"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that first reached us through the newspapers was meagre and contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother left us no room for doubt. The sickness was in the city. The hospitals were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the stricken place by every steamboat. The unsettled state of my father's affairs made it imperative for ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been more ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... think most likely, hardly ever comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world, which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration—'It did not weigh as much as I expected, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... nearly an hour, of the most contradictory character; some one passion was trying to overcome the other; but he seemed ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... had to represent, with counters the contradictory to "no Cakes are new", which would be "some Cakes are new", or, putting letters for words, "some Cakes are x", how ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... queer sicht for a guid omen. It's unco strange hoo fowk 'll mix up God an' chance, seein' there could hardly be twa mair contradictory ideas! I min' ance hearin' a ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... short time ago from Stockholm, and did not contain any thing of importance, but that matters stand well. The German mail has not come, and, in general, the news was so contradictory that nobody knew what ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... lives in reasoning against reason. In short, Count Kostia respected nothing but facts, and believed that, properly viewed, there was nothing else, and that the universe, considered as an entirety, was but a collection of contradictory accidents. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... he warned his contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the classic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine; they perished by the sword or at the stake." We have a letter, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... determined to unite in one body all the rules of law, whatever may have been their origin, and in the year 528, appointed ten jurisconsults, among whom was the celebrated Tribonian, to select and arrange the imperial constitutions, leaving out what was obsolete or useless or contradictory, and to make such alterations as the circumstances required. This was called the Code, divided into twelve books, and comprising the constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. This was published in fourteen ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... faint, acrid, sinister music if the French poet had led a sensible life? Cruel question of the dilettante for whom the world, all its splendor, all its art, is but a spectacle. It is needless to continue, the list is too large; too large and too contradictory. The Variations of Genius would be as profound and as vast a book as Lord Acton's projected History of Human Thought. The truth is that genius is the sacrificial goat of humanity; through some inexplicable transposition genius bears the burdens of mankind; afflicted by the burden of the flesh ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... peculiarly dependent on the weather. It is not easy to lay down a law governing this postulate, which, indeed, may be scoffed at by the superficial reasoner, and the progression from cause to effect is often obscured by contradictory facts. For instance, a fine summer means a good harvest, much traveling, the prolongation of holiday periods, a free circulation of money, and the consequent enhanced prosperity and happiness of millions of men and women. But there are more suicides in June and July than in December and ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... completely reverse his nature, so to speak. I do not think this is true at all. Unselfishness naturally and necessarily springs out of selfishness, and, in the deepest sense of the word, is not at all contradictory to that. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... of the relation and attitude toward psychic material of the consistent physiologist, who refuses to deal in contradictory terms, would lead us a little too far. So would the reconciliation between the claims of mind and the concept of the organism as a system of chemical reactions. The most fundamental aspects of that herculean task, warned by the sign, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Talcott drew out contradictory statements from these witnesses, and proved several alibis at points where Harold had been accused. He produced Jack Burns and several others to prove that Harold liked fun, but that he was not inclined to lead in any ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... years the Greeks were the principal representatives, protectors, elaborators and explorers of Christianity. When the Greeks visited the Slav country with their divine message, the Slavs were heathens. Their heathenism was like a confusing dream. Nature stood before them with its contradictory forces. The primitive Slavs regarded all the forces of Nature encircling a human creature as being alive and stronger than this creature. All the forces, whether friendly or unfriendly to man, are man like, anthropomorphic, and none of ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... this member upon a bench, that member on a chair, a few on the tables. All contradictory opinions burst forth at once. In a corner some ex-leaders of "order" were scared at the possible triumph of the "Reds." In another the men of the Right surrounded the men of the Left, and asked them: "Are not ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Miss Caroline observed that she was always sure that Clement Underwood was a great humbug; whereupon, between the mother, daughter and curate, the popular version of the Marshlands Hall affair was narrated—or rather versions, for all were beautifully entangled and contradictory. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... embarrass the natives greatly. All their accounts were contradictory: one giving me to understand that Toby would be with me in a very short time; another that he did not know where he was; while a third, violently inveighing, against him, assured me that he had stolen away, and would never come back. It appeared to me, at the time, that in making these ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... head swims with it. I do not mind meeting accounts, which unpaid remind you of your distress, or paid serve to show you you have been throwing away money you would be glad to have back again. I do not mind the strange contradictory mode of papers hiding themselves that you wish to see, and others thrusting themselves into your hand to confuse and bewilder you. There is a clergyman's letter about the Scottish pronunciation, to which I ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Just because this is a little contradictory to what you have heard, I want to say that my experience has been this: I have an old nursery—well, there is a butternut in the row and also heartnut—Japs. One of those Japs has had the bunch disease for six or eight years. None of the others has been affected. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... required by the constitution of Indiana that is so extravagant as to have caused contradictory decisions in the courts. The constitution reads: "The General Assembly ... (shall) submit such amendment ... to the electors of the state, and if a majority of said electors shall ratify." This was interpreted ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... deeming that the most favourable side to attack, but the Duke of Burgundy, who nominally had the supreme command, and who was jealous of Vendome's reputation, countermanded this order; alleging that an impassable morass separated the two armies in that quarter. Those contradictory orders produced indecision in the French lines, and Marlborough, divining its cause, instantly took advantage of it. Judging with reason that the real attack of the enemy would be made on his left by their right, in front of the castle of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... returned and packed up not only her entire wardrobe, but the whole of her personal possessions. In the course of her walk there had come to her one of those curious contradictory impulses which are so characteristic of a woman's nature. Having poured out her heart in grief because Erskine had neither written nor followed her to town, she was now restlessly impatient to make ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... as sexual activity is regarded in a dualistic and contradictory light,—in which it is revealed either as the instrument by which men and women "cooperate with the Creator" to bring children into the world, on the one hand; and on the other, as the sinful instrument of self-gratification, lust and sensuality, there is bound to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... there have been inharmonious deductions, and many statements of a contradictory character. Some of the participants have criticised unfavorably the conduct of others, and a bitterness continuing through and after the war has been ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... process by which information is acquired, converted into intelligence, and made available to policymakers. Information is raw data from any source, data that may be fragmentary, contradictory, unreliable, ambiguous, deceptive, or wrong. Intelligence is information that has been collected, integrated, evaluated, analyzed, and interpreted. Finished intelligence is the final product of the Intelligence Cycle ready to be ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... apparently incompatible and mutually destructive faiths, each equally and self-evidently demonstrable, each equally necessary for salvation of any kind, and each equally entering into every thought and action of our whole lives, yet utterly contradictory and irreconcilable. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... deed, he replied he did not know, for he had never seen the man before: and when further questioned regarding the sum he had received, he declared it was but one pistole, but he had been promised five pistoles more when he should have done his work. These ridiculous answers, together with some contradictory statements he made, inclined many persons, amongst whom was the chief justice, to doubt his confession. Later on in his examinations, he was asked if he knew where the house had stood which he set on fire, to which he replied in the affirmative, and on being taken into ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... 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 which you feel, possibly merely a passing ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, Oriental ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the identical action and drapery. As for Dumont d'Urville's statement that, when the statue was discovered, one hand held an apple and the other a fold of the drapery, the latter is obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the subject is so contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the statement made by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none of whom seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and hand now in the Louvre were really found in ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 that ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... established from the foundations in his name. It had a sufficient number of students, and a continually brilliant exercise in the branches of learning, which is flourishing in these times. Its antiquity, and its precedence to that of Santo Tomas, is defined by the royal Council of the Indias, in a contradictory judgment, which appears from a royal decree or writ of execution dated March 12, 1653. The title Real ad honorem, with authority to place it on all its acts and despatches, and to place the royal arms on its gates, as we now see them, is a concession ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... for an explanation of these contradictory remarks. But he might have waited indefinitely—Crane had quite finished. The Cherub raised his little round eyes, that were like glass alleys, green and red and blue-streaked, to the other's face inquiringly, and encountered a pair of penetrating orbs peering at ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... we parted. He sighed—the cheerful man sighed, as he opened the door for me. Women are contradictory creatures. That sigh affected me more than all his arguments. I felt myself blush for my own head-strong resistance to him as I took my leave and turned away into ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... mortifying a position, the pilot endeavoured to conceal his own vexation, by the number and vociferousness of his orders. From blustering, he soon passed into confusion, until the men themselves stood idle, not knowing which of the uncertain and contradictory mandates they received ought to be first obeyed. In the mean time, Wilder had folded his arms with an appearance of entire composure, and taken his station near his female passengers. Mrs Wyllys closely studied his eye, with the wish of ascertaining, by its expression, the nature ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Alida, half tempted, by the wild and excited eye of her companion, not withstanding all the contradictory evidence which surrounded him, to believe she was addressing one of the very rovers in question. "The book was lent me by a brave seaman, who holds himself in readiness to repress their depredations; and while reading of so much wickedness, I endeavor to recall ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... nothing of striking his mother when she delayed ever so little to give him the breast; he would claw, and bite, and strangle without remorse the first of his younger brothers, that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise disturbed him. But these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature, to be robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent, and his own master before he grows robust. Hobbes did not consider that the same cause, which hinders savages ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... intermarrying with white people were to be slaves for life, except mulattoes born of white women, who were to serve for seven years, and the white person so intermarrying also for seven years. It is needless to say that with all these changing and contradictory provisions many servants and Negroes did not even know what the law was. In 1728, however, free mulatto women having illegitimate children by Negroes and other slaves, and free Negro women having illegitimate children by white men, and their issue, were subjected to the same penalties as in the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... L. Cornelius Scipio, consul B.C. 83. Plutarch speaks of the same event in the Life of Sulla, c. 28, where he states that the soldiers of Scipio came over to Sulla. The two statements are contradictory, Appianus (Civil Wars, i. 85) tells the story of Scipio's army ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... conditions the 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 degrees and longitude 130 degrees, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... call it, in your Uncle Dan's sincerity, if only because he's done so many inconsistent and apparently contradictory things in his life. But that doesn't make me see any real reason why ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... teaching which connected the modern with the ancient Church was but the private and accidental opinion of Hooker and Andrewes and Bull and Wilson, unauthorised in the English Church, uncongenial to its spirit, if not contradictory to its formularies? It is only just to Mr. Newman to say, that even after some of his friends were frightened, he long continued to hope for the best; but undoubtedly, more and more, his belief in the reality of the English Church was undergoing a very ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... written criterion of the laws and the imperfect stability of traditionary usage must frequently, in the intricacies of their suits, give rise to contradictory decisions; particularly as the interests and passions of the chiefs are but too often concerned in the determination of the causes that come ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... or not so contradictory as the English Humour generally is, he next brought me into a fair and large Cloister, round which I took several Turns with him; and, indeed, The Place was too delicious to tire, under a Conversation ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... seen by this retrospect how difficult it is to seize all the shifting subtleties of this remarkable character. His sophisms even, when self-contradictory, are so adroit that they are often hard to parry. He made a great merit to himself for not having originated the new episcopates; but it should be remembered that he did his utmost to enforce the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... uncle; and animated to perseverance by the hopes of supporting the honour of the family, and overtopping his elder brother. He had a natural ductility of mind, without much warmth of affection, or elevation of sentiment; and therefore readily complied with every variety of caprice; patiently endured contradictory reproofs; heard false accusations without pain, and opprobrious reproaches without reply; laughed obstreperously at the ninetieth repetition of a joke; asked questions about the universal decay of trade; admired the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... indeed so great a poet, and at the same time exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying exception to what we conceive to be the natural wisdom and temper of great poets; in other words, he was such a bigoted and exasperated man, and sullied his imagination with so much that is contradictory to good feeling, in matters divine as well as human; that I should not have thought myself justified in assisting, however humbly, to extend the influence of his writings, had I not believed a time to have arrived, when the community ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... 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; till at length nothing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that held by all modern anthropologists. The other is contained in his "First Principles," and the two theories, like parallel lines, never meet. Though born in the same brain they are quite distinct, and even contradictory. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... soft and hard, for the eyes, the rather full lips, and pale cheeks, were naturally soft; but they were hardened by the self-containment which grows on women who have to face life for themselves, and, conscious of beauty, intend to keep it, in spite of age. Her figure was contradictory, also; its soft modelling a little too rigidified by stays. In this desert of the dawn she let her long blue overcoat flap loose, and swung her hat on a finger, so that her light-brown, touched-up hair took ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... above all else, to indicate a resolution to shun her presence) Quen could not regard the immediately-following actions of his son with anything but an emotion of confusion. For when his eyes next rested upon the exceedingly contradictory Liao, he was seated in the open space before the house in which Ts'ain dwelt, playing upon an instrument of stringed woods, and chanting verses into which the names of the two persons in question had been skilfully introduced without restraint, his whole manner of behaving being with the evident ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... which I am sorry we are obliged to eat in this early part of our journey. This supply of biscuits has certainly cost us much in carriage—many hard dollars; but nevertheless we have found it excellent for our health, and it now promises to save us from starvation. We had heard contradictory reports on the road; some people saying we should find everything in Aheer, and others nothing. The latter prophecy seems likely to turn ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... as if she were sorry. Indeed, she thought she was glad too. That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed contradictory. And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to relieve her suddenly and to take from her all ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... 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, he being her child by a second husband. So these monsters murdered him ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... ship's company. I told Asaph Khan, that we could not endure this slavery, nor would I stay longer in the country, as the prince gave us one day a phirmaund for our good usage, with a grant of privileges, and countermand all the next by contradictory orders, in which proceedings there was neither honour nor good faith, and I could not answer for my continuing to reside among them. Asaph Khan said, he would speak to the king at night on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... the microscope, the idea was evolved that each male cell contained a complete microscopic man, the homunculus; and then it was announced that not Eve, but Adam had contained all humanity within himself. Hence the two contradictory theories which in the eighteenth century kept their adherents sharply divided, the theories of the ovulists and those of the animalculists, and the dispute seemed to offer little hope of a possible decision. The names of famous scientists and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... a buoyant, hopeful, elated temperament lacks some other virtues, aptitudes, or powers, such as are seen flourishing in the men whose temperament is sombre, inclining to despondency. Most commonly the contradictory demand is reconciled by the proverbial "short life ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... has, so to speak, its everlasting embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was taken over into Latin and transmitted, with much mingling of foreign and even contradictory ideas, to the modern world. From Homer to the last runnings of the Hellenic spirit you will find it taught by every kind of precept and enforced by every kind of example; nor was Shakespeare writing at hazard, but under the instinctive guidance of genius, when ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... newspapers eagerly all day, when he came, and, from a contradictory mass of evidence, had gleaned some grains of truth. One fact was beyond contradiction—a second Samson had drawn down the ruins of a temple, not on the heads of his foes alone, but his friends as well, blinded, as he of old, by the treachery of that ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a Ship-master and a Boatswain] In this naval dialogue, perhaps the first example of sailor's language exhibited on the stage, there are, as I have been told by a skilful narrator, some inaccuracies and contradictory orders. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... had neither the forethought, nor the experience, to anticipate all the embarrassments of a parliamentary government, they unwittingly committed themselves, and illegal acts are constantly resorted to, in order that the system may be upheld. The charter was bestowed ad captandum, and is a contradictory melange of inexpedient concessions and wily reservations. The conscription undermined the popularity of Napoleon, and Louis XVIII. in his charter says, "The conscription is abolished; the recruiting for the army and navy shall ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... you admired Tommy he was always a boor in your presence, shy and self-distrustful. Especially was this so if you were a lady (how amazingly he got on in after years with some of you, what agony others endured till he went away!), and it is the chief reason why there are such contradictory accounts of ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... against him. His eyes were opened to see things now as never before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be destitute of the very things he had hoped she would ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... brings against Origen the reproach of having in his book De Principiis taught that, in certain cases, the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of animals, was possible—as, indeed, seems to be the case—certain writers deny that he ever said anything on the subject. These contradictory affirmations are easy to explain, once we know that Ruffinus, when translating into Latin the Greek text of De Principiis, omitted all that referred to this question, that the conspiracy of silence might be preserved on the matter of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the Battle which our Boy-Friend Johann Wolfgang watched with such interest, from his garret-window, hour after hour; all Frankfurt simmering round him, in such a whirlpool of self-contradictory emotions; till towards evening, when, in long rows of carts, poor wounded Hessians and Hanoverians came jolting in, and melted every heart into pity, into wailing sorrow, and eagerness to help. A little later, Papa Goethe, stepping downstairs, came across the Official French ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... interpreted in a variety of ways by the cackling society of the town, whose gossip often gave rise to fatal blunders, like those relating to the birth of Agathe and that of Max. It is not easy for the community of a country town to disentangle the truth from the mass of conjecture and contradictory reports to which a single fact gives rise. The provinces insist—as in former days the politicians of the little Provence at the Tuileries insisted—on full explanations, and they usually end by knowing everything. But each person clings to the version of the event which he, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... The reports I obtained were conflicting. One man had it that he was wounded badly, and left dying on No Man's Land; another told me he had seen him taken prisoner by two Germans; another, still, that he was seen to break away from them. But everything was confused and contradictory. The truth was, that there was a great deal of hand-to-hand fighting, and when that is the case it is ofttimes difficult to tell what becomes of a single individual. The fact remained, however, that he was missing, and no one ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... Bishop of Durham.—Having employed my leisure for many years in collecting materials for the biography of the famous Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, I am baffled by the conflicting and contradictory accounts of,—(1.) The title by which he became possessed of the Vesci estates; (2.) When and by what authority he took upon him the title of "King of the Isle of Man;" and (3.) How he became dispossessed of that title, which it is well known that Edward II. bestowed upon Gaveston; ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of Christ, and that the whole substance of the bread is turned into his body, and the whole substance of the wine into his blood; which conversion, so contradictory to our senses, they call transubstantiation, but at the same time they affirm, that, under either kind or species, only one whole entire Christ, and the true sacrament, is received. But why are those words, "This is my body," to be taken in a literal sense, any more than those concerning ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Edwin and Angelina quarrel? It is because Edwin has been given a fine, high-spirited nature that will not brook contradiction; while Angelina, poor girl, has been cursed with contradictory instincts. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... causes of non-observation is a preconceived opinion. This it is which, in all ages, has made the whole race of mankind, and every separate section of it, for the most part unobservant of all facts, however abundant, even when passing under their own eyes, which are contradictory to any first appearance, or any received tenet. It is worth while to recall occasionally to the oblivious memory of mankind some of the striking instances in which opinions that the simplest experiment would have shown to be erroneous, continued to be ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband's Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable in her life. After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library, where her husband shut her up and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... right, the author was undoubtedly "cross." In early childhood this sort of thing is well understood, and called by its right name. When a small person starts the day in a contradictory mood and insists on taking everything by the wrong handle,—he is not allowed to flatter himself that he is a superior person with a "temperament," or a fine thinker with a gift for righteous indignation. He is simply set down as cross. It is presumed that he got up the wrong ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... religious writings also begin with this. As the Koran is the direct word of God, any statement in it has the unquestioned and complete force of law. On some points, however, separate utterances in the work itself are contradictory, and the necessity then arises of determining which is the later ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... important world, where words are used and altered in the using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great saying, "He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it," is an example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can content himself with putting it this way, that ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... coffee. But this last assertion is demolished, by the declaration of M. d'Abbadie, who has just returned from Abyssinia, that certain tribes of Arabs and Abyssinians who do not use coffee can support greater fatigue than those who do. In presence of such very contradictory facts, who shall say which of the learned doctors is ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... yet we may come near it. And who, that comes thus near it, must not feel how terms which St. Paul employs in trying to follow, with his analysis of such profound power and originality, some of the most delicate, intricate, obscure, and contradictory workings and states of the human spirit, are detached and employed by Puritanism, not in the connected and fluid way in which St. Paul employs them, and for which alone words are really meant, but in an isolated, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... if we ventured to doubt their Christianity. Is it not true that many of us consult our Guide-book very much as a matter of form and habit, without much real belief that it will serve us in all the minute details of life? We all wish to get on in life. The most obstinate and contradictory man on earth admits that. Even if he denies it with his lips, all his actions prove that he admits it. Well, what says our Guide-book in regard to what is called 'getting on'? 'In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct thy paths.' Now, what could be simpler—we might even say, ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... his protector; and high as were the expectations he had built on his justice and magnanimity, the chance of this unfortunate prince's reinstatement in his kingdom was as distant as ever. The inactivity and contradictory policies of the English court had abated the zeal of Gustavus Adolphus, and an irritability which he could not always repress made him on this occasion forget the glorious vocation of protector ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Government is also furnished with constant reports from the stipendiary magistrates and inspectors of constabulary, who are charged to watch the state of the potato disease, and the progress of the harvest. These vary from day to day, and are often contradictory; it will, therefore, be impossible to form an accurate opinion on the whole extent of the evil till the digging of the potatoes shall be further advanced. To decide, under such circumstances, upon the most proper measures to be adopted, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... exceptions in the world's history, the higher the development, the more complex the organisation and the more violent the clashing of the divers elements of the man's nature; so that his soul resembles a field of battle, and he wears out quickly. Nevertheless, because everything in Balzac seems contradictory, when he is likened by one of his friends to the sea, which is one and indivisible, we perceive that the comparison is not inapt. Round the edge are the ever-restless waves; on the surface the foam blown by fitful gusts of wind, the translucent ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... as we can discover, there is no single work devoted to the topic: all that is to be gleaned of it from books consists only in scraps of information, most of them very brief, some contradictory; as a rule almost casually introduced in works upon dancing, ancient games ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... in camp full of tremors and contradictory emotions. One minute she felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself of this impulse by arguing that the insane sheep-herder ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's 'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter? It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... of Abraham, or the son of Adam who was the son of God, as the Eternal 'Word' who 'was with God,' and entered into history and time when He 'became flesh.' We must take all these points of view together if we would understand any of them, for they are not contradictory, but complementary. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... extraordinary in my theory of dreams: it is the theory accepted by the great mass of my profession. A dream is the reproduction, in the sleeping state of the brain, of images and impressions produced on it in the waking state; and this reproduction is more or less involved, imperfect, or contradictory, as the action of certain faculties in the dreamer is controlled more or less completely by the influence of sleep. Without inquiring further into this latter part of the subject—a very curious and interesting part of it—let us take the theory, roughly and generally, as I have just ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... taught. Statements are made—the sort of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is no swift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out into vague qualifications and butt gently against other partially contradictory statements. There is a classification of minds—the sort of classification dear to the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the purposes of the essay and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told, accurate unimaginative, ingenious minds capable of science and kindred vulgar things ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... they will both be released. In the first place, all is contradictory. Consider. Why did they call the porter if it were their work? To denounce themselves? Or out of cunning? Not at all, that would be too much! Besides, did not the porter see the student Pestriakoff at the very ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... the doctor testily, as if he did not like being interrupted, "the more I examine into man's nature the more curious and contradictory I find it—I ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... knowledge." For they could not have failed to remember that the Negroes were considered heathen, and, therefore, not sworn by the court; that they were not allowed counsel; that the evidence was indirect, contradictory, and malicious, while the trials were hasty and unfair. From the 11th of May to the 29th of August, one hundred and fifty-four Negroes were cast into prison; fourteen of whom were burnt, eighteen hanged, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... paddle for the unfortunate and began to be talked about on the playground and in the work-room. When she heard what had happened, Fouchette was conscience-stricken and ran to Sister Agnes for consolation. The latter was so confused and contradictory in her definition of right and wrong, as to how far one might go for Christ's sake, that Fouchette was left in doubt. And when Sister Angelique asked her for the name of the girl who committed an offence in the dormitory, Fouchette hesitated and wanted ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... then, that the architects thought of nothing but "hard utility," and that it was some aesthetic divinity that shaped their blocks, rough-hew them how they might? For my part, I cannot see how truth is to result from the clash of contradictory falsehoods. There are a few cities more splendid than New York; many more hideous. In point of concentrated architectural magnificence, there is nothing in New York to compare with the Vienna Ringstrasse, from the Opera House ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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 ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... difficulty in executing this plan was that two things nearly contradictory were to be reconciled: the march of the army to the Elbe, and the security of the magazine. Not to forget all rule, the army of the King, in advancing, ought not to depart too far from the line of defence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... who turned, squinted horribly at the Princess, and salaamed to her with a curious and contradictory dignity, turning his fingers, covered ...
— The Princess And The Jewel Doctor - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... showed him them, to prevent his falling into another like fault: that the Duke of Albemarle seems to be able to answer them; but he thinks that the Duke of Albemarle and the Prince are contented to let their Narratives sleep, they being not only contradictory in some things (as he observed about the business of the Duke of Albemarle's being to follow the Prince upon the dividing the fleet in case the enemy come out), but neither of them to be maintained in others. That the business the other night of my Lord ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... remarkable approximation—which converts a statement apparently contradictory, into a strong confirmation of the deduction to be obtained from the other physical facts grouped together by Chaucer with such ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... much the same in our own country, is it not?" queried Harry. "It seems to me that I have read articles in the New York Tribune and the New York Evening Post that were flatly contradictory of each other on the subject of ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and perhaps I can more graphically set J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks before my readers by a few incidents which show his contradictory characteristics in action than by verbal ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... just we would be in our judgment of men if we realised that a man may be honestly two different men, and how this theory would explain that which in every man of high organisation seems sometimes to be contradictory! Aye, within five minutes some of us with mercurial natures can remember to have been two entirely different men in two entirely different worlds. Something said to us cheering or depressing; some tidings announced, glad or sad; some great kindness ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... out and left unfinished; in short, all the confusion and vacancies resulting from plans for order never carried out. The lawyer's private room, especially disordered by this incessant rummage, bore witness to his unresting pace, the hurry of a man overwhelmed with business, hunted by contradictory necessities. The bookcase looked as if it had been sacked; there were books scattered over everything, some piled up open, one on another, others on the floor face downwards; registers of proceedings laid on the floor in ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... 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 a profound sense in which the word 'cannot' is absolutely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited passenger was not "better" when, after a period of oblivious rest indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless resignation, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... socialist; but things were not come to that pass yet among people brought up to their duty. And Dan's free sentiments had not been worked by those who make a trade of such work now. So that he was pleased and respectful, instead of carping and contradictory, when persons of higher position than his own would discuss the condition of the times with him. Carne had discovered this, although as a rule he said little to his neighbours, and for reasons of his own ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said of John Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," and I own that without going through the long catalogue of singularly contradictory criticisms which have been passed on Donne, I feel disposed to fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium. Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but that ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... distilled through the cool and procrastinating alembic of Dyer's 'Weekly Letter.' [Footnote: See Note I. ] For it may be observed in passing, that instead of those mail-coaches, by means of which every mechanic at his six-penny club, may nightly learn from twenty contradictory channels the yesterday's news of the capital, a weekly post brought, in those days, to Waverley-Honour, a Weekly Intelligencer, which, after it had gratified Sir Everard's curiosity, his sister's, and that of his aged butler, was regularly transferred from the Hall to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... side was championed here by millions living among us who were of European birth. Their contradictory accusations threw our thought into disarray, and in the first chaotic days we could see no clear issue that affected our national policy. There was not direct assault on our rights. It seemed at first to most of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... Rosville she was reading "Paradise Lost," and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book. She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness. Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well. She remembered people's ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered dates and suggested agreeable ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard |
