"Self-contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... So comprehensive and self-contradictory a scheme would seem to indicate an elasticity of principle and a fertility of resource not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... insist upon the fact that we cannot but conceive space as infinite employ a very similar argument to prove their point. They set us a self-contradictory task, and regard our failure to accomplish it as proof of their position. Thus, Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856) argues: "We are altogether unable to conceive space as bounded—as finite; that is, as a whole beyond which there is no further space." And Herbert ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... necessary existence, whether in the world as its part, or outside of it as its cause. Proof. Of unconditionally necessary existence within the world there can be none. The assumption of a first unconditioned link in the chain of cosmical conditions is self-contradictory. For such link or cause, being in time, must be subject to the law of all temporal existence, and so be determined—contrary to the original assumption—by another link or cause ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea: ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he sees there the precept, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and also this injunction, "Thou shalt buy them for a possession," and "They shall be your bondmen forever;" but although this looks very "anomalous" to him, he dare not pronounce it absurd or self-contradictory. It is true, he declares, that slavery is condemned always and everywhere by "the plainest dictates of natural justice;" but yet, although, according to his own admission,[148] it was instituted by Heaven, he has found out a method to save the character ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... free as before, but he binds himself either under a wider obligation to do or abstain, where he was not bound before, or under a stronger obligation where he was bound already. Nevertheless Rousseau finds a means of accomplishing the impossible and the self-contradictory. "Each of us puts into a common stock his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we receive in our turn the offering of the rest, each member as an inseparable part of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... after all previous explanations of the principles of duty, so far as it is derived from pure reason, it was still possible to reduce it again to a doctrine of happiness; in such a way, however, that a certain moral happiness not resting on empirical causes was ultimately arrived at, a self-contradictory nonentity. In fact, when the thinking man has conquered the temptations to vice, and is conscious of having done his (often hard) duty, he finds himself in a state of peace and satisfaction which may well be called ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... to Mass? And you say: "fathers are blind." Here is a self-contradictory individual. One can see plainly that you are not a father, or you would alter your theories. Hang it! You can't say I am enchanted at it, but you must put yourself in a man's place. She is a child, who leaves school, mark that well, where she was obliged, compelled to ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... reference to supporting his family—where shall we ever stop? We can never catch up with goodness. It is always promising to disclose itself a little way beyond, and then evading us, slipping from under our fingers just when we are about to touch it. This meaning of goodness is self-contradictory. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... such gods are not infrequently represented as men who have gone up to the sky; this is a natural way of accounting for their superterrestrial abode. Savage conceptions of the origin and history of such figures are usually vague, and their theologies fluctuating and self-contradictory; but there are two points as to which opinion is firm: the god is like men in everything except power, and his functions are universal. He represents not a monotheistic creed (which takes the whole world as the domain of God), but a narrow tribal acceptance of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy |
