's Letters, to Priestly;" and those who are desirous of seeing an account of the various, contradictory, perplexed and multitudinous contrivances, by which it has been endeavoured to apply this prophecy to Jesus, are referred to Prideaux, Michaelis, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... three epochs, English in blood and American in feeling, are not so unlike as one might think. A thorough grasp of our literature thus requires—and in scarcely less a degree than the mastery of one of the literatures of Europe—a survey of a long period, the search below the baffling or contradictory surface of national experience for the main drift of that experience, and the selection of the writers, of one generation after another, who have given the most fit and permanent and personalized expression to the underlying forces of the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature, that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was. I wanted to go on serving under that man. I realized suddenly how much I loved my work, and when I got back to my quarters that night and saw ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... war back into France and by holding the Duke of Burgundy to his faith, to distress and disturb Charles very much, Charles sometimes asked the Maid of Orleans what the Voices said about it? But, the Voices had become (very like ordinary voices in perplexed times) contradictory and confused, so that now they said one thing, and now said another, and the Maid lost credit every day. Charles marched on Paris, which was opposed to him, and attacked the suburb of Saint Honore. In this fight, being again struck down into ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... me! Poor, unhappy Olivier!" The tones of her voice cut De Scuderi to the heart; again there stirred in the depths of her soul a dim presentiment that there was some mystery connected with the case, and also the belief in Olivier's innocence returned. Her mind distracted by the most contradictory feelings, she cried, "What spirit of darkness is it which has entangled me in this terrible affair? I am certain it will be the death of me." At this juncture Baptiste came in, pale and terrified, with the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... last order of the people, that was law? Nay, certainly they all knew it; and they therefore obeyed the Aemilian law, rather than the old one, under which the censors had been at first created; because it was the last order; and because, when two laws are contradictory, the new always repeals the old. Do you mean to say, Appius, that the people are not bound by the Aemilian law? Or, that the people are bound, and you alone exempted? The Aemilian law bound those violent censors, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... about from place to place. His pseudo-theology or mythology ended in a theatrical comedy, and the comedy in a tragedy." "In 1839 this famous Dr. Strauss—who resolved the gospel history of salvation into an incoherent and self-contradictory mythological poem, and denied the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul—was duly elected professor of Christian dogmatics and ethics in the University of Zurich, by the party then in power, which consisted mostly of demagogues ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... of disposition more displeasing to men than one which is obstinate and contradictory. People of this sort are pests of conversation, firebrands in social intercourse, sowers of discord. Like hedgehogs and horse-chestnuts, they have prickles all over them, and cannot be handled. On the other hand, a gentle, pliable, condescending disposition, which is ready ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... of his agony, came inspiration. He must save them all with a lie! Queer that, queer and contradictory! Yes, after practicing the truth, he must save them all from shipwreck ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... frowned. This somewhat contradictory evidence had very sensibly affected her; and when, a moment later, the coroner, having dismissed the witness, turned towards her, and inquired if she had anything further to say in the way of explanation or otherwise, she threw her hands up almost spasmodically, ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... persecuted pietist he became a close client of Royalty, and almost the chief of court favorites in an age of favoritism. That some of his sayings and doings in these two strangely-contrasted scenes of his life should be a little contradictory is, to say the least, no matter of wonder. Mr. Macaulay, accordingly, giving him full credit for religious principle, but not much for strength of mind, depicts the stubborn and fanatical Quaker of former days as having become in the reign of King James the compliant and, though well-meaning, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... mouth for a few months, thy eyes would get sound again!' The 'complainant' did not even return thanks for this medical counsel, but sipped his toddy in silence, and soon after left the room, 'uttering never a word.' . . . THERE have been various surmises, and sundry contradictory statements, in relation to the work superscribed 'Count D'Orsay on Etiquette,' which we noticed at some length in our December issue. Mr. WILLIS, of the 'New Mirror' weekly journal, seems to question its having been written by the COUNT, but expresses his belief that he may ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... therefore unreasonable. He would not play subordinate, so left Leonora no choice but to lend herself gracefully to Denis's companionship. These two were sure to misunderstand one another. Fred was contradictory. With intense and variable feeling, he possessed the traits of slower natures. A kind of natural prudence retarded him. He puzzled Leonora. One moment he cooed over her, the next became Horatian. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pointed in instructing them. He considered it a miracle, that they yielded their hearts to his teaching; but it seemed to me, that if the good priest's gentle ways and entire devotion to their welfare had produced no effect, it would have been as contradictory to all the laws of nature as any miracle could be. While instructing some savages from Puget Sound, he said the idea came into the mind of one of the priests, to represent by a ladder, which he made on paper, the various truths and mysteries of religion, ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... however, of a discharge of discreet inquiries as to when he arrived, how long he meant to stay, whether he found Cadurcis altered, and similar interrogations which required no extraordinary exertion of his lordship's intellect to answer, but to which he nevertheless contrived to give inconsistent and contradictory responses, Cadurcis in time recovered himself sufficiently to maintain a fair though not very brilliant conversation, and even ventured occasionally to address an observation to Venetia, who was seated at her work perfectly composed, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... degree of romance will always be attached to the history of the Irish wolf-dog, but so contradictory are the accounts handed down to us respecting it, that, with every disposition to do justice to the character of this noble animal, the task is ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... to go, I set about learning the how and the where, with the usual results; much advice asked and unasked of a very contradictory sort. The American Legation with fine courtesy offered no counsel, but gave every possible help, securing for me the proper vises for my passports, even speeding the wheels of the slow-moving Wai-wu-pu so that I might not be delayed. The matter of getting a servant ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... When such self-contradictory "information" is placed before the public as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of irrelevant ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... therefore between the devils and the human race ought to be considered. These matters however, become still clearer when the promise is considered. For since the promise is universal, and since there are no contradictory wills in God, there must of necessity be in us some cause of difference why Saul is rejected and David is received; i.e., there must of necessity be some dissimilar action in these two. Cum promissio ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the custom of the Greeks, gave leave, by their herald, to any person who chose to offer advice, not one stood forth; but they sat a long time, looking on each other in silence. It was no wonder that men, revolving in their minds matters of such contradictory natures, and who found themselves puzzled and confounded, should be involved in additional perplexity by the speeches continued through the whole preceding day; in which the difficulties, on all sides, were brought into view, and stated in their full force. At length Aristaenus, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... barrel-organ's one leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... they understand not so much as the very Terms they have Learn'd in them: And more often find the Proportions therein contain'd, so short in the Information of their Ignorance; or so unintelligible, to their Apprehensions; or so plainly contradictory of the most obvious Dictates of common Sense; that Religion (for the which they never think of looking beyond these Systems) appears to them indeed a thing not Built upon, or defensible by Reason: In consequence of which Opinion, the weakest attaques made against it, must ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... in their various spheres, claim a monopoly of employment for their members, to the exclusion of those who do not belong to their associations. Logic has something, perhaps not much, to do with political action, and it is almost inconceivable that a party can go on for long holding these two contradictory opinions. Which of them will be abandoned, the future ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... classes of the people, a moral control of themselves, so absolute that, no matter what the inconvenience, or how great the sacrifice, legal ways shall alone be used. In this manner, two of the greatest and apparently most contradictory wants of every legal or moral person, the want of uninterrupted continuity and that of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... toilette next day. Certain it is that Miss Sandbrook's mountain costume was an exquisite feat of elaborate simplicity, and that the completion of her sketch was interrupted by many a backward look down the pass, and many a contradictory mood, sometimes boding almost as harsh a reception for Robert as for Mr. Calthorp, sometimes relenting in the thrill of hope, sometimes accusing herself of arrant folly, and expecting as a pis aller the diversion of dazzling and tormenting an Oxonian, or a soldier or two! Be the meeting ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these devoted Christians when they were thrown into the Tiber in the reign of Maximian. But as the place and manner of their martyrdom are involved in hopeless obscurity, the various accounts given of both being contradictory, the ecclesiastical legend has no weight. Cosma and Damian were Arabian doctors who were converted to Christianity, and belonged to the class called "silverless martyrs"—that is, physicians who took no fee from ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... would escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... as the rate of movement of the rod becomes slower and slower'; and this is equivalent to saying that the distance between the bands diminishes as the rate of movement of the rod decreases. The statements are contradictory. But there is no doubt as to which is the wrong one—it is the first. What these authors have called 'distance between the bands' has here been shown to be itself a band. Now, no point about this illusion can be more readily observed than that ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Toffy began to writhe under the cruel speeches which Avory made to her; he never saw for an instant that there was a fault anywhere save with the husband. She was one of those women who invariably inspire sweeping and contradictory criticisms on the whole of her sex, one man finding in her a proof that all women are angels, and the next discovering as certainly that ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... whole party had been closeted with this and that leading "Radical"; and that the poor, stricken, down-trodden South—the land fairest and richest and poorest and most peaceful and most chivalric, the most submissive and the most defiant; in short, the most contradictory in its self-conferred superlatives—that this land of antipodal excellences must now look for new forms of tyranny and new measures ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to the popular ideas on the achievements of Samson at Gaza, but only obtained such uncertain and even contradictory answers, that on this journey it did not seem worth while to take any great trouble on the subject; but I certainly had not expected to get better information from either the Mohammedans or from ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... to speak soon died out of knowledge. The localities of many very interesting incidents cannot be identified. This is very observable, and peculiarly remarkable as to places in the now City of Salem. The reminiscences floating about are vague, contradictory, and few in number. In a community of uncommon intelligence, composed, to a greater degree perhaps than almost any other, of families that have been here from the first, very inquisitive for knowledge, and always imbued with the historical spirit, it is truly surprising ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... and contradictory aspect of this neighborliness, this kindliness, this thought for mutual welfare, and that was its narrowness, especially in New England, as regards the limitations of space and locality. It is impossible to judge what caused this restraint of vision, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... light on all those families of one or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her, aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was too simple a solution ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... there is neither leisure nor inclination, and the doctrines that have been dictated concerning our intellectual faculties and their operations, have tended rather to stifle than to promote inquiry. It is therefore unnecessary to enumerate the catalogue of illustrious names whose contradictory systems have created suspicion and distaste in the student. The science that has been improperly termed Metaphysics, ought to be considered a branch of human physiology, not abstracted from, but in this state of existence, connected with ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... temerity, brave to heroism, and a tactician of the first order. But his career had felt the vicissitudes of politics, and like so many of his contemporaries,—more, perhaps, than any of them,—he had played the most contradictory parts. Equally intrepid in the army of Conde, in the Vendean army, and in the Grand Army of Napoleon, he had won as much distinction under the white flag as under the tricolor. The Emperor, who was an expert in military talent, having recognized in him a superior military man, had ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... midst of these contradictory advices the roughs lifted their struggling victim from his feet, and proceeded to carry him in the direction of ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... of my life," Mary declares through her heroine,—"continual restraint in the most trivial matters, unconditional submission to orders, which as a mere child I soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory. Thus are we destined to experience a mixture of bitterness with the recollection of our most innocent enjoyment." Edward, as the mother's favorite, escaped her severity; but it fell upon Mary with double force, and was with her carried out with a thoroughness that laid its shortcomings bare, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... could not get his thoughts together at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. "You ask me to take love for granted," said Corydon to him once; "but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... God treats it as national rejection of Him. Here it appears as due, on the part of the people, to their fear of the Philistines, and on the part of God to His loving yielding to their cry. In 1 Samuel xii. 12, Samuel traces it to the fear of Ammonite invasion. Are these contradictory or supplementary accounts? Certainly the latter. Though Israel had in heart rejected God, and He gave them a king that they might learn how much better they would have been without one, it is as true that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I'm a bundle of 'isms,' and in practice one can only be true to one at a time. When that one begins to make me feel uncomfortable, I become true to another. Thus I am always true to myself. All the mutually contradictory 'isms' unite in a higher synthesis. Am I not the most lovely higher synthesis you ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... insulted, honoured him with the 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to make things tally, that are contradictory in their natures. When I bid you not be a miser, I do not order you to become a debauchee or a prodigal. There is some difference between the case of Tanais and his son-in-law Visellius, there is a mean in things; finally, there are certain boundaries, on either side of which moral rectitude ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... of permanent appropriations for the civil list and military establishments, yet when the House desired to strengthen public credit it had rendered the appropriation for those objects permanent and not yearly. It was, therefore, "contradictory to suppose that the House was bound to do a certain act at the same time that they were exercising the discretionary power of voting upon it." The debate determined nothing, but it is of interest as the first declaration in Congress of the supremacy ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... suspicious nature so far misled by its own inventions, tickled me much. Yet as the laugh died, a kind of wrath smote me, and then bitterness followed: it was the rock struck, and Meribah's waters gushing out. I never had felt so strange and contradictory an inward tumult as I felt for an hour that evening: soreness and laughter, and fire, and grief, shared my heart between them. I cried hot tears: not because Madame mistrusted me—I did not care twopence for her mistrust—but for other ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... physiological—of the blood and tissues, and of the secretions and excretions of scurvy. Such inquiries would be of great value in their bearing upon the origin of hospital gangrene. Up to the present war, the results of chemical investigations upon the pathology of the blood in scurvy were not only contradictory, but meager, and wanting in that careful detail of the cases from which the blood was abstracted which would enable us to explain the cause of the apparent discrepancies in different analyses. Thus it is not ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of the parishioners, and the work of restoration was committed to the then famous Gothic architect Mr. George Gwilt. He did his work most carefully and conscientiously, adhering as far as possible to the original, though hampered throughout his progress by contradictory instructions from the managing committee, who, like most bodies of that kind, were apt to fluctuate between motives of economy and a sense of what was due to the ancient fabric. The Gothic revival was then in an incipient stage, and Mr. Gwilt, or his committee, must ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... across the fields the girls only spoke occasionally. Alice strove to see clear, but her thoughts were clouded, scattered, diffused. Force herself as she would, still no conclusion seemed possible; all was vague and contradictory. She had talked to these Brennans, seen how they lived, could guess what their past was, what their future must be. In that neat little house their uneventful life dribbled away in maiden idleness; neither hope nor despair broke the triviality of ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... tobacco brought peculiar relief to his over-wrought mind, and dulled for a few moments the edge of his remorse. In the wavering clouds of smoke he saw her eyes once more. And the crimson cloak! Was ever a wrap worn by mortal woman so bewitching, so deliciously contradictory in its suggestions? The Shaker women never married, and this was their peculiar garment, though they always wore one of sad, monotonous gray. Every winter they came to Warwick and sold cloaks of worldly colours to the rich young women of the town, seeking ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... denunciations, their narrowness and that horrible Covenant, had been a passage from bondage to liberty, there were times, as she paced the terrace alone and looked out on the gray sea of the east coast, when the contradictory circumstances of her life beset her and she was troubled. When she was forced to listen to the interminable harangues of hill preachers, sheltering for a night in the castle, and day by day was resisting the domination of her mother, her mind rose in ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... commercial people gave freely, as they always do. What trouble these matchless patriots had to overcome! Intrigue, treason, religious fanaticism, begrudging of supplies, the constant shortage of stores and provisions at every critical stage of a crisis, the contradictory instructions from the exasperating Tudor Queen: the fleet kept in port until the chances of an easy victory over England's bitterest foes had passed away! But for the vacillation of the icy virgin, Drake's ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... said to you to-day, 'There is something more important than the religion I preached to you and the gods I revealed; something more august and more sacred, and that is my own good pleasure'? Bernard, your love is full of contradictory desires. Inconsistency, moreover, is the mark of all human loves. Men imagine that a woman can have no separate existence of her own, and that she must always be wrapped up in them; and yet the only woman ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... they had come to stay and seemed to think we were expecting them. They said the young woman, whom they call Cousin Dink, had sent them. I have tried to question them, but their answers are confused and contradictory. I felt that perhaps it was better to wait for you and see what ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... to think of it, was inevitable. The life and habits and general attitude of the period would have been absolutely impossible, in conjunction with any serious face-to-face consideration of a situation which embraced, for example, such preposterously contradictory ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... proprietors, three of the largest land-agents in Ireland, two bank managers, an influential lawyer, three leaders of the people, and one probable assassin. Through the discourse of all of these—varied and contradictory as much of it necessarily was—I could see distinctly one ugly shadow, as of an old man filthy of aspect, hungry of eye, and greedy of claw, sitting in the rear of a gloomy store looking over papers by the light of a miserable tallow dip. From the papers ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... with the line so as to be receptive of a call at any time while the telephone is not in use. The requirements also demand that no conducting path shall normally exist between the two sides of the line. These two apparently contradictory requirements are met by placing a condenser in series with the ringer so that the ringer will be in a path that will readily transmit the alternating ringing currents sent out from the central-office generator, while at the same time the condenser will afford a complete ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... many of these objects serve other ends, medicinal and religious. I took no little pains in investigating this point, but the replies to my inquiries were at times so indeterminate, at others so varied, and so contradictory that I can not make any definite statement; but I am strongly inclined to believe, for sundry reasons, that both medicinal and magic powers are attributed to many of the innocent-looking objects that go to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... model for the ether which might furnish a satisfactory mechanical interpretation of Maxwell's laws of the electro-magnetic field. The laws were clear and simple, the mechanical interpretations clumsy and contradictory. Almost imperceptibly the theoretical physicists adapted themselves to a situation which, from the standpoint of their mechanical programme, was very depressing. They were particularly influenced by the electro-dynamical investigations of Heinrich Hertz. For whereas they previously had ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... Court at the capital of each island, with corresponding duties and powers. These powers are very loosely and vaguely defined, and are the subject of endless controversy everywhere, and nowhere more than in the courts themselves—such is the multiplicity of laws and so many are the contradictory decisions upon them, every decision constituting what is called a lantrag, or, as we might say, "precedent." The peculiarity of a lantrag, or previous decision, is that it is, or is not, binding, at the will of the honorable ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... a pause. She shrinks from looking at him—she trembles with strange contradictory sensations of pleasure and pain. His arm steals round her; he repeats his question in a whisper; his lips almost touch her little rosy ear as ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass god with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... As soon as the description was received from Mrs. Amidon (a description, by the way, which was unusually clear and precise, owing to the peculiar and contradictory features of the man), the police were able to recognize him among the many suspects always under their eye. Arrested, he pleaded, just as Miss Strange had foretold, an alibi of a seemingly unimpeachable character; ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... is compromise. His bete noir extravagance. We are not saved by syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at one and the same moment of time self-contradictory propositions. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... made me resolve once more to visit my native country, and my resolution was immediately put in practice. It was a relief, though of a painful kind, to the more painful state in which my undecided thoughts at that moment held me. The man whose contradictory impulses goad him in a thousand different directions, without permitting him to pursue any one, is happy to be ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... been asleep, and was just waking to painful life. For nearly four years had Grena Holland soothed her many misgivings by some such reasoning as that of Mr Justice Roberts. She had conformed outwardly: had not merely abstained from contradictory speeches, but had gone to mass, had attended the confessional, had bowed down before images of wood and stone, and all the time had comforted herself by imagining that God saw her heart, and knew that she did not really believe in any of these things, but only acted thus for safety's sake. Now, ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... plants for which self-pollination is of greater importance than it is for others is by no means contradictory to Darwin's view. Self-fertilisation is, for example, of greater importance for annuals than for perennials as without it seeds might fail to be produced. Even in the case of annual plants with small inconspicuous flowers in which self-fertilisation usually occurs, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... some demonstration on the animal's part that he had feared. A snort, a hoof-beat, a whinny would betray him, and very liable was the animal to any of these expressions. One realizes how unnecessary is speech for the exposition of opinion when brought into contradictory relations with the horse which one rides or drives. All day had this animal snorted his doubts of his master's sanity; all day had he protested against these aimless, fruitless rambles; all day had he held back with a high head and ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... denies that three times one are, or can be, one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man can ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... other, contribute together to form a total result, namely society. Simple or complex, stable or unstable, barbarous or civilized, this society contains within itself its explanations of its being. Strange as a social structure may be, it can be explained; also its institutions, however contradictory. Neither prosperity, nor decline, nor despotism, nor freedom, is the result of a throw of the dice, of luck or an unexpected turn of events caused by rash men. They are conditions we must live with. In any event, it is useful to understand them, either to improve our situation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... what sort of a kingdom he was to reign, that the errors crept in. The Messianic conceptions which have come down to us through the Prophets, the Targums, incidental allusions in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the few other traditions and records yet in existence, are very diverse and sometimes contradictory. They agreed in ardently looking for an earthly sovereign in the Messiah, one who would rise up in the line of David and by the power of Jehovah deliver his people, punish their enemies, subdue the world to his sceptre, and reign with Divine auspices of beneficence and splendor. They also expected ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... face with the enemy before he could be joined by Macpherson. In his explanatory report Massy stated that he had been misled by a memorandum[9] which he received from the Assistant Adjutant-General after his interview with me (although this memorandum contained nothing contradictory of the orders I had given him); that he understood from it that his business was to reach the Ghazni road at its nearest point in the direction of Arghandeh, and that he thought it better, with a thirty miles' march in prospect, to take the most direct line in order ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... philosophy of Heraclitus.[1] In this paragraph the statement is made that Aenesidemus and his followers, [Greek: hoi peri ton Ainesidemon], said that Scepticism is the path to the philosophy of Heraclitus, because the doctrine that contradictory predicates appear to be applicable to the same thing, leads the way to the one that contradictory predicates are in reality applicable to the same thing.[2] [Greek: hoi peri ton Ainesidemon elegon hodon ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... third Synoptic at all.' Of 'the events unknown to our Gospel' I have disposed in the text. But the statement which I have italicized is still more extraordinary. I am altogether unable to put any interpretation upon the words which is not directly contradictory to the facts, and must therefore suppose that we have here again one of those extraordinary misprints, which our author has pleaded on former occasions. As a matter of fact, the references to the Third and Fourth Gospels in this ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the right to an explanation from our young brother. I was denied that privilege at the time of his ordination. But I consider his contradictory statements so serious a thing that I shall give you the opportunity that ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... the words may have taken place through the fault of the early printers; but even if the present order be preserved, still the transposed sense is, I think, much less difficult than the forced and rather contradictory meaning contended for by MR. COLLIER. Has not the pause in Ferdinand's labour been hitherto too much overlooked? What is it that has induced him to forget his task? Is it not those delicious thoughts, most busy in the pauses of labour, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... That the moral good, if attained, should itself prove vain is a plain self-contradiction. For moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good. The question. "Why should I be moral," has no answer, because it is self-contradictory. The moral ideal contains its justification in itself, and requires to ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... which I had no share, decides at once upon my liberty and property, sending me from the court to a prison, and adjudging my family to beggary and famine. I am innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and uncertainty of your science. I never darkened it with absurd and contradictory notions, nor confounded it with chicane and sophistry. You have excluded me from any share in the conduct of my own cause; the science was too deep for me; I acknowledged it; but it was too deep even for yourselves: you have made the way so intricate, that you are yourselves ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... call it, in your Uncle Dan's sincerity, if only because he's done so many inconsistent and apparently contradictory things in his life. But that doesn't make me see any real reason why ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... revelation of truth and duty that the mind of man could conceive. I could no longer find in my heart to talk or write about what appeared to be its imperfections. There were passages that seemed dark or doubtful: there were some that seemed erroneous or contradictory; but they amounted to nothing. They did not affect the scope, the drift, the aim, the tendency of the Book as a whole. They might not be consistent with certain erroneous theories of inspiration, or with certain unguarded statements of extravagant theologians; but they were consistent with the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the legislator of his art. His vanity seems to have been as remarkable as that of Zeuxis. Among the most celebrated of his works was a portrait of the personified Athenian Demos, which is said to have miraculously expressed even the most contradictory ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... little consequence what colour or flavour we attribute to them, provided it be agreeable. Availing myself of the obliging assistance of Mr. Arphaxad Bowers, an ingenious photographick artist, whose house-on-wheels has now stood for three years on our Meeting-House Green, with the somewhat contradictory inscription,—"Our motto is onward,"—I have sent accurate copies of my treasure to many learned men and societies, both native and European. I may hereafter communicate their different and (me judice) equally erroneous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... 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 respecting it; and ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... will be seen 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... incidental questions which may arise; but when a case occurs in which we have the omnipotence of Parliament to set off against the infallibility of the pope—the sacred obligations of a will against the equally sacred principles of hereditary succession—and when we have, at last, two contradictory actions of the same ultimate umpire, we find all technical grounds of coming to a conclusion gone. We then, abandoning these, seek for some higher and more universal principles—essential in the nature of things, and thus independent of the ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to make the machine do the thing with as little dependence as possible on the human element, even though the human element was never emphasized more. Contradictory? Yet there it is. We men go to the impersonal. Yet deep down in our hearts we hunger for the human touch, the warm personal touch. This after all is the thing. We all feel that. Yet the whole crowding of life's action is ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... person of the Little Giant was contradictory, as was the man himself. His height was insignificant. But he had the head and shoulders of a lion, and even the lion's roar. What at contrast the ring of his deep bass to the tentative falsetto of Mr. Lincoln's opening words. If Stephen expected the Judge to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... these confessions he made such confusion, first confessing a little, then a little more, then contradicting himself, then admitting, when the thing had been proved against him, what he had before denied, that it was almost impossible to disentangle the truth from his confused and contradictory declarations. The substance of the case ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... state of mind the four walls of his room made an intolerable prison to him; they seemed to hem in and press down upon him all the crowd of contradictory thoughts and conflicting feelings, some of which would fly away in the open air. He had only an hour or two to make up his mind in, and he must get clear and calm. Once on Meg's back, in the fresh air ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square,' a 'present past,' 'two parallel lines that intersect,' are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... superstitious belief which is in question, but the reality of the miracles, and the sufficiency of the witnesses to establish them. What such objectors urge practically amounts to this: that we should believe in the actual occurrence of certain miracles contradictory to all experience, out of a mass of false miracles which are reported but never really took place, because some unknown persons in an ignorant and superstitious age, who give no evidence of personal knowledge, or of careful investigation, have ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... parallels in foreign countries. It must be remembered, however, that a great number of these plant-sayings originated very many years ago—long before the alteration in the style of the calendar—which in numerous instances will account for their apparent contradictory character. In noticing, too, these proverbs, account must be taken of the variation of climate in different countries, for what applies to one locality does not to another. Thus, for instance, according to a Basque proverb, "A wet May, a fruitful year," whereas it is ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... at the last moment, it will be broken. He has been obsessing me these last days. He too—I am certain of it—dreads the Irrevocable, and regrets the rupture between us. I dream of him continually—such restless, tantalising dreams. And yet my mood is so contradictory. If the marriage WERE broken off and he stood before me, free, and ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... in the religious symbolism of the peoples of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis. But by the side of divine serpents, essentially benign ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... is for protection and adornment. That of a book involves two other demands mutually so contradictory that bookbinding has always offered a most attractive challenge to the skill of the handicraftsman. The first demand is that the book when closed shall form a well-squared and virtually solid block, like the rectangle of wood from which its first predecessors were ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... hated bores especially—Me. de Stael or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis; he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set, I don't mean personally, but less tiresome, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to everything and everybody. Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in summer, he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening, and the consequence of this pilotage was ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... and elsewhere in the Prayer Book, means the minister in charge of the parish, having "cure of souls," not the assistant minister generally so denominated now. The direction that notice of Holy Communion is to be given at this part of the service is quite contradictory to the rubric following the Prayer for the Church Militant, which should be altered. The word "Homily," in the second of these rubrics, means "a plain sermon." Two books of Homilies have been put forth, one in 1547, by Archbp. Cranmer and others, and the ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... employed in negotiating treaties with that power, and afterwards in discussing their true intent and meaning. In this respect the convention of April 19, 1850, commonly called the Clayton and Bulwer treaty, has been the most unfortunate of all, because the two Governments place directly opposite and contradictory constructions upon its first and most important article. Whilst in the United States we believed that this treaty would place both powers upon an exact equality by the stipulation that neither will ever "occupy, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... in subdued but not unkindly tones. I heard him bid her be composed, and caught, as I thought, a light reply that ought to have satisfied me that Mrs. Urquhart had simply suffered from some nightmare horror at which she was as ready to laugh now as he. But my nature is a contradictory one, and I was not satisfied. The echo of her cry was still ringing in my ears, and I felt as if I would give the world for a momentary peep into their room. Influenced by this idea, I boldly knocked, and in an instant—too soon for him not to ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.' It is not, therefore, because this author has failed to furnish the rules of interpretation necessary for penetrating to the ultimate intention of this new kind of speaking, if all this affectation of simplicity, and all these absurd contradictory statements of his, have been suffered hitherto to pass unchallenged. It is the public mind he has to deal with. 'That which he adores in kings is the throng of their adorers.' If he should take the public at once into his confidence, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... are generally the most innocent and harmless people; who are then liable to accuse themselves of the greatest imaginary crimes, and have so much intellectual cowardice, that they dare not reason about those things, which they are directed by their priests to believe, however contradictory to human apprehension, or derogatory to the great Creator of all things. The maniacal hallucination at length becomes so painful, that the poor insane flies from life to become free ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... I made all my arrangements to that effect before leaving home. Rosa's reference to my desire to go back to my clients was sheer badinage"—smiling mournfully. "You have heard her talk often enough to understand how little of earnest there is in the raillery." More insincerity! For, contradictory as it may appear, Mrs. Sutton felt constrained to believe his unsupported word, in opposition to his wife's written assertion that he designed to return to his practice ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Perhaps a little more at the mercy of contradictory impulses than other women. But that's not her fault. I really think she has been ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... committed, offered 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
... well informed of this will; and, when the testator is on his death-bed, he contrives to tease and persuade the dying man to alter the will again in his favor. This is exactly the state of the case; and though considerable doubts have been raised relating to the contradictory bequests of the Confessor, there can be no difficulty in admitting that the conflicting pretensions of William and Harold were grounded upon the acts emanating from a wavering and feeble mind. If such disputes take ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... glaring contradictions in the Gospels, leaving untouched a mass of minor discrepancies. We find the principal of these when we compare the three synoptics with the Fourth Gospel, but there are some irreconcilable differences even between the three. The contradictory genealogies of Christ given in Matthew and Luke—farther complicated, in part, by a third discordant genealogy in Chronicles—have long been the despair of Christian harmonists. "On comparing these lists, we ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... of our writers very extensively indulges the mixed construction of which I have said so much, and concerning the propriety of which, the opinions of our grammarians are so various, so confused, and so self-contradictory. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... come to repentance," 2 Pet. iii. 9. Besides, remission of sins is to be preached, not to a few, 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, I want those signs and fruits ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... not swear; into that which is completely abolished, such as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, being tainted with unrighteousness, and having the same work of unrighteousness, and these are taken away by the Saviour because contradictory (for those things which are contradictory are mutually destructive), "For I say unto you that ye in no wise resist evil, but if any one smite thee turn to him the other cheek also;" and into that part which ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... contradictory to the above to say that stimuli which have little effect on the centres of consciousness during waking life produce an appreciable result in sleep. Nevertheless, it will be found that this is the case. Thus organic processes which scarcely ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... bitterness was 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 ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... looking at the precedents in the case of regency. There are two modern contradictory precedents, 24 Geo. II. and 5 Geo. III., and no experience of either, nor has there been a minority since Edward ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... shed many tears—some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. We see reflections—re-reflections—views at ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... gait, pilot-cloth coat, and pocketed hands proclaimed him a sailor, there were one or two contradictory points about him. A huge beard and moustache savoured more of the diggings than the deep, and a brown wide-awake with a prodigiously broad brim suggested ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... excitement. For about a week after Christmas Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head, and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room hurriedly on being spoken to, for ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... Francis as well as his; and I had found Clara so gentle, so confiding, so flatteringly cordial in her intercourse with me, that, once within my power, and prevented from receding by shame, and a thousand contradictory feelings, I had, with the vanity of an amoureux de seize ans, the confidence to believe I could reconcile the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... given into her hand. As to the Squire, the owner of Mannering, who had provided her with the task, Mrs. Bremerton could not imagine him or envisage him at all. Elizabeth's accounts of him were so reticent and so contradictory.... 'Well, that's very interesting'—said Elizabeth thoughtfully, when Captain Dell laid down his papers—'I wonder what Mr. Mannering will say to it? As you know, I got his express permission for you to make these enquiries. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,—in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he would have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with it the significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead and temples ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... 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, that one inconsistency ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ballot, which before ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... present themselves to us in "antinomies," apparently contradictory pairs, pairs of poles, which, however, do not really contradict, or even limit, each other, but are only correlatives, the existence of the one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other, and giving ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... country? Certainly, certainly, my Lord, there can be but one answer to this question. Is it not far more reasonable that England should either prevent such emigration of her subjects, or that, if she encourage and promote it, she should leave them, not to the embroilment of a double and contradictory allegiance, but to their own voluntary choice, to form such relations, political or social, as they see fit, in the country where they are to find their bread, and to the laws and institutions of which they are to look for ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... newspapers are regarded with suspicion, not only because they come exclusively through British channels, but on account of their contradictory character. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Acre, I must observe that it introduces a theory which is altogether new, and not only opposed to the opinion that the Archbishop was of English or Norman descent on both sides, but essentially contradictory of the legend as to the fair Saracen who came from the East in search of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... self-contradictory to say that Congress had power to confiscate property, and yet had no power to restore it ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... as a people. An author was still wanting to collect all these together, so as to present us with something like a continuous history. But to do this was no easy task: the materials were scanty and often contradictory; they were all written in a spirit hostile to the Gauls; a deep vein of prejudice and national partiality ran through and tarnished them all; the motives of that people were misrepresented, their actions falsified, the historians often understood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... the interpretation of the Egyptian word ka, especially during recent years. An excellent summary of the arguments brought forward by the various disputants up to 1912 will be found in Morel's "Mysteres Egyptiens". Since then more or less contradictory views have been put forward by Alan Gardiner, Breasted, and Blackman. It is not my intention to intervene in a dispute as to the meaning of certain phrases in ancient literature; but there are certain aspects of the problems at issue which are so intimately ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... was it admissible that, having reached them, they had perished for want of food. On the other hand, the great strength of the tides setting westward, past the islands, could only be caused by some exceedingly deep inlet, or by a passage through to the southern Indian Ocean. These contradictory circumstances were very embarrassing; and the schooner not being placed at my disposal, I was obliged, to my great regret, to leave this important geographical ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... should require others to believe, they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical work; ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... three's none," and that Mr. Russell, after turning a deaf ear to hints to retire which had gradually increased in bluntness, had suddenly turned restive and called Mr. Tasker a "mouldy image," a "wall-eyed rabbit," and divers other obscure and contradictory things. Not content with that, he had, without any warning, kissed Miss Vickers, and when Mr. Tasker, obeying that infuriated damsel's commands, tried to show him the door, had facetiously offered to show that gentleman the wall ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... part of the estate for L2,765. It was easy enough to buy, and even to pay, but to get possession was quite another thing. Precise information is difficult to get, for while some decline to say a word, others are mutually contradictory, and a State Commission would hardly sift truth from the confusing mass of details, denials, assertions, and counter-assertions. This much is clear enough. A tenant named Ruane was required to leave a house, with ground, which he had ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... William IV on the dissolution was another delusion, and so on in perverse, wicked, contradictory human nature. Those who like to probe such systems may do so—the only wise conclusion is Swift's, "If you want to confute a lie, tell another in the opposite direction." Madame de Sevigne tells of a curate who put up a clock on his church. His parishioners collected stones ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and responsible to the Court alone. His task was a difficult one. The Five Nations would fain have remained neutral, and let the European rivals fight it out; but, on account of their local position, they could not. The exactions and lies of the Albany traders, the frauds of land-speculators, the contradictory action of the different provincial governments, joined to English weakness and mismanagement in the last war, all conspired to alienate them and to aid the efforts of the French agents, who cajoled and threatened them ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... to piece it out finally from the narratives of the two tramps, and when he had returned to the Shorter home and listened to the contradictory and whole-souled improvisations of Shorter pere and mere ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... our above consideration, this would appear to be impossible. If every ray of light is propagated relative to the embankment with the velocity c, then for this reason it would appear that another law of propagation of light must necessarily hold with respect to the carriage — a result contradictory to the principle ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... escaping the issue of moral choice." "One opinion is as good as another." Discuss these two contradictory statements. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover |
