"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... practised, that to detect faults is a much lower occupation than to recognize merits. We may add also, that though far easier in the execution, it is not a whit more certain in the result. What is the detecting of a fault, but the feeling of an incongruity, of a contradiction, which may exist in ourselves as well as in the object? Who shall say in which? None but he who sees this object as it is, and himself as he is. We have all heard of the critic fly; but none ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and by herself that she did not intend ever to return to him. It is useless to enter into the controversy as to the cause of this separation. In the light of the latest revelations, the better opinion seems to be that it was a hopeless incongruity that might have been predicted from the characters of the two. It seems that Lady Byron was not quite so amiable as she was supposed to be, and in her later years she was subject to hallucinations. Byron, it must be admitted, was an impossible husband for any woman, most of all for any woman who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... others excepting that English is a very generally required subject. In reference to these two required subjects the pupils who graduate are not more successful than those who do not. When the emphasis is on the teaching of the subject rather than on the teaching of the pupil there is no incongruity in making the subject a requirement for all, but both are incongruous with what psychology has more lately recognized and pointed out as to the wide range of individual differences. A similar situation is evidenced by the percentage of failure in science as reported for the St. ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... without religious symbol of any sort. Only Jacqueline followed the service, kneeling where the congregation should have knelt, making the responses in her clear young voice, joining him in the prayers. But Philip was aware of no incongruity. He gave them what he had to give, and felt none the less a priest because of his flannel shirt and his shabby riding-trousers. Cathedral or log-cabin, it was all one to him. He knew that with Jacqueline's singing, the Lord had indeed entered ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... religious feeling had preserved from the axe, that they might afford congenial shade to the successor of its founder, seemed to impart meanness and vulgarity to the tapering verdure of his plantations, his modern trees—his pert poplars and mean larches—his sycamores and planes. Even the incongruity between his solid new paling and the decayed and sun-bleached wood of the venerable fence to which it adjoined, with its hoary beard of silvery lichen, was an eyesore to him. Every passer-by might note the limit and circumscription dividing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... country, poor, and with no inheritance but the "shillalah," the ballot was freely given to them, as the poor man's weapon for defence. Why cannot men, who have been political serfs in their own country, see the incongruity of voting against the enfranchisement of over one-half of the inhabitants of the State which has made free human beings of them? It is not long since one of these adopted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... of our being insufficiently catered for; whatever accidental benefit be derivable from homophones, we shall always command it fully and in excess; look again at the portentous list of them! And since the essential jocularity of a pun (at least when it makes me laugh) lies in a humorous incongruity, its farcical gaiety may be heightened by a queer pronunciation. I cannot pretend to judge a sophisticated taste; but, to give an example, if, as I should urge, the o of the word petrol should be preserved, as it is now universally spoken, not having ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... the age o' man Threescore and ten, perchance, may be; She's ninety-four. Let them who can, Explain the incongruity. She should hae lived afore the flood— She's come o' patriarchal blood, She's some auld Pagan mummified ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Goldthwaite had been jointly known to the commercial world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had prospered wonderfully and become one of the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... face towards Johnny's bed, to fortify himself with a view of the ark, and fell asleep. Over most of the beds, the toys were yet grouped as the children had left them when they last laid themselves down, and, in their innocent grotesqueness and incongruity, they might have stood ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... compositions in the English language, which convey a more lively and favourable display of the magnificence of fable, of language, and of action, proper to that style of composition. Amid the splendid ornaments of the structure we lose sight of occasional disproportion and incongruity; and, at an early age particularly, there are few poems which make a more deep impression upon the imagination, than the Conquest ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... now proposes to govern Ireland through the Ancient Order of Hibernians. You object: so do we. Why not unite and get rid of the English? They are the real difficulty; their presence here the real incongruity." ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... see a smile struggling about the mouth of the major, which I was then too young, and I may add, too American, to understand. The incongruity of the wife of a man of two thousand, or five and twenty hundred dollars a-year, wearing two years' income round her neck, or of being magnificent in only one item of her dress, household, or manner of living, never occurred to my mind. We can all laugh when we read of Indian chiefs ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the stern of the boat, muffled up to the eyes, and betokening by their attitude the hopeless despair and misery which seize the southern fair the moment they embark in so much as a ferry boat. The fore part of the heavy craft was piled up with trunks and other impedimenta of a feminine incongruity. A single boatman had rowed the boat from the shore, guiding it into mid-stream, and there describing a circle calculated to insure a gentle approach on the lee side. This man, having laid aside his oars, now stood, boathook in hand, awaiting the inevitable crash. The offending ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... into [Greek: ta genemata mou kai ta agatha mou], because [Greek: ta genemata mou] is found in Western documents. The logic is strange, but as Dr. Hort has claimed it, we must perhaps allow him to have intended to include with this strange incongruity some though not many Substitutions in his class of instances, only that we should like to know definitely what substitutions were to be comprised in this class. For I shrewdly suspect that there were actually none. Omissions ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... making a practical application of the new doctrine, the people of the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracy and slavery. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... accidental. The hand of chance has been merciful, that is all; and if you would fully understand New York's self-conscious love of incongruity it is elsewhere that you must look. Walk along the Riverside Drive, framed by nature to be, what an enthusiast has called it, "the finest residential avenue in the world." Turn your back to the houses, and contemplate the noble beauty of the Hudson River. Look from the terrace of ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants. However completely she may be subject to her master, and however inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... were always of a meek and submissive character, but her voice, her look, her gestures were those of a queen. The Doctor felt this, but hardly its incongruity, as she slowly resumed her seat and signed to him ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... The incongruity of the Esher organization had, it may be mentioned, been well illustrated by an episode that occurred very shortly after the reconstitution of the War Office had been carried into effect in the spring of 1904. Under the distribution of duties then laid down, my section of the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the equator for the second time. I had the sense of incongruity which all have when, for the first time, they find themselves living under an entire change of seasons; as, crossing the line under a burning sun in the midst ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... older philosophers were great and awful; and they had the charm of antiquity. Something which found a response in his own mind seemed to have been lost as well as gained in the Socratic dialectic. He felt no incongruity in the veteran Parmenides correcting the youthful Socrates. Two points in his criticism are especially deserving of notice. First of all, Parmenides tries him by the test of consistency. Socrates is willing to assume ideas or principles of the just, the beautiful, ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... commonly rejected those against which the general voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own incongruity immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the author himself would desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have given the highest approbation, by inserting the offered reading in the text; part I have left to the judgment of the reader, as doubtful, though specious; and part ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... in those days, between debasing credulity and wholesome light. We are so sensible of the new air that breathes impalpably over the book, that when the old theological fancies appear for form's sake, and are solemnly marshalled in orthodox state, the contrast and the incongruity are so marked that one is amused by what looks like a subtle irony, mocking the censor under his very eyes. Who can help smiling at the grave question, Adam, le premier de tous les hommes, a-t-il ete philosophe? Such disputes as whether it is proper ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... excuse of some kind must be offered the country, and such flimsy pretexts as the necessity of upholding the sanctity of international law are difficult to get away with. The Chinese press is full of the incongruity of the situation, and ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... never wanted to accept, even from my own country, any reward of this kind. It would be a monstrous incongruity if I should receive from the hands of Peru that which I refused to receive from the ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... combination altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in themselves irresistible. They reach at ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... strange feeling of the incongruity of this declaration of passion with his surroundings, the stuffy unhomelike chambers on King Street, and the rather severe presence of a man, whose existence emphasized all the hated social distinction that never weighed so heavily on him as at present. This ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... innumerable amendments were put on by Senators on both sides of the chamber... to give the Committee of Conference a chance to think of the matter, and they are all adopted, whatever may be their language or the incongruity with other parts of ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... She could sit and think of the strangeness of her own life, and its extraordinary inequalities. What could clash more discordantly than this moment and a memory of a month ago that rushed into her mind for no apparent reason but to make a parade of its own incongruity. Do you remember that brilliant dress of Madame Pontet that she tried on at Park Lane, with "the usual tight armhole"? That dress had figured as a notable achievement of the modiste's art, worthy of its wearer's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Baudet Harenc, of Chalons, found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact by painting him as a ruthless robber of birds'-nests. But a great many boys who began life by robbing birds'-nests have ended it much more creditably. The astonishing and interesting element in Benedict Arnold's career was what one might term the anomaly and incongruity of his treason. Born at Norwich, Conn., in 1741, he was blessed from his earliest years by wholesome parental influences. The education which he received was an excellent one, considering his colonial ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... form—interesting stories full of edification for those who can understand but not to be taken as a narrative of facts. At other times he simply states the ultimate facts of a case and leaves them in their droll incongruity. Thus when King Ajatasattu was moved and illuminated by his teaching, he observed to his disciples that His Majesty had all the makings of a saint in him, if only he had not killed that excellent man his own ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... were opened, and Reist stepped out. He looked about him at the bare walls, the stone floor, and shrugged his shoulders. Erlito was none too well lodged then—soldiering had brought him some brief fame, but little else. Then he suddenly smiled. The incongruity of the thing was ridiculous. His sense of humour, by no means a characteristic trait of the man, was touched. The smile lingered upon his lips. He had come to offer a kingdom ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... exaggerated lamentations whenever anything was the matter with her. But even on these occasions she defied what she called "coddling." Once I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort of incongruity very characteristic of her, "Oh! none of your hot bottles for me!" In her last hours of consciousness she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the flame behind screens because she threatened ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the impressiveness which always belongs to the narration of an eye-witness, whether in the body or in the spirit, of the scenes which he describes. There was something, too, in the stern horror with which the man related these things, and in the incongruity of his description, with the vulgarly received notions of the great place of punishment, and of its presiding spirit, which struck my mind with awe, almost with fear. At length he said, with an expression of horrible, imploring earnestness, which I shall ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... know if you and your mother will not come in and eat a Christmas dinner with us to-morrow. We live in the plainest way, and cannot entertain in the ordinary acceptation of the term. We only ask you to our ordinary home-dinner," he added, with a sudden sense of the incongruity between the atmosphere of refined elegance which pervaded Mercy's simple, little room, and the expression which all his efforts had never been able to banish ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity: for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... her, it is not so much incongruity of features, as a crying contrast between the dress and the face, the head and the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... associate of his, whose views on this point agree with his own so entirely. It is the height of the hope and the lowness of the having—it is the height of the words and the lowness of the matter, that makes the incongruity here. That is the soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. It is the height of 'the style' that 'gives us cause to climb in the merriment' that makes the subject of this essay. It is literature in general that is laughed at here, and the branches of it in particular. It is the old books ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... (who is mentioned in line 38) is Osiris, it does not do away with the fact that he was regarded as a being entirely different from the "god of the city" and that he was of sufficient importance to have one line of the "Confession" devoted to him. The Egyptian saw no incongruity in setting references to the "gods" side by side with allusions to a god whom we cannot help identifying with the Supreme Being and the Creator of the world; his ideas and beliefs have, in consequence, ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... was lighted by a broad arched window crowded full of diamond-shaped glass, tinted through and through by the bloom and glow of a conservatory within. In short the mansion was a picturesque incongruity utterly indescribable, and yet one of the most interesting old ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... me," she said abruptly. "You ought to be dancing instead of wasting your time on old ladies like me." Here there was a burst of mirth at the incongruity of the words with Miss Jinny's ferocious masculine aspect, but she silenced it with a wave of her hookah stem. "Let me introduce the Second Calendar, who I hope knows enough respectable young men here to see that you aren't ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... preferable, at the hazard of some injustice, to revert to the summary process of barbarism? Can it be right, that a magistrate shall be empowered to incarcerate a man for months, while he is debarred from pronouncing definitively on his guilt or innocence? There is an incongruity in all this, of which savages might be ashamed. We trust that the time is approaching when a better system will be established. Consolatory is it to consider, that in various countries of Europe, as well as in America, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and the incongruity of the word as applied to such a passion as mine did not vex or wound me; ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... on his side ruefully. It was his fixed belief that, because he did not get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat. Paul looked at his father's thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails, rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongruity struck him. It seemed strange they were ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Rolfe imagined her the most selfish of women, thought her incapable of sentiment; yet how was her marriage to be accounted for, save by supposing that she fell in love with Hugh Carnaby? Such a woman might surely have sold herself to great advantage; and yet—odd incongruity—she did not impress one as socially ambitious. Her mother, the ever-youthful widow, sped from assembly to assembly, unable to live save in the whirl of fashion; not so Sibyl. Was she too proud, too self-centred? And what ambition did ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... married couple. The room looked as if it had been decorated the day before for a twentieth-century Madame de Pompadour. But, if the background was almost archaeological, the atmosphere was absolutely modern. In this incongruity was ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... lap, with not a tense ligament, not a throbbing fibre—delicate, beautiful hands—it seemed odd to her companions to think how they had seen her wring them in woe and clench them in despair. Her black gown with its heavy folds of crape had an element of incongruity with that still, assured, resolved presence, expressing so cheerful a poise, so confident a control of circumstance. She did not expend herself in protest when at ten o'clock they besought her to go to bed, to be called should the telephone-bell ring. Her negation was so definite ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the year 436 after the fall of Troy; nevertheless the common story retained as the founder of Rome the grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. Cato, who like a good financier checked the calculation, no doubt drew attention in this instance to the incongruity; but he does not appear to have proposed any mode of getting over the difficulty—the list of the Alban kings, which was afterwards inserted with this view, certainly did not proceed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have been surprised at any incongruity in the brief ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... banquet; if in the Scriptures or elsewhere we should find a banquet denominated a marriage feast, while from the circumstances it appeared that no marriage had taken place, we should experience no difficulty in explaining the apparent incongruity. But in this case there is no reason for adopting the exceptional, and the strongest reason for retaining what is confessedly the ordinary and natural signification of the term. The conception of the Redeemer ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... associations in his mind that he went on ruminating them for a long, long time. As he turned from the window he felt he had never seen anything more complete of its sort. The one feature that struck him with a sense of incongruity was a small Irish yew, thin and black, which stood out like an outpost of the shrubbery, through which the maze was approached. That, he thought, might as well be away: the wonder was that anyone should have thought it would ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... furnishings were similar to those in New England; but there were greater contrasts in table appointments. There was more silver, and richer food; but the negro servants were so squalid, clumsy, and uncouth that the incongruity made the meals very surprising and, at ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... of these priest-dominated ancestors of ours is amazing. They were like children in the hands of unscrupulous teachers. In reading these old chronicles it is impossible not to be shocked by the incongruity ever arising out of the juxtaposition of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Lord Orrery; wherein Betterton, Harris, and Ianthe's parts are most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most full of height and raptures of wit and sense, that ever I heard; having but one incongruity, or what did, not please me in it, that is, that King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their Mistresse, Princesse Katherine of France, more than when it comes to it he seems to do; and Tudor refused by her with some kind ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... that Bacon, for the sake of some five or six pounds, toiled at refashioning old plays, and handed the fair manuscripts to Shakespeare, who passed them off, among the actors who knew him intimately, as his own. THEY detected no incongruity between the player who was their Johannes Factotum and the plays which he gave in to the manager. They seemed to be just the kind of work which Shakespeare would be likely to write. BE LIKELY TO WRITE, but 'the father of the rest,' Mr. Smith, believed that Shakespeare ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... avail. His replies to their questions had been brief, though gravely courteous, and in the Latin tongue. The purity of his speech, his cultivated manners, his reticence, served to stimulate their curiosity the more. Such as observed him closely were struck by an incongruity between his demeanor, which had the ease and grace of a patrician, and certain points of his person. Thus his arms were disproportionately long; and when, to steady himself against the motion of the vessel, he took hold of anything near by, the size of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Red Riding-Hood we preferred to use the German ending, as it leaves a far happier impression on the minds of the children than the accepted English version. The incongruity of the wolf's swallowing whole the grandmother and child does not destroy the child's enjoyment of the story, while the happy release of both grandmother and little ...
— A Primary Reader - Old-time Stories, Fairy Tales and Myths Retold by Children • E. Louise Smythe
... the versicle, "Give peace in our time, O Lord," and the response, "Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God," to be "a very infelicitous non-sequitur." For correcting this palpable incongruity, the authors of The Book Annexed have been sharply criticised here at home. What were they that they should have presumed to disturb ancient Anglican precedent in such a point? If we could not understand why the God of battles, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Johnson affirmed, to praise a book than to read and understand it. The custom of reading to a congregation in a dead or foreign language, which the listeners do not understand, has never caused any general protest from the listeners. The scoffers are the only ones who have ever noticed the incongruity, and they do not count, since they probably would not ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the maple laid on a cold and whitish stone, and lips that had already begun to recede from the teeth, made a sad, sad picture, truly, to look upon at such a moment; yet, of all present, Mary Pratt alone felt the fullness of the incongruity, and alone bethought her of the unreasonableness of encouraging feelings like those which were now uppermost in the deacon's breast. Even minister Whittle had a curiosity to know how much was added ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a third raison d'etre for this facsimile, which to name with approbation will no doubt seem impiety to many, but which, as a personal predilection, I venture to risk—there is no Cotton! The relation between Walton and Cotton is a charming incongruity to contemplate, and one stands by their little fishing-house in Dovedale as before an altar of friendship. Happy and pleasant in their lives, it is good to see them still undivided in their deaths—but, to my mind, their association between the boards ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... The crass incongruity of her in that setting smote him with renewed force. Young, beautiful, dainty, brilliant and graceful in her pretty evening gown, she figured strangely against the gloomy background of the river, in those dull and mean surroundings of dank ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the heart of a crowd which pressed upon him so that many must have come into bodily contact with him, he knew that some one had touched him with special intent. No perplexity arises from the difference between the accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied myself concerning them. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my efforts to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from them. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Corliss and the company at Antelope Station, and in two more days were at Yuma City. By this time, the Southern Pacific Railroad had been built as far as Yuma, and a bridge thrown across the Colorado at this point. It seemed an incongruity. And how burning hot the cars looked, standing there in the ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... playing, I stopped thinking. For I had to keep time in my brain with the beat of the tune. And so, at last, since I couldn't think, or remember, I fell asleep. The gramophone saved me"; and again Joan was smitten by the incongruity of Stella with her life. She had eaten of all that nature allots to women—love, marriage, the birth of children, the loss of them—and there she was, to this day half-child, and quite incompatible with what ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... these duties as formerly, without consent of parliament, and even increasing them at pleasure, was such an incongruity in a free constitution, where the people by their fundamental privileges cannot be taxed but by their own consent, as could no longer be endured by these jealous patrons of liberty. In the preamble, therefore, to the bill by which the commons granted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which held what was left of her father's clothes without any feeling of incongruity. There were four shirts of checked oxford shirting, two pairs of long stockings, a corduroy jacket, and his best suit of black serge bound with braid round the coat. There was a revolver, too, a clasp knife, a unused church-warden, an old wide-awake hat. To-morrow she would write to the ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... actions of moral agents, we have both a perception of the understanding and a feeling of the heart;' but that this feeling of the heart, while partly instinctive, is mainly a sense of congruity and incongruity in actions. The author therefore allows something to innate sense, but differs from Shaftesbury, who makes the whole a matter of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... other. Then all along the floor there are sculptured monuments of ancient warriors armed to the teeth in marble representations of iron and steel, while the walls are adorned with rich paintings of immense magnitude, representing scenes in the life of the Savior. There seemed to Mr. George some incongruity between the reverence evinced for the teachings and example of Jesus, in the pictures above, and the honor paid to the barbarous valor of the fighting old barons, in the monuments and effigies ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... bombi, (as they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan and Roman theatres,) that they could not protect themselves from dying in the very moment of their birth,—laying together all these considerations, we see the incongruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than their own tenure ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Christianity has proclaimed it and clung to it from the very beginning. But it has been interwoven with traditional forms which are now seen through by so many as pictorial ideas of epochs and times. Earlier times could allow the Essence and the Form to coalesce without discovering any incongruity in this. But the [p.205] time for doing this has irrevocably passed away. The human which once seemed to bring the Spiritual and Divine so near to man has now become a burden and a hindrance to him. A keener analysis, a more independent development of the Spiritual ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... laughed together at the incongruity of rehearsing those dainty rites of old Japan in the over-furnished sitting-room at the Imperial Hotel, with Geoffrey sitting back in his arm-chair and puffing at ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... errands of duty and pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... with recent controversies, but which is well worthy of being borne in mind, as teaching us to beware of hastily assuming that objections to Revelation, whether suggested by the progress of science, or from the supposed incongruity of its own contents, are unanswerable. We are not, he says, rashly to suppose that we have arrived at the true meaning of the whole of that book. 'It is not at all incredible that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... There is no incongruity in the idea that in the very earliest period of man's habitation of this world he made a friend and companion of some sort of aboriginal representative of our modern dog, and that in return for its aid in protecting him from ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... false in two ways, for Defoe's ears were not clipped, though he was condemned to stand in the pillory; and there can hardly be a greater incongruity conceived than there is between our idea of a dunce and the energetic, shifty, wide-awake Defoe,—though for that matter a scholar like Bentley and a wit like Colley Cibber are as much out of place in the poet's ill-natured catalogue. Defoe ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... The incongruity of his manner of life was patent to all who saw. The mountaineers around him recognized it, but they attributed it to the fact of his being a foreigner. The more cultivated folk realized that a man of the world who bore ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... perceived that wealth did not increase in proportion to industrial capacity, even when production and trade were, as Smith demanded, freed from State interference and injury. He hit upon the expedient of finding the cause of this incongruity in the nature of labour itself. Since labour is the only source of value, he said, it cannot increase value. A thing is worth as much as the quantity of labour put into it; consequently, when with increasing productiveness of labour the amount of labour necessary to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Shelby, "but no sort of a heroine for that yarn you two fellows are spinning. I'm no author, but I'm an architect, and I can see the incongruity." ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... lace, while the rest of his dress consisted of the plaid and philabeg. Duncan superintended a district which was partly Highland, partly Lowland, and therefore might be supposed to combine their national habits, in order to show his impartiality to Trojan or Tyrian. The incongruity, however, had a whimsical and ludicrous effect, as it made his head and body look as if belonging to different individuals; or, as some one said who had seen the executions of the insurgent prisoners in ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... red-emblazoned newspapers which are yellow; you call your politicians public servants who are your masters, and you call your women the masters, but will not let them vote. Why, then, should you be so surprised at any seeming incongruity in others?" ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... of the franking system are far more serious than the pecuniary expense, although that is by no means undeserving of regard. It is not only an ensnaring prerogative to those who enjoy it, and an anomaly and incongruity in our republican institutions, but it is an oppressive burden upon the post-office, which ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... be not so much what this type is, as its fitness to the context of our mind. It is like a word in a poem, more effective by its fitness than by its intrinsic beauty, although that is requisite too. We can be shocked at an incongruity of natures more than we can be pleased by the intrinsic beauty of each nature apart, so long, that is, as they remain abstract natures, objects recognized without being studied. The aesthetic dignity of the form, then, tells us the kind of beauty we ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Thrackles had a number of volumes of very cheap love stories. Pulz had brought some extraordinary garish detective stories. The others contributed sensational literature with paper covers adorned lithographically. By the usual incongruity a fragment of The Marble Faun was included in the collection. The Nigger has his copy of Duvall on Alchemy. I haven't the slightest idea where ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the bad influence it must have had upon all emotions of reverence for the name and attributes of the Divine Being, and the natural effect of profane swearing, to "harden a' within," we might marvel at the utter folly and incongruity of making swearing accompany every expression of anger or surprise, or of using oaths as mere expletives in common discourse. A quaint anecdote, descriptive of such senseless ebullition, I have from a friend who mentioned ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... humor by introducing into our writing the slightest possible exaggeration which will result in the slightest possible incongruity. Of course this presupposes that we understand the facts in a most thorough and delicate way. Our language is not precisely representative of things as they are, but it proves better than any other language that we know just ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The Winter's Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" but not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... world. And Father Roland had invited him to enter it. That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... people, was not quite in the style of the present decade, and he read Carlyle and Emerson more than Herbert Spencer. His creed had, therefore, quite transcendentalism enough to accommodate without incongruity ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... Mr. W. S. Gilbert had this in his mind when, in 'Patience,' he pictured the processes by which to manufacture a heavy dragoon; but here, again, the design is too obvious, the incongruity a little too apparent. The late Shirley Brooks extracted much fun out of a mosaic of quotations ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... Further back still, Joe knew, were emergency facilities. Two men by contemporary usage were going to be allowed to butcher each other, but moments after, all the facilities of modern medical science were going to be at their disposal. Joe felt a wry twinge of humor at the incongruity ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... illustrates our sheeplike habit of expressing ourselves in the familiar phrase or popular slang of the day that at the instant the only thing King could think of to send was this: "Hold the fort, for I am coming." The incongruity of this made him smile, and he did not write it. Finally he composed this message, which seemed to him to have a businesslike and innocent aspect: "Too late. Impossible for me to change. Have invested ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... truants, and when under probation, after having fallen into the hands of the police two or three times, he impersonated a policeman. The latter was such a remarkable occurrence and led to such a peculiar situation that much notice of it was taken in the newspapers. The incongruity between apperception of his own faults and his continued lying, considering his good mental endowment, seemed very strange. One day he sobbed and clung to my arm and begged me to be a friend to him and help him from telling ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"—there is in the original, between each act, a mysterious "mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of somewhat cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... savagery in all parts of the world, and that the first literary generations into whose poetic myths those stories were transferred, being as much accustomed to them as to other surroundings of their childhood, such as bloody sacrifices, mystic expiations, and fantastic initiations, saw no incongruity in anything told them of the gods. Besides, as those wild myths were associated with sacred rites, the inveterate conservatism of religion, which insisted on stone knives in sacrifices long after bronze and iron came in, was likely enough to maintain the divine importance ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... than decreased from day to day. Instead of becoming familiar with the transformation, the wonder of it evidently grew on her. The girl's old, buoyant spirits, which had returned in full flow, seemed to shock and pain her mother with a sense of incongruity she could not get over. When Madeline treated her lover to an exhibition of her old imperious tyrannical ways, which to see again was to him sweeter than the return of day, her mother appeared frightened, and would ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... approached, his eyes fastened themselves on his father's companion. With amazement, he recognised the queer figure of the lanky, gangling Droom; but too kind-hearted and well-bred to allow his features in the slightest degree to express the astonishment which he felt at sight of such a comic incongruity, the young man voiced a few kindly words to the old man, while from the table in the alcove, where the smart, little supper party were seating themselves, Miss Cable was smiling her cheery recognition to her prospective father-in-law; ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... results from this imperfect view of the ligament, to demonstrate the incongruity and untenableness of a doctrine which should assign the indications of different functions, exercises and propensities of the mind to the exterior surface of the scull or the brain. This is quackery, and is to be classed with chiromancy, augury, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... species of elephant living on aquatic plants, and reaching the height of twelve feet. The mammoth was another elephant, and supposed to have survived till comparatively recent times. The megatherium is an incongruity of nature, of gigantic proportions, yet ranking in a much humbler order than the elephant, that of the edenta, to which the sloth, ant-eater, and armadilla belong. The megatherium had a skeleton of enormous solidity, with an armour-clad body, and five toes, terminating ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... almost comic in its incongruity with what actually is. The mere thought of these protagonists of the century working in harmony to one great purpose, without distrust of each other's motives, and with no necessity for anyone's dodging political foul play, summons the smile of irony. Mutual trust was never so much a suggestion ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... to the next carriage, the train having started, and left us to reflect on the incongruity of an ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... [Transcriber's note: "Izaak" in Index] Walton, {44} even though we have no means of proving that these were actually his handiwork; but as a friend of Casaubon's son, and a namesake and admirer of the father, there is no incongruity in associating ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... are these everlasting borrowings of yours!' exclaimed his aunt, unaware of a trifling incongruity in her sentiments. 'You must speak to him without—pay him by-and-by. We must scrape the money together. I will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and the smile transformed his face. He looked suddenly years younger, and an almost boyish recklessness and irresolution appeared in his face. He flung himself into a chair with a gesture which was bewildering from its incongruity with his general appearance. He leaned his head back, flung one leg over the other, and looked ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal Exposition at Paris—so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express ground that the legislative ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... quietly, as such transactions were habitually managed among people of their kind. It seemed grotesque to introduce melodrama into their little world of unruffled Sybarites, and he felt inclined, now, to smile at the incongruity of his gesture.... But suddenly his eyes filled with tears. The future without Susy was unbearable, inconceivable. Why, after all, should they separate? At the question, her soft face seemed close to his, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... primitive form; however, finally, the Attic dialect may not have assumed all its more marked and distinguishing characteristics—still it is difficult to suppose that the language, particularly in the joinings and transitions, and connecting parts, should not more clearly betray the incongruity between the more ancient and modern forms of expression. It is not quite in character with such a period to imitate an antique style, in order to piece out an imperfect poem in the character of the original, as Sir Walter Scott has done in his ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... incorrect: I knew that at that season he was not likely to be called away on business, and he had given me no reason to suppose he was enjoying himself; and as I walked with him to the gate I am afraid I was only stiffly polite. Our spirits rose after his departure. Anita said she had found him an incongruity, and I was tired of the spectacle of a purse-proud man trying to appear like other people. But if I were harsh in my judgment of him I was speedily punished. On the third day after he left I received a message from Baxter, who wanted to see me at Baldwin's ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... Then came supper, and the evening closed with hot cockles and blind-hoodman—the latter being blindman's buff. And among all the company, to none but John and Isoult Avery did it ever occur that in these occupations there was the least incongruity with the Sabbath day. For they only were Gospellers; and at that time the Gospellers alone remembered to keep it holy. Rome strikes her pen through the third and fourth commandments, if less notoriously, yet quite as really, as ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Katie anew: the incongruity of choosing so well-regulated a place for the performance of so disorderly an act as the taking of one's life. Choosing army headquarters as the place in which to desert from the army of life! Such an infringement of discipline as seeking self-destruction in that ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... committee met, every one discovered his incongruity with the rest. Each was disposed to treat Ginx's Baby in a different way—in other words, each wished to reflect the views of his particular sect on the object of their charity. They were a new "Evangelical Alliance," agreed ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... if the seeming incongruity, multiplicity and heterogeneity of human qualities have baffled you, remember that this is exactly how the print in all books and newspapers baffled you before ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... afterwards, when all her leisure hours were occupied with the contemplation and consideration of her own presents, Willy had been perfectly contented to let things go on in the old way, or any way, but now the incongruity of Mrs. Cliff's present mode of living, and the probable amount of her fortune, began to impress itself ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... The incongruity of the word was enough to make one jump out of the chair. Striking! That girl striking! Stri . . .! But Renouard restrained his feelings. His friend was not a person to give oneself away to. And, after all, this sort of speech was what he had come there to hear. As, however, he had made a movement ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence. The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius. It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, that ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... God knows. But never mind. I should have spoken—once; should have said the great Word for which the World since the evening and the morning of the First Day has listened. God knows. God knows. What a whirl is this? Monstrous incongruity. Philosophy and fighting troopers. The Infinite and dead horses. There's humour for you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... The incongruity between the ideas of honor which make women so great, and the errors in conduct which are forced upon them by the constitution of society, had thrown Eugene's thoughts into confusion; he uttered soothing and consoling words, and wondered at the beautiful woman ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... work and meals were finished, the 'pu,' or war conch, was sounded from the back veranda and the front, so that it might be heard by all. I don't think it ever occurred to us that there was any incongruity in the use of the war conch for the peaceful invitation to prayer. In response to its summons the white members of the family took their usual places in one end of the large hall, while the Samoans - men, women, ...
— A Lowden Sabbath Morn • Robert Louis Stevenson
... days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,—the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... overloaded with abortions and embryos. Another faction of the reformers incline to drama written in both prose and verse, as Shakespeare composed it. This method has its advantages. There might, however, be some incongruity in the transitions from one form to the other; and when a tissue is homogeneous it is much stouter. However, whether the drama should be written in prose is only a secondary question. The rank of a work is certain to be fixed, not according to its form, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... back on her heels. She had slipped her bared arms into the armholes of the sleeveless white "fluff-and-flimsy" evening frock, and the "sparklers" of the low-cut bodice now framed her blue-print clad shoulders with an astonishing effect of incongruity. "I have a wonderful inspiration. Let's ask Jeannette out here for a visit—an object-lesson as to the state of life whereunto the country cousins have been called. She hasn't seen me in ten years, and all I remember of her is a fluffy, yellow-haired girl with a sniffly cold in her head. What ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... buckle them on again and rush out to do battle for the Fatherland between the courses, the other guests only looked upon these weapons in the light of sticks and umbrellas, and possessed their souls in peace. And when, added to this singular incongruity, many of these warriors were spectacled, studious men, and, despite their lethal weapons, wore a slightly professional air, and were—to a man—deeply sentimental and singularly simple, their attitude in this eternal Kriegspiel seemed to the consul ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... that citizenship was precipitated upon the Negro before he was fit for its exercise. Without discussing the incongruity of this, when applied to the ignorant native Negro and not to the ignorant alien emigrant, it may be conceded that keeping them in abject bondage with no opportunity to protest, made slavery anything ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... aid of the academy of compliments. The master himself, suiting the action to the word, occasionally started up, and making some pas, as an illustrative example, with his heels flying in the air, was certainly in a state of signal incongruity with his aspect, which, when seated, was that of a steady-looking banker's clerk ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... maintained a dignified and critical reserve. When the President of the Board of Trade, in full court costume, appeared upon the scene, in the midst of the very realistic long-haired sea-ladies, the audience was half shocked for a moment by the utter incongruity of the situation; but after a while they began to discover that the incongruity was part of the joke, and they laughed quietly a sedate and moderate laugh of suspended judgment. As the Progenitor had predicted, the gods were ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen |
