"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... get his thoughts together at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. "You ask me to take love for granted," said Corydon to him once; "but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... ceremony. A mild "ring" in Egypt attempted in vain to run the Hamamat and Dar-For mines (Chap. III.) against Midian. Consequently the local Press was dosed with rumours, which, retailed by the home papers, made the latter rife in contradictory reports. To quote one case only. The turquoise-gangue from Ziba (Chap. XII.) was pronounced, by the inexpert mineralogists at the Citadel, Cairo, who attempted criticism, to be carbonate of copper, because rich ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... stated to him his belief, that Tecumseh did meet his death by a shot from the colonel. Shane, who, we believe, is now deceased, sustained, through life, a character for integrity. Whether, in his latter years, his memory had failed him, by which he was led to express these contradictory opinions, or whether Mr. Brown misunderstood the import of his language, when talking upon this matter, we shall not undertake to decide. The reader who feels an interest in the point at issue will settle the question for himself, whether, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... Mayhew did not conceal or disguise his sentiments on this point any more than on others, such as the peculiar tenets of Calvinism. He explicitly and boldly declared the doctrine irrational, unscriptural, and directly contradictory."[20] He taught the strict unity of God as early as 1753, "in the most unequivocal and plain manner, in his sermons of that year."[21] What most excited comment and objection was that, in a foot-note to the volume of his sermons published ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... practical connexion with the result, The Effingham family had started Federalists, in the true meaning of the term; for their education, native sense and principles, had a leaning to order, good government, and the dignity of the country; but as factions became fiercer, and names got to be confounded and contradictory, the landed branch settled down into what they thought were American, and the commercial branch into what might properly be termed English Federalists. We do not mean that the father of John intended to be untrue to his native land; but by following up ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... In many particulars Carlyle was indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbakuk. His words at times bubble forth with abysmic inspiration. Always precious, such men; as precious now as any time. His rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory tones—what ones are more wanted amid the supple, polish'd, money—worshipping, Jesus-and-Judas-equalizing, suffrage-sovereignty echoes of current America? He has lit up our Nineteenth century with the light of a powerful, penetrating, and perfectly honest intellect of the first class, turn'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in dealing with the Bible so superior! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are, because Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to see you all, of course," she said, "but I am really delighted to see you about again, Henry. Do tell me, now. I have heard so many contradictory reports. Did you shoot yourself, or was it one of your guests who did it? I don't know how it is, but poor Ronald always says that the men one asks to shoot, nowadays, hit everything except ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the esteem in which his own works have been held, and the connection between the sentimental, whimsical, contradictory English clergyman and his German imitators have been noted, generally speaking, by all the historians of literature; and several monographs and separate articles have been published on single phases of the theme.[2] As yet, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... like her mother. But Elizabeth seemed to attach very little importance to my evidence, if I may call it by so grand a name. 'People have such strange ideas about likenesses,' she said, 'and arrive at such contradictory conclusions. One can only trust one's own eyes in a matter of ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... two different religions. But if he were told that they professed the same, he would then say, that the precepts of this religion had been expressed in such doubtful language, that they led to two sets of principles contradictory to one another. I need scarcely inform the reader, that I allude to the two opposite conclusions, which will almost always be drawn, where men reason from motives of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... nothing useless in the works of Christ and of the Church. Now that is useless which does not reach the end to which it is ordained; and, on the other hand, no one having the will to sin can, at the same time, be cleansed from sin, which is the purpose of Baptism; for this would be to combine two contradictory things. Thirdly, because there should be no falsehood in the sacramental signs. Now a sign is false if it does not correspond with the thing signified. But the very fact that a man presents himself to be cleansed by Baptism, signifies that he ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... to crumpets or cricket; Should a snug Party Club prove a trifle too free, Or give an equivocal "treat," or hat-ticket; A seven years' nursing of Slopville-on-Slime, A well-fought Election and Glorious Victory (Crowed o'er by proud Party prints at the time) May—lose you your Seat. It does seem contradictory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... behaviour in leaping overboard to the rescue, had gained favour—for true courage always finds admirers whether they be rude or refined—and the number of Brace's friends was increased by it. I heard that he had really interfered when I was being forced aloft, and had shouted out contradictory orders to those of the mate. This accounted for the confusion I had noticed on deck, and which was the result of several of his friends endeavouring to restrain him, while others were ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... passengers was very great— the more so that it was undefined. They saw the captain, however, every now and then come into the cabin and toss off a tumbler of strong rum-and-water, and then return on deck, and shout out with oaths often contradictory orders. The gale all this time was increasing, until it threatened to become as violent as the hurricane from which we had escaped. I could not help wishing that we had not left our leaky little schooner. ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... scientific and political conservatism—and if every day increases the army of their avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us—I was about to say by a law of intellectual symbiosis—that they are neither irreconcilable with, nor contradictory to, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... to describe him by negatives. He had not a creative imagination. He had not a pure taste. He was not a great reasoner. There is indeed scarcely any writer in whose works it would be possible to find so many contradictory judgments, so many sentences of extravagant nonsense. Nor was it only in his familiar correspondence that he wrote in this flighty and inconsistent manner, but in long and elaborate books, in books repeatedly transcribed and intended for the public eye. We will give an instance or two; for without ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... waste material. Elsewhere I read that "Professor Atwater's investigations into nutrition have shown in a most convincing manner that the body derives all its energy from the food consumed. This may be regarded as established." Which of these definite and contradictory assertions does Dr Knaggs support, and why? Where can I get information re Professor Atwater's experiments and other recent works ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed: 'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far fetched) that they made little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... Hysteria and neurasthenia closely simulate every imaginable physical disease, but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are. Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease, with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for only the carefully trained in all the requirements of diagnosis can differentiate ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... smooth that he could not find a knot in it, and shew how it might be got rid of. The other of the two was prompt in reply, and never for the sake of subterfuge avoided a question that was proposed; but he would choose the contradictory side, or by multiplicity of words would show that a simple answer could not be given. In all questions, therefore, he was subtle and profuse, whilst the other in his answer was perspicuous, brief, and to the point If two such characters could ever have been ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... from the temptations and allurements of company; and many a long winter evening passed delightfully in the elegant quietude of home, as they read, and sang, and talked of the past, and dreamed of the future in each other's society. But, contradictory as it may appear to the theory of the sentimentalist, it is nevertheless a fact, that two persons cannot always find sufficient excitement in talking to each other merely; and this is especially true of those to whom high excitement ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a heavy-set man, dewlapped like a bloodhound, and his hard blue eyes were close-coupled. The reptilian forehead did not signify a superior mentality, even as the slack, retreating chin denoted a minimum of courage. It was a most contradictory face. The features did not balance. Racey Dawson was not a student of physiognomy, but he recognized a weak chin when he saw it. If this man were indeed McFluke, then he, Racey ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the courtyard. The confusion which reigned there was indescribable. The citizens with shouts of alarm took to their heels. The men-at-arms were powerless against this rain of missiles, and the knights, hastily closing their visors, shouted contradictory ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... He was not afraid of her influence over Belarab. He knew his man. No words, no blandishments, no sulks, scoldings, or whisperings of a favourite could affect either the resolves or the irresolutions of that Arab whose action ever seemed to hang in mystic suspense between the contradictory speculations and judgments disputing the possession of his will. It was not what Belarab would either suddenly do or leisurely determine upon that Lingard was afraid of. The danger was that in his taciturn hesitation, which had something hopelessly ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... seems contradictory to the above to say that stimuli which have little effect on the centres of consciousness during waking life produce an appreciable result in sleep. Nevertheless, it will be found that this is the case. Thus organic processes which scarcely make themselves ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... pain. If creation is the self-expression of God, pain was inevitable from the first. For what is the nature of God? According to the Christian religion it is love. And what is love? Here is another slippery word which has had some contradictory connotations in the course of its history. Some time ago Mr. G. Bernard Shaw delivered a lecture at the City Temple on the "Religion of the British Empire," in the course of which he said that, if I knew as much about stage-plays as he did, I should distrust the word "love," for it was bound ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... 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
... debate, were not framing their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar expressions often employed in our own time, such as "the people of Africa," or "the people of South America," should be cited, by some ingenious theorist of a future generation, as evidence that the subjects of the Khedive and those ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... French lieutenant; and—I suppose on account of that same perversity—I felt no surprise whatever when he assured me that I had faithfully described to him the arch-pirate who had left him and his crew to perish in the flames. Indeed, in my then contradictory state of mind I should have been disappointed had he said otherwise. The man's conduct—his stealthy but searching scrutiny of the ship; his endeavour, as I regarded it, to mislead us with his broken English; and his excessive curiosity, as hinted at by Captain ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... coquettishly from behind the fenced enclosure, which has been prepared for their protection, and where they are quite safe from injury. The young Rajas stalk about, examine the bulls, and give loud and contradictory orders, as to the manner in which the fight is to be conducted. The keepers, fortunately, are so deafened by the row which every one near them is making, that they are utterly incapable of following directions which ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... men make a name of two Names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an Incorporeall Body, or (which is all one) an Incorporeall Substance, and a great number more. For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... of all moral authority by persistent efforts to procure their indirect repeal through contradictory enactments. They had been practically abrogated by the legislation attending the organization of Utah, New Mexico, and Washington. If any vitality remained in them it would have been taken away, in effect, by the new Territorial acts in the form originally ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... fall into a most neglected state, and the overlookers brought reports to Albert that there were hardly any safety-lamps used in the great pit, and that the galleries were so insufficiently supported that there was great danger in continuing to work there. However, the reports were contradictory, and after trying in vain to settle what was to be done, Lord St. Erme rode this morning to the collieries, to make a personal inspection, and insist on the men using the Davy-lamp. After trying to dissuade him, Albert proposed to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... school of philosophers to bear directly against its authority. There are those who hope, there are those who are sure, that in the incessant investigation of facts, physical, political, and moral, something or other, or many things, will sooner or later turn up, and stubborn facts too, simply contradictory of revealed declarations. A vision comes before them of some physical or historical proof that mankind is not descended from a common origin, or that the hopes of the world were never consigned to a wooden ark floating on the waters, or that the manifestations ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... when she had worn them a bit; he frequently noticed, too, that when he entered the room, the conversation was suddenly broken off, and when he inquired what they were talking about, they first of all looked at each other as if they were afraid of giving contradictory answers, and once or twice his impatience went so far that he asked his wife, "Why does Matilda wear such ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... 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, fixed, mechanical ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... His firm was very desirous of having him return with the cash which was sore needed at the present time. Collecting the claim would be quite a feather in his cap. Rock's statements concerning the Fish Cannery, he noticed, were somewhat contradictory. But that was up to Rock. An account like this, the chances were, would not be worth much anyway. He could explain the whole matter to Dunham when he ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... Patsy, as Orlando's mother fluttered into the garden like a gorgeous hen with wings outspread, her clothes a riot of contradictory colours, all of them insistently bright, "d'ye know what this place is—this terry firmy on which we stand, that's wan mile wan way, an' half a mile the other? Ye don't? Well, I'll tell ye: it's a zoolyogical gardin. Is it like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... and if I have to go for the truth, let me go. Mr. Bruce said he did not believe that my boy had got that offer, and he was somewhat angry. I dreaded the consequences, because I might have no shelter if I went contradictory to his will, and I did not know where to go if I should be ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... from which all convictions radiate and all look equally probable. But then, instead of mocking at all, he sympathises with all, and expresses the one sentiment which may be extracted from their collision—the sentiment of reverence blended with scepticism. It is a contradictory sentiment, one may say, in a sense, but the essence of humour is to be contradictory. The language in which he utters himself was determined by his omnivorous appetite for every quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... in their effects. Good and evil as spoken of in Genesis ii. iii. point to no contrast of some actions with others according to their moral distinctions: the phrase is only a comprehensive one for things generally, according to the contradictory attributes which constitute their interest to man, as they help or injure him: for, as said, he desires to know not what things are metaphysically, but what is the use of them. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... is better than a Satire, (at least, a personal one,) with which I stand truly arraigned, and in atonement of which I am resolved to bear silently all criticisms, abuses, and even praises, for bad pantomimes never composed by me, without even a contradictory aspect. I suppose the root of this report is my loan to the manager of my Turkish drawings for his dresses, to which he was more welcome than to my name. I suppose the real author will soon own it, as it has succeeded; if not, Job be my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... when the Medes had compelled the Scythians to retreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires so much, they quickly resumed the offensive[76]. We cannot follow all the fluctuations of the conflict; the information left by the early historians is vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to help us out. After the fall of Nineveh cylinders of clay and alabaster slabs were no longer covered with wedges by the Assyrian scribes. They had recounted their victories and conquests at length, but not one among them, so far as we know, cared to retrace ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Ormonde exhausted herself in eloquent if contradictory argument: but finding she made no impression, suddenly changed the subject. "That is a very expensive school you have chosen for the boys, Katherine. 'Duke thinks it ridiculous. Sixty pounds a year for such a little fellow as Cis! and now Charlie ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... 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 he was striving ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... signal instance within all time, of a malignant delusion maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by an absolute determination and even a fanatic zeal not to receive one new idea. Tenets involving the most palpable impossibilities, and asserted in self-contradictory terms, must stand inviolable to all question or controversy; literature must be scouted as a profane folly; not a principle of true philosophy is to be admitted; hardly is an application of the plainest mechanics to ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... that which really occurs in practice: and that the instincts which make us cling to a vivid belief in the future always spring from a vehement revolt against the present. Meanwhile, however, the answers generally given to sceptics are apparently contradictory. To limit our hopes to this world, it is sometimes said, is to encourage mere grovelling materialism; in the same breath it is added that to ask for an interest in the fate of our fellow-creatures here, instead of ourselves hereafter, is to make excessive demands upon ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... a ghost is likely not to be complimented on her assertion. But it does not follow that that woman's grandmother, when she said that she saw a ghost, was a consciously dishonest person; on the contrary, so complex and contradictory is human nature, she would have been, probably, a person of more than average intellect and earnestness; and her instinct of the invisible and the infinite (which is that which raises man above the brutes) would have been, because misinformed, the honourable cause of her error. And thus we may ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... to those present is to be premature in nothing, not even in progress. It is evolution and not revolution that we should seek. In a word, we must not be before our time. I have come too soon today to withstand such contradictory and divided interests as yours. Nations are not yet ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... 278. 1'.Though a despatch in a daily paper (April 3, 1911) declares that the city of Haverhill has been forced to borrow, yet the report is untrustworthy without further evidence; for a'. In itself it is contradictory and confused; and b'. It is known that professional politicians and other enemies of the plan have often spread false reports about it. McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXV, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... hours had been the most wonderful, and the most crowded—yes, quite literally the most crowded—that he had ever experienced. At last he had really taken part in the life of his people, and had come into direct contact with things very diverse and contradictory, representing the popular will. He had talked with street urchins, and visionaries, had rubbed shoulders with men of brutal habit and vile character,—with knaves, cowards, fools; he had been shut up with drunkards ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... to be trusted; and experience will show us the same of translations. Even Henry Valois, the most learned and celebrated Greek interpreter, is accused of having sometimes so far mistaken the sense of Eusebius, as to have given in his translation the contradictory of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... be regarded as a peculiarly interesting portion of scripture: a blessing being promised those who read, hear, and keep the things which are written therein. It has been subjected to so many contradictory interpretations, that any attempt to comprehend its meaning is often regarded with distrust; and the impression has become very prevalent, that it is a "sealed book,"—that its meaning is so hidden in unintelligible symbols, that very little ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... that could be put forward from the political point of view. But our Government's attitude was that, in view of engagements entered into by Greece, the Serbs must not act aggressively against the still neutral Bulgars. Nor do I think that, seeing how contradictory and inconclusive the information was upon which they were relying, they were to blame for maintaining an attitude which in the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... smaller and smaller spaces as the rate of movement of the rod becomes slower and slower'; and this is equivalent to saying that the distance between the bands diminishes as the rate of movement of the rod decreases. The statements are contradictory. But there is no doubt as to which is the wrong one—it is the first. What these authors have called 'distance between the bands' has here been shown to be itself a band. Now, no point about this illusion can be more readily observed than that the widths ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... an increase of sensibility, by an enlightened awareness of the evil beyond. And to experience evil, to realize it, and yet to be content, lies not within {116} the power of any moral being; it is not merely difficult, it is self-contradictory. To any one who judges himself fairly, with a wide and vivid image of life as it is in all its ramifications and obscurities, the evil of the world is all one. It follows that, as there is no perfect happiness except in the annihilation of evil, so there can be no peace of mind, no self-respect, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... discuss, that it is impossible for Christianity at that early date to have found its way to this distant island, beyond the boundary of the world. An argument on a different plane is (I.), the undoubtedly contradictory and inconsistent character of the Life. It is easy however to exaggerate the importance of this point. Modern critical methods were undreamed of in the days of our hagiographer, who wrote, moreover, for edification only in a credulous age. Most of the historical documents of the period are in ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... tolerably in his legal lucubrations; for, in 1792, he was called to the bar as an advocate. He established himself in good style in Edinburgh, but had little practice; though the accounts of his progress are somewhat contradictory. That he passed much of his time in acquiring other than professional knowledge is more certain, though he rarely attempted composition. Mr. Chambers, with all his diligence and advantages for research, (and they are very meritorious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... he confessed it would be what she declared. I never dreamed that Clancy and his confederate were the thieves: I never believed the money was taken until after Hayne received it. I saw how Hayne's guilt was believed in even in the face of contradictory evidence before the court. What would be the tendency if three men together were to swear against me, now that everybody thought him wronged? I know very well what you will think of my cowardice. I know you and your officers will say I should have given him every ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... 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 by which it covered its subsistence; and the motion it was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... leading monthlies on the profoundly important question, "The Influence on Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief". Men of every shade of opinion, from Roman Catholicism to Agnosticism, contributed their views, and, as might well have been expected, they came to the most contradictory conclusions. The Roman Catholic and Anglican writers appeared to think that the mere husk of morality would be left with the disappearance of Christianity; that a sort of enlightened epicureanism, a prudent ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... internal affairs of an independent state! The Roman statesmen gave themselves as little concern as possible about this tempest in a nut-shell, as is best shown by the many complaints regarding the superficial, contradictory, and obscure decisions of the senate; in fact, how could its decisions be expected to be clear, when there were four parties from Sparta simultaneously speaking against each other at its bar? Add to this the personal impression, which most ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a perplexing contradictory apology for his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... case perhaps with the works of only one man out of the whole circle of the fathers of art, of him to whom we have just referred—Michael Angelo. In others the estimate and the sensation are constantly unequal, and often contradictory." There is a distinction between the sensation of power and the intellectual perception of it. A slight sketch will give the sensation; the greater power is in the completion, not so manifest, but of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... 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 mean, in the ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... over a collection of manuscript letters of the times of James the First, I was struck by the contradictory reports of the result of the famous battle of Lutzen, so glorious and so fatal to Gustavus Adolphus; the victory was sometimes reported to have been obtained by the Swedes; but a general uncertainty, a sort of mystery, agitated the majority ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... consideration, viz., if there is to be this purifying it must be done by myself. 'Ah!' you say, 'done by yourself? That is not evangelical teaching.' Well, let us see. Take two or three verses out of this Epistle which at first sight seem to be contradictory of this. Take the very first that bears on the subject:—'The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin' (i. 7). 'If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... entered, with Marsham and the butler behind him. Mr. Ferrier, in his London frock-coat, appeared rounder and heavier than ever but for the contradictory vigor and lightness of his step, the shrewd cheerfulness of the eyes. It had been a hard week in Parliament, however, and his features and complexion showed signs ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what an individual!' exclaimed Coningsby. 'Tell me,' he added, eagerly, 'what is he? This Prince of whom one hears in all countries at all hours; on whose existence we are told the tranquillity, almost the civilisation, of Europe depends, yet of whom we receive accounts so conflicting, so contradictory; tell me, you who can tell me, tell me ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... were complex and contradictory, flitting about and crossing each other in his mind with astounding rapidity. He wished she had not come, because his father was there, and the thought of his father would intensify his self-consciousness. He wondered why he should care whether she came ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... retorted the young minx with no contradictory twinkle in her eye; "but I could never trust a red-headed person: all ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... East of this Metropolis is to be the Seat of Government— that the Commissioners of the Customs and their numerous Retinue are to remove to the Town of Marblehead a Town contiguous to Salem and that this if the General shall think proper is to be a Garrisond Town. Reports are various and contradictory. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... community. Among them are found those who had been Romanists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Restorationists, Quakers, Arians, Unitarians, etc., etc. We have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, but various opinions. All these persons, of so many and contradictory opinions, weekly meet around our Lord's table in hundreds of churches all over the land. Our bond of union is faith in the slain Messiah, in his death for our sins and his resurrection ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... American statesman remarked that the war of the rebellion was waged "to expound the constitution." It is a pertinent question now, shall all other contradictory principles be retained in the constitution until they, too, are expounded by civil war? On what theory is it less dangerous to defraud twenty million women of their inalienable rights than four million negroes? Is not the same principle ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... persons whomsoever; and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to keep to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as guests of the Countess of Romfrey. Contradictory indeed. Rosamund shook her head over him. For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing contradictory commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him, appears to be expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Christmas Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head, and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room hurriedly on being spoken to, ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one whit. Obviously, ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of his travels, as well as from the various, accurate, and, in many cases, most important information, which he acquired, that these expences must have been very considerable. From his work it is certain that he was endowed with that faculty of eliciting the truth from fabulous, imperfect, or contradictory evidence, at all times so necessary to a traveller, and indispensably so at the period when he travelled, and in most of the countries where his enquiries and his researches were carried on. His great and characteristic merit consists in freeing his mind from the opinions which must ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... also so much. One cultivated and honest man has an enthusiastic and most real love and enjoyment of Gothic architecture, and an absolute hatred for that of the classic revival; another man, equally cultivated and honest, has tastes which are the logical contradictory of these. No one can doubt the ability of Byron, or of Sheridan; yet each of them thought very little of Shakspeare. The question is, What suits you? You may have the strongest conviction that you ought to like an author; you may be ashamed to confess that you don't like him; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Swift, bootmaker, who worked for his lordship from 1805 to 1807. Swift is still alive, and continues to reside at Southwell. His testimony as to the genuineness of the trees, and to the nature of Lord Byron's deformity, of which so many contradictory assertions have ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... a-day, or that you can devote the same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile for imaginative composition. The nearest contradictory instances to this proposition are those of Scott and Southey, and they are, in more ways than one or two, very damaging instances—exceptions which, in a rather horrible manner, do prove the rule. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... on my return to New Sestros. The coast was full of odd and contradictory stories about our capture. When the tale of my death at Sierra Leone by drowning, in a fit of drunkenness, was told to my patron Don Pedro, that intelligent gentleman denied it without hesitation, because, in the language ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... said, "wait till you see her. What would do her any good no one as yet has found out. She is just the most contradictory, queer-tempered, troublesome ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... my chest heaved and my heart beat as though it would burst. There were nineteen Irishmen in the gang—big, rough fellows who had picked me out, as the only "Dutchman," as the butt for their coarse jokes; but when they saw that the work was plainly too much for me, the other side of this curiously contradictory, mischief-loving, and big-hearted people came out. They invented a thousand excuses to get me out of the line. Water was certainly not their daily diet, but they fell victims, one and all, to the most ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... continued the magistrate, "our codes are in full force, with all their contradictory enactments derived from Gallic customs, Roman laws, and Frank usages; the knowledge of all which, you will agree, is not to be acquired without extended labor; it needs tedious study to acquire this knowledge, and, when acquired, a strong power of brain ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the East nor of the West but rather international in its universality, yet India is specially fitted to make great contributions. {FN8-5} The burning Indian imagination, which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is held in check by the habit of concentration. This restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth with an ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... is taken chiefly from Sir Charles Hotham's reports, it is possible that the acts of his opponents may not obtain strict justice. But it is admitted on all sides that Sir Charles acted with the most perfect good faith; and the accounts given by the insurgents are far too contradictory and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... to offer a contradictory opinion; for my sense of the saneness of things, would not allow me to take the story literally; then I shut them again, without saying anything. Somehow, the certainty in Tonnison's voice affected my doubts. I felt, all at once, less assured; ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the truth of moral science, possessing a complete knowledge of the six Angas (viz., pronunciation, grammar, prosody, explanation of basic terms, description of religious rites, and astronomy). He was a perfect master in reconciling contradictory texts and differentiating in applying general principles to particular cases, as also in interpreting contraries by reference to differences in situation, eloquent, resolute, intelligent, possessed of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... of the rifle ought to be 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 ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... earlier blasphemy. But the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this or that practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the whole scheme of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen contradictory doctrines to suit half-a-dozen different emergencies. The Church solemnized and sanctified marriage without ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine on the subject. And it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... there and then. I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... his flank was in danger, and his representations to that effect were so urgent that Johnson's division was brought up between 9 and 10 o'clock and posted on Bate's left, Johnson's line and the line of Bate's refused brigade paralleling the pike at a distance of not more than 150 yards. Many contradictory statements have been made relative to the distance of that part of the Confederate line from the pike. The owner of the land pointed out to me a small plantation graveyard as being just inside their line that night. He said that the position of their line was marked, after they had gone ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger
... and the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which seem to imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed,—a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Hiller says they are, who shall save them from the changeableness and instability which they show with relation to music and her votaries? Who shall bid the restless waves be still? We, in America, are a new people, a vast hotch-potch of varied and contradictory elements. We are engaged in conquering a continent; employed in a mad scramble for material things; we give feverish hours to win the comfort for our bodies that we take only seconds to enjoy; the moments which we steal from our labors we give grudgingly ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... which, to use the words of one of our greatest historians, was "a state of perpetual war, anarchy, and confusion, calculated solely for defence against the assaults of any foreign power; but, in its provision for the interior order and tranquillity of society, extremely defective. A constitution, so contradictory to all the principles that govern mankind, could never be brought about, but by foreign conquest or native usurpation." And, a very celebrated writer calls it, "that most iniquitous and absurd form of government, by which human nature was so shamefully degraded." This system of iniquity, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... is just what I mean; but there must be some explanation for this curious outburst of forms and doctrines, so contradictory in the different sects. Something surely causes both the form of religion ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain "Miss Netticoat," who wore a white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that "the longer she stands the shorter she grows." The Boy always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton |
