"Tautology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or prose-works, that—pardon our tautology—are popular with the people. The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... his life repeating the same thought in different words? and why should we be more lenient to the parrot-painter who has learned one lesson from the page of nature, and keeps stammering it out with eternal repetition without turning the leaf? Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and over again with lines, than it is with words? The teaching of nature is as varied and infinite as it is constant; and the duty of the painter is to watch for every one of her lessons, and to give (for human life will admit of nothing more) those in which ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... self-denial in his pleasures? What a stock of lively recollections? It is curious that Shakespeare has ridiculed in Justice Shallow, who was 'in some authority under the king', that disposition to unmeaning tautology which is the regal infirmity of later times, and which, it may be supposed, he acquired from talking to his cousin Silence, and ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... moralized in a letter to the Bishop, "who care for religion. 'Tis necessary, therefore, for us to take the greater heed for Christianity. We must lose our all, if need be, in order to do our duty; in fine," added he, with his usual tautology, "it is right that a man should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... heir should in a word or two understand his father's meaning, and hold ten acres of land by half-an-acre of parchment. Nay, I hope to see the time when that there is indeed some progress made in, shall be wholly affected; and by the improvement of the noble art of tautology, every Inn in Holborn an Inn of Court. Let others think of logic, rhetoric, and I know not what impertinence, but mind thou tautology. What's the first excellence in a lawyer? Tautology. What's ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... erat: the Platonic [Greek: en], was, as we said. In ratione et disserendo: an instance of Cicero's fondness for tautology, cf. D.F. I. 22 quaerendi ac disserendi. Quamquam oriretur: the sentence is inexact, it is knowledge which takes its rise in the senses, not the criterion of truth, which is the mind itself; cf. however II. 30 and n. Iudicium: the constant translation of [Greek: kriterion], a ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... if I walked straight away." But he looked again, and could not help looking more than many times again, so piercing (as an ancient poet puts it) is the shaft from the eyes of the female women. And Insie was especially a female girl—which has now ceased to be tautology—so feminine were her walk, and way, and sudden ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... MR. COLLIER says that the passage, "dangerous, unsafe lunes i' the king," is mere tautology, and therefore he follows the old corrector in substituting "unsane lunes." Now it strikes me that there is quite as much tautology in "unsane lunes" as in the double epithet, "dangerous, unsafe." It is, in fact, equivalent to "insane madness;" and, moreover, drags in quite ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various |
