"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it. Presently it split, as do all parties; yet here the paradox was revealed of a small party splitting into two larger halves. To one of these halves adhered the Red Republicans, the government opposition of the Extreme Left, the Opportunists, the Anarchists, certain Socialists, the so-called Communards, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... of all. Of course, much of our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine me ungrateful to the noble thinkers of your—of my—race,—they have moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated class, a leaven that ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and on the course and importance of which he himself would not venture to give an opinion. However, the idea that Marie dreamt her disease, that the fearful sufferings torturing her came from an injury long since healed, appeared such a paradox to Pierre when he gazed at her and saw her in such agony, her limbs already stretched out lifeless on her bed of misery, that he did not even pause to consider it; but at that moment felt simply happy in the thought that all three doctors agreed in authorising ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... so full of the wars of the Lord—they both support and serve as an encouragement and an example to our spiritual author in the elaboration of his military allegory. Every good soldier of Jesus Christ has by heart the noble paradox of Paul to the Philippians—that the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep their hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Let God's peace, he says, be your man of war. Let His surpassing peace do both the work of war and the work of peace also ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid ...
— Who Was She? - From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874 • Bayard Taylor
... the heaven-born genii and inspired young scriveners of the day much of this will appear paradox; it will appear so even to the higher order of our critics; but it was a truism twenty years ago, and it will be a re-acknowledged truth in ten more. In the mean time, I will conclude with two quotations, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... home. Emperor William, who in many things is so exceedingly reactionary, and so apparently assured that royalty is constructed of an entirely different clay than that used for ordinary folks, gave a manifestation of those democratic notions which constitute such a paradox to the remainder of his character by sending forth his three eldest boys each year during their holidays on a pedestrian tour through the length and breadth of his dominions, just as if they were the sons of artisans, and were compelled ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... weapon, the horror upon the face became unspeakable. The eyes were starting, the mouth working painfully. Resolved to be rid of life, yet terrified to die, the wretch was writhing. There never was seen so loathsome a paradox. Cowardice was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... where everybody has business of his own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own mischievousness, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... it must be pointed in a vertical plane. The latter factor determines how far it will throw its projectile, and up to a certain point the higher the gun is pointed the further will go the shell. A certain paradox seems to enter here. It is a fact that a distant ship presents a target more easily hit if its bow or stern is toward the gunner. If it presents a broadside there is the danger that the shells will go either ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... which we have to deal, the thing with which we limit it is always the same—it is by the introduction of our own personality. This may appear at first a direct contradiction of all that I have said about the necessity for the Personal Factor, but it is not. Here is a paradox. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... into the sort of loving, genial talk which each was longing to have with the other. It is so easy to speak when one has little or nothing to say; but often so difficult when there is much that must be said: and the same paradox is ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... The mirage, indeed, suddenly became reality—a mirage only because she had proclaimed it such. She had beheld in it, as he spoke, a Grenoble which was paradise regained. And why should paradise regained be a paradox? Why paradise regained? Paradise gained. She had never known it, until he had flung wide the gates. She had sought for it, and never found it until now, and her senses doubted it. It was a paradise of love, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... moment that the present volume is Miss Austen's greatest, as it was her first published, novel, would be a mere exercise in paradox. There are, who swear by Persuasion; there are, who prefer Emma and Mansfield Park; there is a large contingent for Pride and Prejudice; and there is even a section which advocates the pre-eminence of Northanger Abbey. But no one, as far as we can remember, has ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Opticks to encourage him to that communication. If I did believe, that this would be esteemed one, To measure with a great Telescope the distance of Objects upon the Earth; which I have found long since, and proposed to some by way of Paradox; Locorum distantias ex unica statione, absque ullo Instrumento Mathematico, metiri; I doe here promise to discover it to him, with the necessary Tables, as soon as He shall have imparted his to me; which ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... faces and flanks. She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking and spreading homely themes over an inept-looking clavier confounding the wits of his children and all men's children down to the last generation. He marvels at the paradox, drums his head with the tattoo: how can a thing as small as he shape and maintain an art out of himself universal enough to carry her daily vigil to crystalled immortality? She lets ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... affecting the lengthy quaintnesses of some obsolete modes of speech. The article which it attacks was 'A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors', where the subject was, I imagine, treated in the orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... second dram of rum and pushed it towards him. 'Twas all hopeless to protest or seek an understanding. I loved the old man, and forgave the paradox of his rascality and loyal affection. The young man from London must take his chance, as must we all, in the fashioning hands of circumstance. 'Twas not to be conceived that his ruin was here to be wrought. My uncle's face had lost all appearance of repulsion: scar ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever."—"On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... essay on Justification in 1837; it was aimed at the Lutheran dictum that justification by faith only was the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. I considered that this doctrine was either a paradox or a truism—a paradox in Luther's mouth, a truism in Melanchthon. I thought that the Anglican Church followed Melanchthon, and that in consequence between Rome and Anglicanism, between high Church and low Church, there was no real intellectual difference on the point. I wished to fill ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... launched his paradox; the frivolous and polite society which he attacked was amused at it without being troubled by it: it was a new field of battle opened for brilliant jousts of wit; he had his partisans and his admirers. In the discussion ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... struggle against continual difficulties, and further still, because anything in the form of accidental injury, or any kind of illness or disability is so very serious in their own sphere. I will explain this seeming paradox of mine. Take the case of a Christmas Pantomime. Surely nobody supposes that the young mother in the pit who falls into fits of laughter when the baby is boiled or sat upon, would be at all diverted by such an occurrence off the stage. Nor is the decent workman in the gallery, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... her with the screws as well," says Captain Hodgson, and, unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on to the floor. Here we find Fleury's Paradox of the Bulk-headed Vacuum—which we accept now without thought—literally in full blast. The three engines are H.T.&T. assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3000 to the Limit—that is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air "bell"—cut out a vacuum for themselves ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Honor, by the evidence of the priest who baptized her, and by the records of the church, that this young lady is the lawful and only child of Maxime Valois and Dolores Peralta. We have abundant proof to explain the seeming paradox. We are in a position to positively identify the young lady, and to dispose of the contest raised here to-day, as to the marriage of the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sounds, as is made even by four feet—that is, by two men. The beats are not the same. Secondly, by his motions, and especially the brisk motions of the arms. Thirdly, by this briskness itself; for most animals, except man, move with a slow motion—paradox as it may seem—even when they are going along fast. With them it is usually repose in action. Fourthly, and this is rather curious—experience seems to show that fish, and animals and birds certainly, recognise man by his hat or cap, to which they ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination, had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to the logical necessity ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... question were angrily put to him a second time, meet it with another equally brief counter-question or retort. It is this final interchange of thrusts which Plutarch has given, omitting the arguments previously stated by Epameinondas, and necessary to warrant the seeming paradox which he advances. We must recollect that Epameinondas does not contend that Thebes was entitled to as much power in Boeotia as Sparta in Laconia. He only contends that Boeotia, under the presidency of Thebes, was as much an integral political ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... relative and absolute terms, since the end of World War II, the military strength and capability of the United States have never been greater. Yet this condition of virtual military superiority has created a paradox. Absent a massive threat or massive security challenge, it is not clear that this military advantage can (always) be translated into concrete political terms that advance American interests. Nor is it clear that the current structure and foundations ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... was telling Miss Beltham that I join in the abuse of London exactly because I love it. A paradox! she says. But we seem to be effecting a kind of insurance on the life of the things we love best by crying them down violently. You have observed it? Denounce them—they endure for ever! So I join any soul on earth in decrying our dear London. The naughty old City ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be gainsaid. Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern States means retrogression, a paradox which has passed now from the friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly formulates. Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful evils that would ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Wholeheartedly he sought for peace in that year. But it was to be peace with honour. In fact, Great Britain fared better after 1796 than before. As Allies fell away or joined the enemy, her real strength began to appear. The reasons for the paradox are not far to seek. Open enemies are less dangerous than false friends. Further, the complexities of the war, resulting from the conflicting aims of the Allies, vanished. England therefore could act in the way in which Pitt would all along have preferred her to act, namely, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... You vndergo too strict a Paradox, Striuing to make an vgly deed looke faire: Your words haue tooke such paines, as if they labour'd To bring Man-slaughter into forme, and set Quarrelling Vpon the head of Valour; which indeede Is Valour mis-begot, and came into the world, When Sects, and Factions were ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... brilliant piece of satire, gemmed with ingenious paradox. Every page is pregnant with ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... friend. And, that love may deepen into awe, there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that paradox of his position, by which he supports that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the paradox is easily explained, we find much more similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of Catiline which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsen had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wager that, when ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... thought of her as impersonally as he thought of these women, and the fact that she participated in the life of the flesh neither concerned him nor did it matter. That she lived in the flesh instead of in marble was an accident. He smiled at the paradox, for he had recovered from the fears of overnight and was certain that even the longing to strain her in his arms was only part of the impulse which compels our lips to the rose, which buries our ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's physical environment; but at the same time—paradox as it may seem—more conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and beauty interwoven with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf child and every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very stuff that language is made of, the thought and the experience of his race. The language must be one used by a nation, not an artificial thing. Volapuk is a paradox, unless one has French or English or German or some other language that has grown up in a nation. The deaf child who has only the sign language of De l'Epee is an intellectual Philip Nolan, an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the thoughts of an Englishman, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 1834. The MS., which is inscribed in a notebook, is immediately preceded by that of the first draft of Limbo (ante, p. 429). The so-called 'Ne Plus Ultra' may have been intended to illustrate a similar paradox—the 'positivity of negation'. No date can be assigned to either of these metaphysical conceits, but there can be little doubt that they were 'written ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Adam's laboratory, a huge apartment filled with queer apparatus and cages of live animals. The room was a strange paradox. Part of the equipment, the walls, and the floor was glistening with newness, and part was moulding with extreme age. The powers of disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... beautifully than when he was describing the gentle process of her influences on the solitary human soul. He understood simplicity: the charm of little happinesses, the sweetness of ordinary affections, the beauty of a country face. The paradox is strange; how was it that it should have been left to the morbid, tortured, half-crazy egoist of the Confessions to lead the way to such spiritual delicacies, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... magic. Magic! That was the word which the thought of Venice evoked. It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere impossible might naturally happen, in which two and two might make five, a paradox elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie to its own premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and again, long to get away into such a world as that? Tony, at least, had felt the longing ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... ladyship have thought it?) have I ventured upon a strange paradox, that even this strongest instance of his debasing himself, is not the weakest of his pride: and he ventured once at Sir Simon Darnford's to say, in your hearing, as you may remember, that, in his conscience, he thought he should hardly have made a tolerable husband to any body ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the years have passed, and I comprehend somewhat of the paradox of things, and I know that this death was just what he might have prayed for. It was a fitting close for a life that had done a supreme and mighty work. His ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... strive to enlarge and to render as precise as possible this record, which in some places is dim, in others very clear. We cannot do without it, such as it is, and taken as a whole, it is rich in truth. In a spirit of paradox only, can one doubt if there ever were a Greece or a Rome, an Alexander or a Caesar, a feudal Europe overthrown by a series of revolutions, that on the 1st of November 1517 the theses of Luther were seen fixed to the door of the church of Wittenberg, or that the Bastile was taken by the people ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... to solve this apparent paradox, and to bring into greater clearness the train of ideas which I have been endeavouring to indicate, I must borrow the results of the inquiry which was attempted in the earlier portion of the preceding chapter. We saw one peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... war therefore inevitable, and must we not prepare diligently for it? I will answer all these questions quite simply and directly without casuistry and logic-chopping, and honestly desiring to avoid paradox and "cleverness." And these quite simple answers will not be in contradiction with anything that I have written, nor will they invalidate any of the principles I have attempted ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... best policy in general not to explain any remark he had made, but to say the right thing better next time instead. I suppose he believed, with another friend of mine, that "when explanations become necessary, they become impossible," a paradox well worth the consideration of those who write letters to newspapers. But Lady Bernard understood him well enough, and was only unwinding the clew ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... nations was given to the thought of war, and yet the mass of their citizens was a teeming democracy as heedless of and unfitted for fighting, mentally, morally, physically, as any population has ever been—or, one ventures to add, could ever be. That was the paradox of the time. It was a period altogether unique in the world's history. The apparatus of warfare, the art and method of fighting, changed absolutely every dozen years in a stupendous progress towards perfection, and people grew less and less warlike, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... are, the keener do they feel their fallings off from it. A moral lapse, which would give me hardly a moment's uneasy thought, is capable of causing in them acute and prolonged sorrow. The nearer they draw to the moral ideal, strange paradox, the farther off from them does it ever appear, and they from it. It is an apostle who writes, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief." Nor can I discover any tolerable explanation of all this, except that the guiding and directive power in the world, ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... no real knowledge of Russia, announced desire for serf-emancipation,—and then, in the modern English way, with plentiful pyrotechnics of antithesis and paradox, threw a gloomy light into the skilfully pictured depths of Imperial despotism, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... Ibsen abruptly parts company with all his predecessors. "'Of course,' reply the rest in chorus, 'a deep and sincere love';— 'together,' add some, 'with prudent good sense.'" The prudent good sense Ibsen allows; but he couples with it the startling paradox that the first condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... oddly stressed, but completely intelligible phrases, he explained that he recognized the paradox his communication represented. Even before 1972, he observed, there had been argument about what would happen if a man could travel in time and happened to go back to an earlier age and kill his grandfather. This communication ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... wearisome. The only criticism which applies adversely to Chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often—and I rather fear he likes being so—obscure. He is brilliant in an original manner, he is original in a brilliant way; scarcely any thought of his is not expressed in paradox. What is orthodox to him is heresy to other people; what is heresy to him is orthodox to other people; and the surprising fact is that he is usually right when he is orthodox, and equally right when he is heretical. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... been sitting up with a sick friend or nursing a Robert-tail flush—well, she must be the newest kind of a "New Woman," with a brain built for bloomers and bike. The New Woman is—she is all right; just the Old Woman in disguise, a paradox and a coat ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the tailor; we will give him fifty guineas provided he can show a calf to his leg. We know he could not; for the tailor had none, and that was because he had not an enemy. No man in friendship with the world ever has calves to his legs. To sum up all in a paradox of our own invention, for which we claim the full credit of originality, we now assert, that more men have risen in the world by the injury of their enemies, than have risen by the kindness of their friends. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured disease before they knew medicine. Art came before aesthetics, and righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other. Hypothesis is confirmed and modified ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... speak from conjecture when I say, for example, that certain eminent members of the Society had obviously never passed that 'asses' bridge' of English metaphysics, the writings of Bishop Berkeley, and considered his form of idealism, when it was mentioned, to be a novel and startling paradox. It was, I fancy, a small minority that had ever really looked into Kant; and Hegel was a name standing for an unknown region wrapped in hopeless mist. This would be enough to disenchant any young gentleman fresh from his compendiums of philosophy. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... election of a new Professor to the Chemical Professorship was going on. Farish was one of the candidates: the man of whom Leslie Foster used to talk in such raptures when he first came from Cambridge; the man who lectured on arches, and whose paradox of the one-toothed wheel William will recollect. My father was introduced to him, and invited him to dine with us: Mr. Farish accepted the invitation. We sat on a bench with a few ladies. A number of Fellows, with black tiles on their heads, walked up and down the hall, whispering ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... advance what seems a paradox, it is evident that even what we regard as inspired genius comes to man in a great measure from Instinct, though as I noted before it is aided by reflection. As the young bird listens to its mother and then sings till ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... most part on that bit of writing. Only thus could he save himself from an access of fury which would only have injured him—the ire of shame in which a man is tempted to beat his head against stone walls. He composed aloud, balancing many a pretty antithesis, and polishing more than one lively paradox. ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... for this year," she told Aunt Emmy. "I have some things to give after all. Some of them quite costly, too; that is, they will cost me something, but I know I'll be better off and richer after I've paid the price. That is what Mr. Grierson would call a paradox, isn't it? I'll explain all about it to you ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Can you guess what locks the door of life? It is faith. If you have faith, faith in God, faith in the Saviour, faith in things that are true and pure, you need never fear that your house of life will be broken into by burglars. You are secure if you have the lock of faith. Now here is a strange paradox, namely—you lock your door only by opening it. Open your door to ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... intractable, with better right, impose and levy for their own use and behoof. Withal, to the one-idea'd philosophy of your absolute theory, systematic, uniformity men of the present day, it should seem an extraordinary paradox, putting all speculation to rout, that despotic Japan should be as prosperous, more powerful, more free from intestine convulsion, although more ancient of standing, therefore to be presumed enjoying at least as much happiness as free and unfettered Switzerland, rioting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... yet concurrent and mighty forces are driving the vessel of State towards the rocks upon which she must split, unless she receives timely aid—a paradox, yet expressive of a momentous and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to plant himself just as near the scene and circumstance as human strength permitted, end there, single-handed if need be, fight out the battle of life, with the daily sense of flaunting the enemy that had robbed him of his joy in life—his one and only child. For with Chestertonian paradox this lonely man's passion ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... freed from the torment of the body, leaving untasted the green water that makes thirst more burning, he was perfectly initiated in the true knowledge of the splendid and glorious love. There seemed to him a monstrous paradox in the assertion that there could be no true love without a corporal presence of the beloved; even the popular sayings of "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," and "familiarity breeds contempt," witnessed to the contrary. He thought, sighing, and with compassion, of ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... may remain unaffected by the condition of Europe. I could perhaps understand such an opinion, if you would or could be entirely isolated from Europe; but as you are not isolated, as you cannot be, as you cannot even have the will to be (for that very will would be a paradox, a logical absurdity, impossible to be carried out, being contrary to the eternal laws of God, which he for nobody's sake will change); therefore to believe that you can go on to be connected with Europe in a thousand respects, and still remain unaffected by its social and political condition, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... there is one thing I have a penchant for, it is common sense! A paradox I detest with my ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... attached a high value to his study of English poetry. When he spoke of "our sage and serious Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)," he was conscious that he was maintaining what seemed a bold paradox in an age when scholasticism still controlled education. It is pleasant to think of Milton during these early years, whether in London or at Christ's College, in his "calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts," before ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... an opinion. It is sufficient to have visited half-a-dozen Italian towns, and to have read a few pages of fashionable aesthetic literature—no other education is needed to fit the intelligent young critic for his easy task. The art of paradox can be learned in five minutes, and practised by any child; it consists chiefly in taking two expressions of opinion from different authors, halving them, and uniting the first half of the one with the second half of the other. The result is invariably startling, and generally ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the Catholics have too much already, and those who allege that the lower orders, at least, have nothing more to require. We are told by the former, that the Catholics never will be contented: by the latter, that they are already too happy. The last paradox is sufficiently refuted by the present as by all past petitions; it might as well be said, that the negroes did not desire to be emancipated, but this is an unfortunate comparison, for you have already delivered them out of the house ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... regularity, logic, principles, ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the rule of emotions and passions in practical action."[250] "Man's language developed because he could make, not merely passive ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... paradox here," Burnett explained. "Every excess eventually undermines itself. Everybody in the movement starts by wanting to act for their beliefs because work appears so attractive for its own sake. I was that way, too, until I studied the dead art ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... Britain had a government that governed; America had not. Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does not govern, self-government, "government of the people, by the people and for the people" (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished from the face ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... circumstance upon his reader at the end. Thus, if a friend were to ask me to guess who dined with him yesterday, it would be fatuous if he had in mind somebody of whom he knew I had never heard. The only person who has ever solved "The Big Bow Mystery" is myself. This is not paradox but plain fact. For long before the book was written, I said to myself one night that no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access. The puzzle was scarcely propounded ere the solution flew up ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... known as the hydrostatic paradox, according to which a pressure applied at any point of an inclosed mass of liquid is transmitted unaltered to every other point, has been singularly fruitful in practical applications. Mr. Bramah was perhaps the first to recognize its value and importance. He applied it to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... of the road are a paradox quite, That puzzles the marvelling throng; For if on the left, you are yet on the right, And if you are right, you ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at this time—in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was, and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it has ever been since—or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable, fairly complicated with classes not very sharply ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... I had a wholesome prejudice against running aground', so that my mentor's turn for breezy paradox was at first rather exasperating. After lunch the large-scale chart of the estuaries was brought down, and we pored over it together, mapping out work for the next few days. There is no need to tire the general reader with ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... supposed that this swell is caused by distant westerly gales in the Atlantic, which force an undue quantity of water into the North Sea, and thus produce the apparent paradox of great rolling breakers ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... question, and to ask it with something more than pain,—to ask it, if only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make out with certainty what it is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... great measure, beyond reach of insult from an enemy. Such an assertion, coming from one who has just detailed the particulars of its capture, may, indeed, appear to partake not slightly of the nature of a paradox; but there is no denying that the fall of Washington ought to be attributed much more to the misconduct of the Americans themselves, than to the skill or enterprise of those who effected it. Had the emergency been contemplated, and in a proper manner provided against, or had ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... tenderness and refinement exhibited by man she transfers by some inexplicable legerdemain of logic to the feminine side, and makes somehow into a new proof of his hopeless inferiority; and she is landed at last in the amazing paradox, that "the most powerful feminine souls have appeared in masculine forms, thus far in human career." (Vol. II. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... he is needed, is Monsieur F., whose great, dark eyes are acquainted with pain; he is a frail, little person and the substantial man of the village, a living paradox. Just when Monsieur R. announces—dramatically waving his spatula—that that is the last ounce of boric ointment and no more peroxide in the cupboard and we are raving around and denouncing the pharmacist, Monsieur F. steps up and inquires what the trouble is, knowing full ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan's hand. And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz an audacious, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... of the verse yields no sense. The meaning, however, is this: Atichccheda or Atichcchanda implies a hyperbolic statement, Ativaua means a paradox. It is said that by gift of even a palmful of water one may attain to a place which is attainable by a hundred sacrifices. This ordinance, which looks like a hyperbole, and its statement by Vedic teachers ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... it is no paradox to say that the ignorance, the decadence of science, of the arts, commerce and agriculture, the depopulation and poverty of Spain, are mainly due to ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... modern idea is not my idea; it is too socialistic. And as for culture applied to the masses, you utter a paradox. The masses and work is the truth one ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the highest form of physicalized power in the universe. It knows no resistance, it passes thru all substances and pervades all space. It is the most vital power in the universe. Our modern life presents a magnetic paradox, it affords the greatest development of magnetism and is the greatest destroyer of it. It is generated by the brain, flows to the right thru the body in form of a figure 8. From the brain to the solar plexus, across to the left side, then down to the procreative ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... Paradox serves to dislodge prejudice; and blasphemy may rudely but effectually bring to their senses those who have mistaken the hardness of their hearts for loyalty, and their easy default for success. But practical wisdom belongs only to those who proceed unwaveringly ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted—the vital power, for example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... recognised by all. Indeed, after reading M. Lemaitre's book, one begins to understand more clearly why it is that English critics find it difficult to appreciate to the full the literature of France. It is no paradox to say that that country is as insular as our own. When we find so eminent a critic as M. Lemaitre observing that Racine 'a vraiment "acheve" et porte a son point supreme de perfection la tragedie, cette etonnante forme d'art, et qui est bien ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... His dominion is also the seat of His repose. The beneficent activity just described is wielded from a calm, central palace, and does not break the King's tranquillity. That is a paradox, except to those who know that Jesus Christ, sitting in undisturbed rest at the right hand of God, thence works with and for His servants. His repose is full of active energy; His active energy is full of repose. And that place of calm abode is 'glorious' or, more emphatically and literally, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... not improve her pupil, she did improve herself, for the more of love and truth we impart to others, the more we have for ourselves; making the very pretty moral paradox, that the more of love and truth we subtract from our store, the more we have ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... reasoning. The most remarkable is the third, in which he endeavored to show that a man cannot be wise unless he be all-wise, a doctrine which he altogether overturns in his De Amicitia, written but four years afterward. Cicero knew well what was true, and wrote his paradox in order to give a zest to the subject. In the fourth and the sixth are attacks upon Clodius and Crassus, and are here republished in what would have been the very worst taste amid the politeness of our modern times. A man now may hate and say so while his foe is still alive and strong; but ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... cell as a unit, and the whole life of the plant or animal is that of the cells which compose them, and in them or by them all its vital processes are carried on. It may sound paradoxical to speak of an animal or plant being composed of millions of cells; but beyond the momentary shock of the paradox no harm is done. ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... could not buy fresh green vegetables anywhere in the homestead country, and they were like manna from Heaven. It had been almost a year since Ida Mary and I had tasted green foods. It is a curious paradox that people living on the land depended for food or canned goods from the cities, and that the fresh milk and cream and green vegetables associated with farm ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... personnel, but I think, though, he hardly allows enough for the point of view. These actors and actresses are not literary. (They should be, I know.) They look at an author's work as a man looks at the universe—a small part at a time. That trite old paradox that, to the actor, the part is greater than the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, too, how "touchy," as he calls it, they must be, in the nature of things. Their touchiness, their affectation, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... tense eagerness for the phrase that came next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kind and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you, sir," he said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching a paradox. "The English people 'ave some common sense, and they'd rather be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... ought in any degree to alarm us. Are we apprehensive that these men will become more dangerous by becoming freemen? Are we alarmed, lest by being admitted into the enjoyment of civil rights, they will be inspired with a deadly enmity against the rights of others? Strange, unaccountable paradox! How much more rational would it be, to argue that the natural enemy of the privileges of a freeman, is he who is robbed of them himself! Dishonorable to the species is the idea that they would ever prove injurious to our interests—released from the shackles of slavery, by ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... studies of celebrated writers, we need say no more than that they are written in careful prose. M. De Banville is not only a poet, but in his "Petit Traite de Poesie Francaise" (Bibliotheque de l'Echo de la Sorbonne, s.d.) a teacher of the mechanical part of poetry. He does not, of course, advance a paradox like that of Baudelaire, "that poetry can be taught in thirty lessons." He merely instructs his pupil in the material part—the scansion, metres, and so on—of French poetry. In this little work he introduces these "traditional forms of verse," which once ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox—and sometimes he realised it—his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, that, if it may, by clever manipulation ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... in this eye that would lead any one to suspect its artificiality. It was at least twice the size of life; but there was a fearful speculative light in its iris, which seemed to expand and contract like the eye of a living being, that rendered it a horrible staring paradox. It looked like the naked eye of the Cyclops, torn from his forehead, and still burning with wrath ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... poems, the Dies Irae. There have been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies Irae is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different opinion. Fortunately ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the embodiment Of everything that is excellent. But I fancy I've found one diminutive flaw In that else impeccable thing, the Law. As its constitutional guardian, I Must extract that mote from the legal eye. It seems a preposterous paradox To exclude the accused from the Witness's Box. To alter that is a duty for A ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... support, by supplying him abundantly with what he most wanted. It had been said that those stupendous masses of ice, called islands or mountains, melted into fresh water, though Crantz, the relator of that paradox, did not imagine they originated from the sea, but that they were first formed in the great rivers of the North, and being carried down into the ocean, were afterwards increased to that amazing height by the snow that fell upon them*. But that all frozen sea-water would thaw into fresh, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... that question, for during the whole of the earl's recital the dark face of his companion had literally burned with rage; and here we may observe how generally selfishness, which makes the man of the world, prevents its possessor, by a sort of paradox, from being consummately so. For Mauleverer, occupied by the pleasure he felt at his own wit, and never having that magic sympathy with others which creates the incessantly keen observer, had not for a moment thought that he was offending ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a great structure of many things—not only of stones and timbers and painted glass." They walked round this example of one, pausing, criticising, admiring, and discussing; mingling the grave with the gay and paradox with contemplation. Behind and at the sides the huge, dusky vessel of the church seemed to dip into the Seine or rise out of it, floating expansively—a ship of stone with its flying buttresses thrown forth like an array of mighty oars. Nick Dormer lingered near it in joy, in soothing ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... (1906), Beside Still Waters (1907), and Thy Rod and Thy Staff (1912) have strengthened faith and proved a tonic to many. Chesterton is a suggestive and stimulating essayist in spite of the fact that he often bombards his readers with too much paradox. Early in life he was an agnostic and a follower of Herbert Spencer, but he later became a champion of Christian faith. Sometimes Chesterton seems to be merely clever, but he is usually too thought-provoking to be read passively. His Robert Browning (1903), Varied Types (1903), Heretics ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... almost every page; and a little more detail may be given on this head later. But the presentation of Rabelais as a novelist-before-novels may cause more demur, and even suggest the presence of the now hopelessly discredited thing—paradox itself. Of course, if anybody requires regular plot as a necessary constituent, only paradox could contend for that. It has been contended—and rightly enough—that in the general scheme and the two (or ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... without paradox be it spoken, thy horses at your owne proper costs and charges shall kneed vp to the knees all the while thou art here in spruce beere & lubeck licour. Not a dog thou bringst with thee but shall be banketted with rhenish wine ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... paradox, Pierre Philibert!" replied she, with a smile. "But it means, I suppose, that you painted a universal portrait of me which will be like through all my seven ages. Such a picture might be true of the soul, Pierre, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... forty-eight hours; but if time is only phenomenal, as the philosophers say, and life only in feeling, as the poets aver, we were some months, if not years, older at that moment than we had been two days before. Yet younger, too,—though this be a paradox,—for the birches had infused into us some of their own ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... paradox! Black is the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons, and the school of night; And beauty's crest becomes the ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... by an uncompromising Ontology should bring into doubt the foundations of Revealed as well as of Natural Theology. It was a bold thing to do, for since he was come to Berlin, and had read more of his books, he had gathered that Mendelssohn still professed Orthodox Judaism. A paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the maze of worry. Many of the suggestions have been scattered through preceding sections. The worrier and folly-doubter is more likely to be benefited by trying them than by arguing about them, and it is within the realms of possibility that some may come to realize the truth of the paradox that he who loses himself shall ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the affirmative. Faithful to logic and to its theory, the book did not shrink from applying them to the external case of the Irish Church. It did not disguise the difficulties of the case, for the author was alive to the paradox which it involved. But the one master idea of the system, that the State as it then stood was capable in this age, as it had been in ages long gone by, of assuming beneficially a responsibility for the inculcation of a particular religion, carried him through all. His doctrine ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... maintain, that, without the Vices of Man, it would be impossible to enjoy all the Ease, Glory, and Greatness, the World can afford, and which, in short, we are fond of, you would think his Assertion to be a terrible Paradox. ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... against draughts. In any event the sum total was a matchless assemblage of grace, charm, talent, sympathy, efficiency. "I am not worthy of her," he said humbly. "But I must have her," he added, with resolution. He was not the author of this ruthless masculine paradox. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Essay on Justification in 1837; it was aimed at the Lutheran dictum that justification by faith only was the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. I considered that this doctrine was either a paradox or a truism,—a paradox in Luther's mouth, a truism in Melanchthon's. I thought that the Anglican Church followed Melanchthon, and that in consequence between Rome and Anglicanism, between high Church and low Church, there was no real ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... successively wielding the arms of the catholics and protestants, he proves that neither the way of authority, nor the way of examination can afford the multitude any test of religious truth; and dexterously concludes that custom and education must be the sole grounds of popular belief. The ancient paradox of Plutarch, that atheism is less pernicious than superstition, acquires a tenfold vigor, when it is adorned with the colours of his wit, and pointed with the acuteness of his logic. His critical dictionary is a vast repository of facts and opinions; ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... thence,—a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... lovers of China—"pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the East—assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... matter. If Whitman's paradox is true, that the soul and body are one, in the same sense the scientific paradox is true: that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless a phase of the universal ether—a reality which can be described only in terms of the negation of matter. In a flash of lightning ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... 'thinking things together.' Every man, says Hegel, is a philosopher, and in so far as it is the natural tendency of the human mind to connect and unify the manifold phenomena of life, the paradox of the German thinker is not without a measure of truth. But while this is only the occasional pastime of the ordinary individual, it is the conscious and habitual aim of the philosopher. In daily life people are wont to make assumptions which ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Appearances were not always a safe guide in the complicated tangle of human affairs. Things were forever happening which left experience wide-eyed with astonishment. The contradictions of human nature persisted in all human acts. In this moat-house mystery, the grimmest paradox of his brilliant career, Colwyn was determined not to accept the presumption of the facts until he had satisfied himself that no other interpretation was possible. His subtle mind had been challenged by a finger-post of doubt in the written evidence; ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... it may seem a paradox to say it, the amount of play in Oxford has increased the amount of work. Organized games mean physical fitness, and physical fitness means ability to get intellectual work done. Perhaps it may ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... his body was as vigorous and his mind as alert as they had been in his fortieth year. His thick hair and beard were scarcely grey, and the wrinkles on his white, thoughtful face were rare. Yet the Doctor, when questioned as to the secret of his youthfulness, being like many learned men fond of a paradox, used to reply that diet and regularity had nothing to do with it, and that the Southern sun and the climate of the Neapolitan coast, which he had chosen among all places to be the abode of his old age, were in reality ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... from literature. Pure literary enthusiasm sheds but few rays. To be lively is to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... supreme; in which the plans of the Guises, of Montmorency and St. Andre, were set aside, to make room for those of Conde and Montluc, Bishop of Valence. It is this fact that furnishes the clue to a circumstance which at first sight seems an inexplicable paradox, namely, that almost the very day on which the intolerant resolution, compelling the Huguenots to surrender the churches, even in places where they constituted the vast majority of the population, was adopted, the members of the triumvirate, formed for the express purpose of upholding the papal ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... benevolent, and gifted with a sense of fun which was even stronger than his desire for dollars. I have talked very confidentially with him many times, for he was very fond of me, and always observed that to engineer some grotesque and startling paradox into tremendous notoriety, to make something immensely puzzling with a stupendous sell as postscript, was more of a motive with him than even the main chance. He was a genius like Rabelais, but one who employed business and humanity for material instead of literature, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... passing himself off for a man of condition formed the point of departure for every conversation. It was discovered that there were but three persons present who had not suspected him from the first; and, by a singular paradox, the most astute of all proved to be old Mr. Bicksit, the traveler, once a visitor at Chateaurien; for he, according to report, had by a coup of diplomacy entrapped the impostor into an admission that ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington |
