"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Perhaps a little more at the mercy of contradictory impulses than other women. But that's not her fault. I really think she ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... word, and in his contradictory heat and flurry and despair he felt as if there were no words at his call which were ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... hear have taken up a Notion, that the Book newly published by my Son, is contradictory to this of mine: 'Tis strange that such Imaginations should enter into the Minds of Men: I perused and approved of that Book before it was printed; and nothing but my Relation to him hindred me from recommending it to the World: But my self and Son agreed ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... calls "an internal-natural point of observation," which we understand to be that of a great majority of the most intelligent and gifted people at present on the earth, the results of this scheme appear so false and contradictory as to furnish its very adequate refutation. Nevertheless, there doubtless exists a class of spiritually minded, cultivated, unsatisfied men and women who will feel that the sober sincerity of this voice crying in the commercial wilderness must challenge a respectful hearing. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... matter of fact, these diverse and contradictory views had a crossing-point, and accepting this as their mean, Charles proved himself to be a knowing man with horses, an entirely ignorant and by no means eager labourer in the little farm work there ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... 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 each other a real standing ground and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with demands as to feeling and inward action from which his soul turned with sickness and fainting. That they were repulsive to him, that they appeared unreal, and contradictory to the nature around him, was no proof that they were not of God. But on the other hand, that they demanded what seemed to him unjust,—that these demands were founded on what seemed to him untruth attributed to God, on ways of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the supreme rulers of this contradictory Church, so benevolent and yet so cruel, so enlightened and yet so fanatical, so humble and yet so proud,—this institution of blended piety and fraud, equally renowned for saints, theologians, statesmen, drivellers, and fanatics; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... opinions differed concerning the climate of the colony. Dr. Madden could obtain only contradictory accounts. [Footnote: See Wanderings in West Africa, for details, vol. i. p. 275.] There is a tradition of a Chief Justice applying to the Colonial Office for information touching his pension, the clerks could not answer him, and he presently ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the natural proneness to exaggerate their age which usually characterises men of advanced years, so that any ex parte statement of this kind must be received with due caution. Where, moreover, as in the present case, we have evidence of a directly contradictory kind furnished by independent witnesses, whose declarations in this respect are presumably disinterested, such ex parte statements are on the face of them unreliable. The balance of evidence in this case appears to rest on the side of the older historians, ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... many care to call old Francois Villon friend nowadays. There was a time——" He paused, running his hand down the long trail of his beard reflectively, a slender-fingered supple hand. La Mothe noted it was, a hand that had a distinct character of its own, just as the contradictory face had, though the finger-tips were less sensitive than in the days when their itching acquisitiveness had brought their owner to the cold shadows of the gallows. "Aye! there was a time. There were ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... 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 is that 'these ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... of course, but we were dressed suitably in our exploring and hunting clothes and did not mind the heat. The river was low, for there had been dry weather for some weeks —judging from the vague and contradictory information I received there is much elasticity to the terms wet season and dry season at this part of the Paraguay. Under the brilliant sky we steamed steadily up the mighty river; the sunset was ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... government. If left to himself, he would probably imagine, that they had embraced two different religions. But if he were told that they professed the same, he would then say, that the precepts of this religion had been expressed in such doubtful language, that they led to two sets of principles contradictory to one another. I need scarcely inform the reader, that I allude to the two opposite conclusions, which will almost always be drawn, where men reason from motives of policy or ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... against the wall, beside the door, arrests your attention, with the words around it, which, with difficulty, you decipher by the dim light, "Editor's Room—No Admittance," followed by the encouraging, but somewhat contradictory word, "Ring," which, doubtless, means this: "If you are a particular friend of the editor, or have particular business with him as a journalist, ring the bell, and perhaps you may be admitted." Supposing either of these positions yours, you "ring the bell," and immediately you are startled ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... and closed the door I made some inquiries about the sufferer's symptoms, but the description she gave me was so utterly vague and contradictory that I could make nothing out of it. Her muddled idea of his illness I put down to her fear and ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... her hand bounties, her petty egoisms, and sudden far-leaping generosities, and all the contradictory impulses of her malady, had now departed utterly. The joys of a landed proprietor mounted into the head of Sir Franks. He was up early the next morning, and he and Harry walked over a good bit of the ground before breakfast. Sir Franks meditated ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he gazed out upon the Kingstonians, began to feel rather nervous. He realized that one contradictory answer, one slip of the tongue, might spoil everything. And in this case to spoil was a verb meaning imprisonment and ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... being gathered, Gustavus renewed his efforts to gain favor through the land. This he soon discovered to be no easy task. Surrounded by conspirators on every hand, he could not turn without confronting some new rumor. Stories of the most contradictory nature were set afloat each day. At one time the report was spread through Dalarne that he had cast Christina into jail. After that it was rumored that he was sending despatches frequently to Gotland, from which some ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... that the angel of his life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron, who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,—this was the very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear. There was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a man that ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... not hold that in ecclesiastical matters, it does not employ such acts, and only declares whether the ecclesiastical judge practices fuerza or no—and this not as judge of the ecclesiastical estate, but as a political governor who desires peace in his country. The other and contradictory relation also tries to prove the proceedings null because, before the royal Audiencia declared that the judge-conservator was not committing fuerza, the procurators of the archbishop drew up a petition which they presented to the president, in which they challenged the auditor ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... necessary and indispensable. Under that placid exterior he conceals, I believe, a boundless ambition, and hatred and jealousy lurk under his professions of esteem and political attachment. His is one of those contradictory characters, containing in it so much of mixed good and evil, that it is difficult to strike an accurate balance between the two, and the acts of his political life are of a corresponding description, of questionable utility and merit, though always marked by great ability. It is very sure ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... decision of the court was "When an intelligent, active, industrious, frugal woman finds she has married a man who, instead of coming up to the standard of a husband, is a mere dependent ... and leaves to her the support of the family, it would be contradictory of fact and an absurd construction of the law to say that he, and not she, is the head of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... succeeded in elaborating a mechanical 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 ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... belonging to the small, spare man already spoken of as having a buxom young wife and blue cotton overalls. During his wife's adjournment to the ladies' cabin, this person, I am obliged to record, had become boisterously drunk,—a condition in which the contradictory elements that make up the characters of most men are generally developed to an instructive extent. In his first paroxysm, the fighting man within him was all aroused, as is generally the case with diminutive men, when under the influence of drink. Already he had tucked his sleeves ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that, while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Which being so, the distaste of readers to the contrary sort in books, can hardly arise from any sense of their untrueness. It may rather ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Lady Maud Fitz-Warene were announced: they had just come from the Commons; a dame and damsel full of political enthusiasm. Lady Firebrace gave critical reports and disseminated many contradictory estimates of the result; Lady Maud talked only of a speech made by Lord Milford, which from the elaborate noise she made about it, you would have supposed to have been the oration of the evening; on the contrary, it had lasted only ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... being consigned to medical treatment but the distance from Bath or Bristol, and the contradictory advice that had been received from our county neighbours as to our family doctor. However, she formed her theory that his nervous imaginings—whether involuntary or acted, she hoped the former, and wished she could be sure—had infected ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bacteria by itself, unmixed with others (pure cultures), rendered advance almost impossible. So conflicting were the results that the whole subject soon came into almost hopeless confusion, and very few steps were taken upon any sure basis. So difficult were the methods, so contradictory and confusing the results, because of impure cultures, that a student of to-day who wishes to look up the previous discoveries in almost any line of bacteriology need hardly go back of 1880, since he can almost rest assured ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... 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 ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... offering prayer in order to obtain various needs presents the difficulty of reconciling the conception of an omnipotent, all-foreseeing God with the contradictory theory of a Father who requires prayer before caring for his children, an almighty God who will be turned from his course by human petitions. Man can do wonders in the way of conquering nature, but he has not ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... and the world, it is perhaps more than a matter of merely personal interest to underline his salient traits. Let it be premised that a logical and satisfactory analysis is well-nigh impossible, for his nature is self-contradictory, subject to gusts of temperament, and he himself has pictured the struggle that has gone on between the impulsive Irish and the cautious Scotch elements in him. Thus it is that he has handled similar problems in different ways at different times, and has ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... to be the Seat of Government— that the Commissioners of the Customs and their numerous Retinue are to remove to the Town of Marblehead a Town contiguous to Salem and that this if the General shall think proper is to be a Garrisond Town. Reports are various and contradictory. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... sense it day by day. He had always been taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. The invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as he knew it in his friends and neighbours. He still cherished the hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid people would apologize and right ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... and generous in purpose that she who is a true woman is a fit peer for a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable of much controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any way tenable) is concerned; but then the plain fact is that my Uncle Roland was as eccentric and contradictory a gentleman—as—as—why, as you and I are, if we once venture to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... universe—a fear engendered chiefly by the man's unpredictable comings and goings, thanks to his secret hiding place. Those who were as close to him as henchmen could be—which was not very close—only added to the general mystery of the whereabouts of the base by their sincerely offered but utterly contradictory notions and data. One thing all agreed on: the outlaw's lair was a place ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... without noticing Kranitski's emotion, "is a sonnet from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil). There is in her something undefined, something contradictory—" ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... many, especially among my young countrymen, who have not opportunity to read the translations of the chief scholars, scattered here and there in learned periodicals, or patience and time to disentangle overlapping and contradictory versions, that they may judge for themselves as to its "lowness" and "want of imagination," and the other well-known charges brought against it before the ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... fires of the most abandoned passion. Yes there might have been that sentiment for him too. There was no doubt. So I say again: No wonder! No wonder that she raged at everything—and perhaps even at him, with contradictory reproaches: for regretting the girl, a little fool who would never in her life be worth anybody's attention, and for taking the disaster itself with a cynical levity in which she perceived a flavour ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... account for so many things that have happened. We cannot always say, "We did this because of that," or "Our enemies did that because of the other." Time after time we can find no reason why things happened as they have—so unaccountable and so contradictory have they seemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year has been done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hence some of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... vision of a jail did not affright her. On the contrary her chief 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 least really come ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... of somewhat jerky, contradictory information, had gleaned that the new leading part at the London theatre had been gained through the middle-aged bridegroom's influence, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 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 seem square not. ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... the surroundings play as important a part in the crossing of races as they do in other matters. They may sometimes favor, sometimes restrict, sometimes prevent, the establishment of a mixed race. This simple consideration accounts for many apparently contradictory facts. Etwick and Long have affirmed that in Jamaica the mulattoes hold out only because they are constantly recruited by the marriage of whites with negresses. But in San Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, there are, we may say, no whites, and the population ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... their error lead us into truth, and let us grasp the relation of the two apparently contradictory facts. 'He saved others,' that is certain. He did not 'save Himself,' that is as certain. Was the explanation 'cannot'? The priests by 'cannot' meant physical impossibility, defect of power, and they were wrong. But there is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... universal and impersonal to God the particular and intimate. Nothing is more needed for our age than to insist upon the truth that there are both common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; that these are not contradictory; that they are complementary; that they are not identical. It is the church's business to insist that men must live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular, in order to be able to ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the bridges over the Elster and have them blown up, but not until after the French army had crossed the river in safety. I have since heard this event discussed from many points of view, and have read many contradictory accounts. It is not my province to shed light on a point of history which forms such a subject of controversy, and I have consequently limited myself to relating as I have done only what came within my own knowledge. Nevertheless, I may be permitted to make to my readers one simple ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... school. There is not in the universe such an areopagus for fair play and abhorrence of all crooked ways, as an English mob, or one of the English time-honoured public schools. But my own first introduction to such an establishment was under peculiar and contradictory circumstances. When my "rating," or graduation in the school, was to be settled, naturally my altitude (to speak astronomically) was taken by the proficiency in Greek. But I could then barely construe books so easy as the Greek Testament and the Iliad. This was considered quite well enough for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Dubois was silent, and the regent thoughtful; there was nothing on the route to arrest the attention of either, and they arrived at Meudon full of contradictory reflections. ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Seventy strong. Well, jot down three ploughmen, genuine clodhoppers, chaw-bacons sans peur et sans reproche, except that the overseers of the parish were upon them with orders of affiliation; add one shepherd, who made contradictory statements about the number of the spring lambs, and in whose house had been found during winter certain fleeces, for which no ingenuity could account; a laird's son, long known by the name of the Neerdoweel; a Man of tailors, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... these contradictory opinions, the shouts of the Indians, at the sight of Cuchillo, burst forth, compelling the chiefs to suspend their deliberations until the warriors who pursued him had returned. When they reappeared, they reported ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... attentively, I was surprised to find it contain a singular mixture of contradictory principles, and in the same breath, the sentiments of a philosopher and of a colonist; of an advocate for the Negroes, and of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... march from Tannhauser, being interrupted by storms of applause. The pleasure thus expressed was aroused, it seems, because the audience was surprised to find that my music, of which there had been so many contradictory reports, contained such long phrases of connected melody. Well satisfied as I was, both with the way in which the concert had been carried out and its enthusiastic reception, I had on the following days to overcome ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... its recognition. But in matters of opinion controlled by reason, there is no such ready detection and recognition of error, even by the best educated classes. The realm of opinion is ever in chaos. Contradictory opinions are ever clashing; no supreme arbiter is known; no law of reason, like the laws of mathematics, comes in to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... to lilies. He considered that their heavy scent was rather dangerous. Mrs. Bouncing told Winn what everybody in the hotel had suggested, and appeared to expect him to combine and carry out all their suggestions, with several other contradictory ones of ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... The sharp contradictory ending of his speech, the colour rising to the old man's cheek and forehead, whence it did not sink, but lay steadily, a heavy, purple blotch, attracted Agatha's notice—certainly more than Mr. ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... with faith in some supernatural force. The clergy state that the physician cures disease through the mediation of God, the physician merely playing the part of the agent of God, through whom the real cure is effected. Is anything more ridiculous and at the same time more contradictory, than to suppose that an all-powerful god should have to appoint an intermediary to perform his work? And if it is only by God's will and aid that a cure takes place, then it follows that God must be willing for the individual to be cured; why in the name of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... that this power was shown in the making of yearly instead 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 ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... reason for the unclear and contradictory theories of class relations lies in the fact that our society, largely controlled in all its organization by one set of doctrines, still contains survivals of old social theories which are totally inconsistent with ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... it were to force its own way through whilst we absorb the attention of their mobile guns, the game would be up. So they are straining every nerve to be ready for anything. The moral of all these rather contradictory remarks is just what I have said time and again since South Africa. The fact that war has become a highly scientific business should not blind us to the other fact that its roots still draw their nutriment from primitive feelings and methods; the feelings and ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... any manifestation that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Thus the most contradictory thoughts and emotions rushed madly through her mind. Absorbed in them, she had allowed time to slip by; perhaps, tired out with long excitement, she had actually closed her eyes and sunk into a troubled sleep, wherein quickly fleeting dreams seemed but the continuation of her anxious thoughts—when ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... said Timar to himself. "If it is difficult to carry through one lie with consistency, how can you manage two?—two contradictory lies? If you accept Noemi's love, you will be inseparably bound to her, and must live henceforth two lives, both full of deceit. . . . You are no boy, to be passion's tool, and perhaps it is not passion ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... thought in these matters after the sixteenth century. Holding also "that a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely no body is repugnant to reason," and that an indivisible space-filling particle is self-contradictory, he was led to identify space and matter; that is, to make matter as indispensable to space as space to matter. There is, then, but one kind of corporeal being, whose attribute is extension, and whose modes are motion and rest. The most famous ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Their's must needs be the Truth; whereas many questions, and especially in matters Physiological, may admit of so many Differing Hypotheses, that 'twill be very inconsiderate and fallacious to conclude (except where the Opinions are precisely Contradictory) the Truth of one from the falsity of another. And in our particular case 'tis no way necessary, that the Properties of mixt Bodies must be explicable either by the Hermetical, or the Aristotelian Hypothesis, there being divers other and ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... various departments of the army. Or, we may fancy ourselves in the circle of listeners, all with necks stretched out towards an old gentleman in the centre, who deliberately puts on his spectacles, unfolds the wet newspaper, and gives us the details of the broken and contradictory reports, which have been flying from mouth to mouth, ever since the courier alighted at Secretary Oliver's office. Sometimes we have an account of the Indian skirmishes near Lake George, and how a ranging party of provincials were so ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... under their green and yellow and red lamps, held a whispered consultation on the manner of conciliating these contradictory demands. Then, after a minute's hesitation, the violins began the prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popular in Venice—the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patrician ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... that it is not the reality of the 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 written an account of them, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... nowise considerable shapes: nevertheless, in their roots and subterranean ramifications, they extend through the entire structure of Society, and work unweariedly in the secret depths of English national Existence; striving to separate and isolate it into two contradictory, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dictums of the Suffrage pioneers have been repeated at their every convention. Overlaid with sentiment as much of the Suffrage idea has become, contradictory as it is in argument and in statement of fact, blended as are its sophisms with the real progress of the time, sincere and well-meaning as are many of its advocates, sex antagonism is the corner-stone of its foundation. The Woman's Rebellion is a more complex affair than ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... in his bosom two contradictory passions—a desire to revenge the death of his father, strangely qualified by admiration of his enemy's daughter. Against the former feeling he had struggled, until it seemed to him upon the wane; against the latter he used no means of resistance, for he did not suspect its existence. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... in the Town Hall. When the tocsin rings, said a member of the Commune, the Convention ceases to exist. In other words, when the principal chooses to interfere, he supersedes his agent. The two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was suspended while Robespierre ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... self-defense, I called Congress together at Montgomery on April 29th, and, in the message of that date, thus spoke of the proclamation of the President of the United States: "Apparently contradictory as are the terms of this singular document, one point is unmistakably evident. The President of the United States calls for an army of seventy-five thousand men, whose first service is to be the capture ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... in you a disposition to assist each other in any little case of difficulty. Nothing tends so much to cement brotherly love, as politeness and attention. In many families this is a thing much neglected; and I have seen more disagreements arise, from a rude, contradictory disposition, than from any other cause whatever. I know you like to have our instructions illustrated by a story, particularly if it be founded on fact. Your father will, therefore, I am sure, give you an account of a friend of his, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... they were motionless and seemed not to have been touched by something passing through them. She had gone, yet I continued still, bent almost double, gazing fixedly at the spot where I had last seen her, my mind in a strange condition, possessed by sensations which were keenly felt and yet contradictory. So vivid was the image left on my brain that she still seemed to be actually before my eyes; and she was not there, nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being existed, or could exist, in this gross world; and at the same time I knew that she had been there—that imagination ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... future state of retribution; all this joined with an explicit ardent wish that, when he was to leave this world, he might be in the condition of a righteous man. Good God! what inconsistency, what perplexity is here! With what different views of things, with what contradictory principles of action, must such a mind be torn and distracted! It was not unthinking carelessness, by which he ran on headlong in vice and folly, without ever making a stand to ask himself what he was doing: no; he acted upon the cool motives of ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... achievements. In ordinary life they look 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 ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... think it is rather nice to be like one,' she said in a woman's contradictory way. 'And, Peter, dear, though I can't give them my fur, I wouldn't mind their building in it. Fancy a nest in my neck with little spotty eggs in it! ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... was 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
... barometer generally stayed quite low. It fell as far as 73.5 centimeters. Our compass indications no longer offered any guarantees. The deranged needles would mark contradictory directions as we approached the southern magnetic pole, which doesn't coincide with the South Pole proper. In fact, according to the astronomer Hansteen, this magnetic pole is located fairly close to latitude 70 ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... upon this important subject, we shall find the more, that external circumstances have an influence upon intellect, increasing in an accumulating ratio; that the political institutions of various countries have their fluctuating and contradictory influences; that example controls in a great degree intellectual production, causing after-growths, as it were, of the first luxuriant crop of masterminds, and giving a character and individuality to habits of thought and modes of expression; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... college chapel in which some allusion to his writings might not be found, and few serious students whose modes of thought were not at least coloured by his influence. That influence now appears to me to have been not only various, but even in some measure contradictory. The 'Analogy' is perhaps the most original, if not the most powerful, book ever written in defence of the Christian creed; but it has probably been the parent of much modern Agnosticism, for its method is to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... pronounce upon the diet. Should there be no such authority present, the greatest care and common sense must be devoted to the selection from the said tables of a system of diet suitable to the various stages of disease. Any recommendations therein contained which may appear to be contradictory or conflicting must be ascribed to their complication on a progressive dietary system consistent with the prospective advancement of ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... intend to describe the details of this brilliant action, for the sufficient reason that, though there were seven young gentlemen (connected with the Primary School) on the field as war correspondents, their accounts of the engagement are so contradictory as to be utterly worthless. On one point they all agree,—that the contest was sharp, short, and decisive. The truth is, the General is a quick, wiry, experienced old hero; and it didn't take him long to rout the Barnabee Boy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... could not meet him cheerfully; he was standing on the rug, his back to the fire—how much did I read in the expression of his eye as my glance encountered his, when I advanced to bid him good morning; how much that was contradictory to my nature! He said "Good morning" abruptly and nodded, and then he snatched, rather than took, a newspaper from the table, and began to read it with the air of a master who seizes a pretext to escape the bore of conversing with an underling. It was well I had taken a resolution ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... which is rarely indulgent, has been in the main just to her motives and her character. "I have been ever the same, intense and sad," were among her last words. "I have loved God, my father, and liberty." But she was a victim to the contradictory elements in her own nature, and walked always among storms. This nature, so complex, so rich, so ardent, so passionate, could it ever ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... of Word (i.e. Thought or Desire) which will set the Law working in the right direction. It must be a Word of confidence in its own power; otherwise by the hypothesis of the case it would be giving contradictory directions to the Law, or to borrow a simile from what we have learnt about waves in ether, it would be sending out vibrations that would cancel one another and so produce no effect. Then it must be a Word that does not compromise itself by antagonizing ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... their intellectual weakness, if they never saw any derogation from the general laws they would take them to be fatalities. A miracle is a grace intervening in things, just as grace properly so-called intervenes in human actions. And it is not contradictory to the general design of God, since by bringing human minds back to the truth that there is a Being who wills, it accustoms them to consider all general laws as permanent acts, but also as the acts of the ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... mostly Welshmen, anxious to be doing, but understanding imperfectly the speech of their employers. With the eagerness of their temperament, they went at the trucks, and Babel began. Amid a confused roar of contradictory exhortations, with energetic gesture, and faces full of animation and fire, they were hauling away, to any and every place, the ton-loads of mattresses, and the fragments of unnumbered bedsteads. It was time for the owners to interpose; ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... contradictory should be examined by the same rules as in dialectical refutation whether the same thing is meant, in the same relation, and in the same sense. We should therefore solve the question by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuweid, in 1832-'34, appears elsewhere in this paper. In Fremont's expedition of 1844 special and repeated allusion is made to the expertness of the Pai-Utes in signs, which is contradictory to the statement above made by correspondents. The same is mentioned regarding a band of Shoshonis met near the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and one of "Diggers," probably Chemehuevas, encountered on a ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... my lips, to offer a contradictory opinion; for my sense of the saneness of things, would not allow me to take the story literally; then I shut them again, without saying anything. Somehow, the certainty in Tonnison's voice affected ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle, mutually producing and produced; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out of date and contradictory. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... image points (Maxwell assumes a less general hypothesis), and are independent of the manner in which the reproduction is effected. These authors proved, however, that no optical system can justify these suppositions, since they are contradictory to the fundamental laws of reflexion and refraction. Consequently the Gaussian theory only supplies a convenient method of approximating to reality; and no constructor would attempt to realize this unattainable ideal. All that at present can be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was sent and an answer received in five minutes. The Government paid little attention to his offer, and finally refused it. Two months later the French were on the Irish coasts, and great confusion and distress was occasioned by the want of accurate news. 'The troops were harassed with contradictory orders and forced marches for want of intelligence, and from that indecision, which must always be the consequence of insufficient information. Many days were spent in terror, and in fruitless wishes for an ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... does not follow from God's failure to overcome any "inexorable laws and indestructible properties of matter," but is implied in the inexorable laws of thought—in that eternal right reason which makes it impossible for Deity to do what is self-contradictory ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of Ritter on this subject are not only improbable, but they are contradictory to the little historical testimony we possess. Herodotus informs us in Euterpe that except the province of Thebes, all Egypt, that is to say, the whole of the Delta and of middle Egypt extending to Hemopolis Magna in N. L. 27 degrees 45 minutes, was originally a morass. This morass was doubtless ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... should exist, and should not exist, are contradictory opposites. But God does not will that evil should not exist; otherwise, since various evils do exist, God's will would not always be fulfilled. Therefore God wills that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... quietly, as Mr. Upton had said. It was a buckskin, fat and hearty from long resting. Nothing could be more docile than the pensive lower lip, and the meek curve of the neck; nothing could be more contradictory than the light of its eye; a brooding, baleful fire, ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... party, with their sermons, their 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 revolt ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... rise of wages causes an equivalent rise of prices, is, as we formerly observed, self-contradictory: for, if it did so, it would not be a rise of wages; the laborer would get no more of any commodity than he had before, let his money wages rise ever so much; a rise of real wages would be an impossibility. This being equally ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... humours of men, and as greate a dexterity in the applyinge them, who from a private and obscure birth, (though of a good family) without interest of estate, allyance or frendshipps, could rayse himselfe to such a height, and compounde and kneade such opposite and contradictory tempers humour and interests, into a consistence, that contributed to his designes and to ther owne destruction, whilst himselfe grew insensibly powerfull enough, to cutt off those by whome he had climed, in the instant, that they projected to demolish ther owne ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... time reticent, and his statements are contradictory. No wonder he declines to tell what has occurred, so compromising to himself! But when the lariat is at length noosed around his neck, the loose end of it thrown over the limb of a pecan tree—the other conditions being clearly expounded to him—he sees that ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... this fact is becoming generally recognised. You cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or less confused and contradictory talk on this subject—nor can you fail to notice that, in one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like discussions in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say that ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... are related not contradictory of equal probability & with equal evidence, if we believe one we must ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... there had been Susans who 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 all angles—but we cannot distinguish the soul itself among all these ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... they believe it, or why they 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
... waste material. Elsewhere I read that "Professor Atwater's investigations into nutrition have shown in a most convincing manner that the body derives all its energy from the food consumed. This may be regarded as established." Which of these definite and contradictory assertions does Dr Knaggs support, and why? Where can I get information re Professor Atwater's experiments and other ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... Solomon's Character. 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 rule well. He built the ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... to tell me something which might seem to a great many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said—and she said it with the most profound conviction. She told me that your husband has ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... poor Ralph was looking about the room for Bud. Bud's actions had of late been strangely contradictory. But had he turned coward and deserted his friend? Why else did he avoid the session of the court? After asking himself such questions as these, Ralph would wonder at his own folly. What could Bud do if he were there? There was no human power that ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... think, a great achievement; for 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, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... you 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 you ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was to heap honors and emoluments on the family of Nuncomar; and this they did. In the meantime the assizes commenced; a true bill was found; and Nuncomar was brought before Sir Elijah Impey and a jury composed of Englishmen. A great quantity of contradictory swearing, and the necessity of having every word of the evidence interpreted, protracted the trial to a most unusual length. At last a verdict of guilty was returned, and the Chief Justice pronounced sentence of death on ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... respecting the situation of the coast to the northward of Cape North, must necessarily be derived from the charts and journals of the persons who have been employed at various times in ascertaining the limits of that empire; and these are for the most part so imperfect, so confused, and contradictory, that it is not easy to form any distinct idea of their pretended, much less to collect the amount of their real discoveries. It is on this account, that the extent and form of the peninsula, inhabited by the Tschutski, still remains a point on which the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... what Mr. Ambassador Bayard has styled "that form of Socialism, Protection," it seems to me that we can find traces of this contradictory tendency. Americans consider their country as emphatically the land of protection, and attribute most of their prosperity to their inhospitable customs barriers. This may be so; but where else in the world will you find such a volume ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... black eyes and raven hair contrasted sadly with the pallor of her face. Poe himself, poor, proud, and ill, anticipating grief and nursing the bitterness that springs from helplessness in the sight of suffering borne by those dear to us, was restless and variable, the creature of contradictory impulses." ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... men make a name of two Names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an Incorporeall Body, or (which is all one) an Incorporeall Substance, and a great number more. For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together and made one, signifie nothing at all. For example ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... instructed by their Catechisms, as that, oftentimes, 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 ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... myself in a great uneasy chair and waited, with the contradictory spirit common to such junctures, dreading every step lest it should herald the man whom, of all men, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... that he belonged to the lower class, and was not, like Biron and the other commanders-in-chief, of good family. Remaining always at a distance from the scene of operations, he confused the generals of divisions by contradictory orders, which vied with each ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... clerks, a crier of the court, constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for the defendant; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled after much challenging. The witnesses were stupid and unreliable and contradictory, as witnesses always are. The counsel were eloquent, argumentative, and vindictively abusive of each other, as was characteristic and proper. The case was at last submitted and duly finished by the judge with an absurd ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the State retains the semblance of a religious ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... to Safti, who turned, squinted horribly at the Princess, and salaamed to her with a curious and contradictory dignity, turning his fingers, covered with jewels, towards ...
— The Princess And The Jewel Doctor - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... fundamental elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series of leading facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory as may appear this result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea within them is that special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... questions, examining the clever little craft beside which their own looked cumbersome, though sea-worthy, and giving such a sad mixture of information that in the end Jack was glad he had his reliable charts to fall back on, since one man's account seemed to be exactly contradictory in comparison ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... charm of a new voice was something to Chatty. And she was so certain that what the rector said was true, that Georgie, or even she herself, more delicate still, a simple-hearted young woman, might have been trusted in his worst haunt. He read her look with a keen pang of feelings contradictory, of sharp anguish and a kind of pleasure. For indeed it was true; and yet—and yet—— Did ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinaman will always be a slave to the opium habit." So said a professedly authoritative American book on China, published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory to common sense. "We white Americans can't get rid of whiskey intemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization and all our Christianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant Chinaman to shake off the clutches of opium?" ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Treherne had developed into a very personal thing. And with that thought came also the conception of what a powerful antagonist he would be. For it improves some men to wear glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue. It was allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet playful, bold yet reverential. Many a time I have longed for Clovelly's tongue. Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without his art; and of this I am occasionally reminded ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... she thought it better to leave the matter where it was. At present she was in a very strong position. Ernest's official purity was firmly established, but at the same time he had shown himself so susceptible that she was able to fuse two contradictory impressions concerning him into a single idea, and consider him as a kind of Joseph and Don Juan in one. This was what she had wanted all along, but her vanity being gratified by the possession of such a son, there was an end of it; the son himself ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... acquaint them with it. It is not necessary for our purpose, that these propositions be capable of proof, or even that, by arguments drawn from the light of nature, they can be made out to be probable; it is enough that we are able to say concerning them, that they are not so violently improbable, so contradictory to what we already believe of the divine power and character, that either the propositions themselves, or facts strictly connected with the propositions (and therefore no further improbable than they are improbable), ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... last fortnight of Kant's life, he busied himself unceasingly in a way that seemed not merely purposeless but self-contradictory. Twenty times in a minute he would unloose and tie his neck handkerchief—so also with a sort of belt which he wore about his dressing-gown, the moment it was clasped, he unclasped it with impatience, and was then equally impatient to have it clasped ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 by her worshipers, maternity for the rest of womankind ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... abruptly, turning over the leaves of her account book; irritated by this contradictory sense of being obliged to feel she had done an injury when she knew she really had not. So at last Laura thought she had a headache or something, and soon went on ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... might have been half-past eleven when Miss Leigh had professed herself to Lord Bromley as too ill and tired to dream of dancing. Looking the consternation she felt at this contradictory piece of evidence, she remained silent, not daring to ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... (Pilgrimages, p. 120.) draws from the name Acrensis, that Becket was born at 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... opinion concerning the Deity. The only escape from having these is to think of nothing outside of the daily routine of life. The attempt to be without them on any other terms generally ends in having but crude and contradictory opinions on the most important subjects of human interest. The theology of Rousseau will be considered later. Philosophical systems were his especial bugbear, and it is only incidentally that he formulates ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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 International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... done, and whatever may yet be done, the amount of hardship must have been and must still be very great. It would be amusing, if amusement were possible in the presence of so much sadness and suffering, to put side by side the absolutely contradictory criticisms, all equally vehement, to which our action is subjected. On the one hand is the outcry against the cruelty and heartlessness manifested in not making better provision for the people in the concentration camps: on the other, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... effectually done, if they could only furnish a pretence for affirming that they had performed every wonder accomplished by the former. Without some such supposition of collusion, two of the miracles attempted by the magicians are perfectly absurd and contradictory. They pretended to turn water into blood, when there was not one drop of water in all the land of Egypt, which Aaron had not previously converted into that substance. They pretended to send frogs over ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Mary speaks of "the petty cares which obscured the morning of her heroine's life; continual restraint in the most trivial matters; unconditional submission to orders, which, as a mere child, she soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory; and the being often obliged to sit, in the presence of her parents, for three or four hours together, without daring to utter a word;" she is, I believe, to be considered as copying the outline of the first period of her ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... to descend from it and enter the prison. "Probably a magistrate," conjectured the crowd. Many of the English magistrates were noble, and almost all had the right of bearing arms. In France blazon and robe were almost contradictory terms. The Duke Saint-Simon says, in speaking of magistrates, "people of that class." In England a gentleman was not despised for ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... prank, but not often merry. His spirit seemed to be overcast; and the terrible fact came out gradually that he was not 'nicely disposed.' His relatives failed to understand him, and they gave him up like a puzzle. He was self-contradictory. For instance, though a shocking liar, he was lavish of truth whenever truth happened to be disconcerting and inopportune. He it was who told the forewoman of his uncle's millinery department, in front of a customer, that she had a moustache. His ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... from a decomposed and dying society. He who, in a proper state of things, would have been the representative of living spiritual principles, is a mere supernumerary. He makes signs of the cross, pronounces accustomed formulas, but he never once thinks of examining into the strange and contradictory relations existing between the husband, forced by his very being into the Future, and the wife, fettered by the conventions and chains of the Past. Neither does he study, with an eye enlightened by philanthropy and spirituality, the poor infant, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore—and this is not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the mass—it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching the imagination and captivating the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... a mass of false swearing and contradictory evidence taken during the examination, that the naval officers were compelled to reserve any judgment on the case till they should arrive in port, when it might be handed over to the lawyers to sift to the bottom. Greatly to my satisfaction, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... his private, personal, or domestic vices, opinions are various, and even opposite. Most persons, who have long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities. On the other hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these rumours, which certainly are exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome, and had long passed ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... success of free labor among the slaves. They will neglect to take into account the discouragements and drawbacks of the year. The sudden reaction consequent upon the change from slavery to what they hardly knew as freedom; the confusion incident upon military occupation (and the contradictory directions given concerning the year's crops); the abundance of money where the cotton-agents and officers were stationed, and the high wages promised and often obtained, at Hilton Head and Beaufort; the lateness of the cotton crop, the poorness of the seed, the uncertainty and doubt ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... a belief, to which many sentimental people still hold, in spite of all contradictory evidence, that marriages are arranged in heaven, and that no amount of earthly wire-pulling can alter the decrees of the Supreme Court. Many beautiful sentiments have been expressed, bearing on this alluring theme, but none more comprehensive than Aunt Kate Shenstone's brief summary: "You'll get ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... moments of life, when one's entire future depends upon a word, or a gesture, twenty contradictory inspirations can traverse the mind in the time occupied ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... man. My first name was 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 fair lady ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... discussed whether Tukaram followed the monistic philosophy of Sankara or not and it must be confessed that his utterances are contradictory. But the gist of the matter is that he disliked not so much monism as philosophy. Hence he says "For me there is no use in the Advaita. Sweet to me is the service of thy feet. The relation between God and his ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... part of this evidence Travers had fixed his eyes on Gardiner, but the witness had steadily avoided him. Jim was now convinced that he was the victim, not of a coincidence, but a plot. Of course, he could give his evidence, which would be directly contradictory to that of Gardiner, but he was already under suspicion, and anything he might say would be unconsciously discounted by the jurors. But he began calmly, a quiet smile still playing about his thin lips and clean teeth. "I am sorry I cannot corroborate all the last witness has said," he commenced. ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations. The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any method which he may follow with ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... must drop in here before I go on, namely, that whilst I thankfully admit, and joyfully preach, that the most imperfect, rudimentary faith knits a man to Jesus Christ, even if in this life it may be found covered over with a great deal that is contradictory and inconsistent; on the other hand there are some people who stand like the angel in the Apocalypse, with one foot on the solid land and one upon the restless sea, half in and half out, undecided, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
