"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matter is supposed to be the one reality with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come in contact with a piece of matter. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Ireland. Perhaps that is most important of all. You will hear lots of Americans—good men, too—damning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing, unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you. Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always damns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom of it is paved with the bones of ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... perhaps the very tomb which now glistens by the moonbeam is the one which consecrates his memory! That man was passionately addicted to literature;—he had a strong mind; a wonderful grasp of intellect; but his love of paradox and hypothesis quite ruined his faculties. NICAS happened to discover some glaring errors in his last treatise, and the poor man grew sick at heart in consequence. Nothing short of infallibility and invincibility satisfied him; and, like the Spaniard in the 'Diable Boiteux,' who went ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... moves me to tears," said Mr. Amarinth musingly. "There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes, second series, vol. iii, p. 116. D. Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, p. vi, proofs and illustrations. G. Save, Jehanne des Armoises, pp. 6, 7. It is well known that Gabriel Naude maintained the paradox that Jeanne was only burned in effigy. Considerations politiques sur les coups d'etat, Rome, 1639, in 4to. G. Lefevre-Pontalis, La fausse ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the public mind is keyed to its highest pitch, ready to snap at any moment. Strong feeling has generated in many minds intellectual hysteria. "In war time," says E. H. Griggs, "there is a curious paradox of widening radicalism of thought, with constantly decreasing freedom of action and expression. When the discrepancy becomes too great, you have the explosion,—a revolution." Therefore in this time of intellectual ferment, the continued affirmation of ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and white women, by means of the test of the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... yet it true is, That down from Pharamond to Louis All covet life, yet call it pain: All feel the ill, yet shun the cure; Can sense this paradox endure? Resolve ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... paradox of this phenomenon is that Puritanism, beaten to a pulp by an ever-increasing herd of first, second, third, and fourth rate iconoclasts, has triumphed completely in the legislatures of the country. With ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... 13th.—Ireland maintains its pre-eminence as the land of paradox. Among the hunger-strikers recently released from Mountjoy prison were (by an accident) several men who had actually been convicted. The House learned to its surprise that these men cannot be re-arrested, but are out for good (their own, though possibly not the community's); ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... commerce, manufactures, agriculture, manners, or religion; and this arises from the multitude of people of all descriptions, who are willing, and who at least appear able, to afford you information. Strange paradox. A Frenchman makes it a rule, never to refuse information on any subject when it is demanded of him; and although he may, in fact, never have directed his attention to the matter in question, and may not possess the slightest information, he will yet descant most plausibly, and ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... varieties, or swift or slow, or dense or delicate. The wind in the patch of pine woods off there—how sibilant. Or at sea, I can imagine it this moment, tossing the waves, with spirits of foam flying far, and the free whistle, and the scent of the salt—and that vast paradox somehow with all its action and restlessness conveying a sense ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... lines more must be devoted to guns, or rather to a gun, for the general opinion in India now seems to be that only one gun is necessary for shooting shot and ball—at least for all shot shooting and ball shooting in the jungly countries. That gun is the widely-known Paradox, which, up to 100 yards, is as accurate as a double rifle, and even at 150 yards makes very fair practice. This gun was a good many years ago recommended to me by Sir Samuel Baker, and I found it to be such an excellent weapon that I now use no other. The great advantage of the Paradox ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... of circumstances, those circumstances were at least defined for him by external laws which he had not created: while the Socialists, with Fourier at their head (as it has always seemed to me), fell into the extraordinary paradox of supposing that though man was the creature of circumstances, he was to become happy by creating the very circumstances which were afterwards to create him. But both of them erred, surely, in ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which he can, for ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... writes Miss Henderson, "has perhaps become obsolete; our national breathlessness cannot brook this paradox of pastoral musings within sight and sound and smell of the busy lure of money making. Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city life. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... to mean all I'm capable of meanin' without any outside help. I mean you're the great human paradox—less human and more paradox then I've seen advertised at a circus—and whilest you're perpetual dodging one horn or t'other of a dilemma, any friend of yours is getting bunked square between the two. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... without being re-minded of a sentence in Huxley's famous essay, On the Physical Basis of Life:—"The living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... as stupid by nature; what a paradox! because they did not consider that slaves, having no object to stimulate industry; have not their faculties sharpened by the only thing that can exercise them, self-interest. Others have been brought forward as brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and sciences, only because the progress of improvement ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... objectionable in every point of view: the other would be a physical way; such as requiring a God who should be at once material and immaterial, abstraction and concretion; or, for a still more confounding paradox to Reason (considered as antagonist to Faith, in lieu of being strictly its ally), an arithmetical contradiction, an algebraic mystery, such as would be included in the idea of Composite Unity; one involving many, and many collapsed ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the proper place to explain the paradox of method in a critique of practical reason, namely, that the concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law (of which it seems as if it must be the foundation), but only after it and ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... found in every book, every chapter almost, and indeed 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 if you take in Grandgousier, three) generations of histories of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and radiant presence. He pictured the successful Stocks welcomed by her, and words of praise for which he would have given his immortal soul, meted out lavishly to that owl-like being. It was a dismal business, and ruefully, but half-humorously, he caught at the paradox of ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... 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. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... a really learned scholar. He was for long in the India Office, where he rose to be Chief Examiner, coming between James Mill and John Stuart Mill. He was the author of several somewhat whimsical, but quite unique novels, full of paradox, prejudice, and curious learning, with witty dialogue and occasional poems interspersed. Among them are Headlong Hall (1816), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Maid Marian (1822), Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860). He was ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... itself obligatory; and when a person is asked to believe that this morality derives its obligation from some general principle round which custom has not thrown the same halo, the assertion is to him a paradox; the supposed corollaries seem to have a more binding force than the original theorem; the superstructure seems to stand better without, than with, what is represented as its foundation. He says to himself, I feel that I am bound not to rob or murder, betray or deceive; ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... 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 its intricacies, nor is there space to reproduce ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... "Talking paradox to Armine?" said the cheerful voice of the young mother. "My dear sprites, do you know that it is past eight! How wet you are! Good night, and mind you don't go upstairs in ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crystallized. No fundamental thoughts, ideas, or ideals are present. There is no 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age. It is they who get counted when Messrs. Lombroso, Nisbet, and others invoke statistics to defend their paradox. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... end, kept itself in condition for running, always fit, always brisk, without taking the least beakful of nourishment from the day when it left the egg, we could find no words strong enough to express our incredulity. Now this paradox of activity maintained without the stay of food is realized by the Clotho ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... hereditary, and that, instead of death being certain in a patient in whose family it has been, this fact alone ensures the victim a much better prospect of cure than if it had never existed in the family. The explanation of this seeming paradox is quite logical from a medical standpoint. The theory of the vaccine treatment of disease is that if you infuse into the blood the products of the germs of certain diseases, the individual in whose blood the vaccine has been put, will wholly resist that particular disease, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... mostly because he could not resist the temptation to laugh at the clergy. He wrote a very characteristic Work entitled "The Praise of Folly," "Encomium Moriae" (a play on the name of Sir Thomas More), in which he maintains a sort of paradox, setting forth the value and advantages of folly, i.e., of indulging the light fancies and errors of imagination. With much humorous illustration he enumerates a great many conceits, and includes among them jests, but his main argument may be ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... from chronic mental dyspepsia, have ever been liable to mistake the rumblings of internal flatulence for the Witness of the Spirit. In their current pronouncements Iglesias met with a wearisome passion for paradox, and an equally wearisome disposition to hail all eccentricity as genius, all hysteria as inspiration. While in their exaltation of the "sub-conscious self" —namely, of those blind movements of instinct and foreboding common to the lower animals and to savage or degenerate man alike—as against ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... has never interested me." I found that he was a Cambridge man, or, at least, was intimately acquainted with Cambridge life and thought; and this was another bond between us. His Radicalism was not very formidable; it amounted to little more, indeed, than a turn for humorous paradox. Our discussion reminded me of Fuller's description of the wit-combats between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare at the "Mermaid." I was the Spanish galleon, my Fascinating Friend was the English man-of-war, ready "to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... here, 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
... Great 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper. The only way to be really free is to be bound—by law. It's the big paradox. Do you know ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... storms hath been In other elements, and on the rocks Of perils, overlooked or unforeseen, I have sustained my share of worldly shocks, The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen My errors with defensive paradox;[ac] I have been cunning in mine overthrow, The careful pilot of my ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... sentimental Nationalists in Chelsea, but had not the smallest effect of any kind on the people of Belfast. They, just then, had no leisure time to spend in reading epigrams, and never at any time appreciated paradox. An English statesman of great ability announced to the world at large that a demonstration was one thing, and a review was quite a different thing. He went no further than to point out the fact that there was a distinction between the two things; but everybody understood that a demonstration ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... for the mothers; and recent Government inquiries seem to show that in spite of universal employment, and high wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while at the same time—uncomfortable paradox!—the amount of alcohol consumed is greater. One hears stories of extravagance among those who have been making "war-profits," but they are less common this year than last; and as to my own experience, all my friends are wearing their old clothes, and the West End ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... friends. To be sure, she had not told them a word which was not strictly true, but they had misunderstood her and she knew it. To make matters worse, she had deliberately constructed her sentences that they might be deceived and yet she was telling the truth. Taking it all in all, it was a paradox. She hated deception, and Hester had placed her in such a position that she had been compelled to put a double meaning ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... ribbons across a desert which isn't a desert, past caravans of camels led by picturesque Mongol horsemen, the Twentieth Century suddenly and violently interjected into the Middle Ages, should be contrast and paradox enough for even the most blase sportsman. I am a naturalist who has wandered into many of the far corners of the earth. I have seen strange men and things, but what I saw on the great Mongolian plateau fairly took ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... 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 and sturgion. On ...
— 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
... drank the desert, unconsciously seeking there in its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self. Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... unhandsomely treated by Nature, maimed and incomplete. Even the Divine Light, resident within her, failed to reconcile her to that reading. She shrank back in protest, once again, against the dealing of Almighty God with this only child of hers. And yet—such is the adorable paradox of a living faith—even while shrinking, while protesting, she flung herself for support, for help, upon the very Being who had permitted, in a sense ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... continue to endure with their families. They are prudent without being at all mean or penurious, and are fond of money without having a tittle of avarice. This may at first sight appear stated from a love of paradox, yet nothing can be more strictly and simply true; this is, in fact, a singular race, and they seem especially endowed by Providence to forward the great work in which they are engaged—to clear the wilderness and lay bare the wealth of this rich country with herculean force and restless ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... 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. You may take this, reader, in any sense; apply it to hanging ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... that "the ancients carried the art of glass-making to a higher degree of perfection than ourselves, though it may appear a paradox to those who have not seen their works in this material;" and we may even add that they used it for more purposes, excepting of course windows, the inconvenience of which in the hot sun of Egypt would have been unbearable, or even in Italy, and only one pane of glass has been found at ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. But the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. She has spiritually lost him, but he has gained her; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (This poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) It is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... misconceptions? I have been making his acquaintance lately. He is an agreeable rattle of a pessimist; his essay on 'The Misery of Mankind' is quite lively reading. At first his assimilation of Christianity and Pessimism (it occurs in his essay on 'Suicide') dazzled me as an audacious paradox. But there is truth in it. Verily, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, and man is a degraded monster, and sin is over all. Ah, my friend, I have shed many of my illusions since I came to this seething ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Christ, we must not forget that the only glory of the Virgin was the glory of true womanhood. "The glory of true womanhood consists in being herself; not in striving to be something else. It is the false paradox and heresy of this present age to claim for her as a glory, the right to leave her sphere. Her glory lies in her sphere, and God has given her a sphere distinct; as in the Epistle to the Church of Corinth, when, in that wise chapter, St. Paul rendered unto womanhood ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... discontent. Most white persons are unable to appreciate the rancor and bitterness which the Negro, as a matter of self-preservation, has learned to hide beneath a smile, a joke, or merely an impassive face." The inherent paradox of trying to inculcate pride, dignity, and aggressiveness in a black soldier while inflicting on him the segregationist's concept of the Negro's (p. 020) place in society created in him an insupportable tension. Second, segregation wasted black manpower, a valuable military ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... he had employed in his parting speech in the Students' Union, when he paid his enthusiastic tribute to the Grand Republic, now kept recurring to him, and in this moment the paradox seemed cruel. The Grand Republic, what did it care for such as he? A pair of brawny arms fit to wield the pick-axe and to steer the plow it received with an eager welcome; for a child-like, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of the Duanes—had he come to feel fear? No! Never in all his wild life had he so longed to go out and meet men face to face. It was not fear that held him back. He hated this hiding, this eternal vigilance, this hopeless life. The damnable paradox of the situation was that if he went out to meet these men there was absolutely no doubt of his doom. If he clung to his covert there was a chance, a merest chance, for his life. These pursuers, dogged and unflagging as they had been, were mortally afraid ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... be fading 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
... virtues and achievements. He extolled the "germinating disorder" of Moscow far above the "implacable discipline" of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. "But all exaltation neglects," said Prothero. "No religion has ever boasted that its saints were spick and span." This controversy raged between them in the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... survey of what Americans are and how they get that way would probably see it as a paradox that within the armed establishment the inculcation of ideals is considered the most vital of all teaching, while in our gentler and less rigid institutions, there is steadily ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... with a marvel of precision. We see that the earth ends; we cannot reach the end we see; therefore the "earth doth end with endless ending." It is a case of that contradiction in the form of the words used, which brings out a truth in another plane as it were;—a paradox in words, not in meaning, for the words can bear no meaning but the one which reveals ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... reproduction the greatest possible, its doctrine seems to be in every respect as just as it is generous and liberal. Its followers are very numerous; and as men are fond of paradoxes, and of appearing to understand what surpasses the comprehensions of ordinary people, the paradox which it maintains, concerning the unproductive nature of manufacturing labour, has not, perhaps, contributed a little to increase the number of its admirers. They have for some years past made a pretty considerable sect, distinguished in the French republic ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... late, arrived at such an extreme as to advocate the study to the exclusion of all others, with the exception of modern languages. My paradox is this, that which is downright indispensable for everyday life, do not teach us; for then, in spite of ourselves, we must, in these subjects, become our own instructors. If, in a few years after we have left the school, we possess not a respectable ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... of departing from common phrases and opinions; it being a main part of our inquiry, to examine whose notions are widest of the common road, and most repugnant to the general sense of the world. But, can you think it no more than a philosophical paradox, to say that REAL SOUNDS ARE NEVER HEARD, and that the idea of them is obtained by some other sense? And is there nothing in this contrary to nature and the ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... allowable ... to steal or take by force the necessary food or medicine, or kidnap and compel to officiate the only qualified medical practitioner.'[20] Wherefore, since to steal or to kidnap is essentially wrong, it may sometimes be allowable to do wrong. Mr. Mill's explanation of the paradox is, that 'there are particular cases in which some other social duty is so important as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice; but that in such cases we usually say, not that justice must give way to some other moral principle, but that ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... prepossesses them in his Favour. A handsome Motto has the same Effect. Besides that, it always gives a Supernumerary Beauty to a Paper, and is sometimes in a manner necessary when the Writer is engaged in what may appear a Paradox to vulgar Minds, as it shews that he is supported by good Authorities, and is not singular in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... literal version 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 that looks like a paradox, fill me with wonder. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the critical writer are epigram, paradox, and satire. An epigram is a very short phrase or sentence which is so full of implied meaning or suggestion that it catches the attention at once, and remains in the memory easily. The paradox is something of the same sort on a larger scale. It is a statement that we can hardly ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... national morality and probably also of national intellect. Drunkenness and vice of other kinds will flourish on such a soil, and you cannot get healthy brains to grow on unhealthy bodies. Cleanliness and self-respect grow together, and it is no paradox to affirm that you tend to purify men's thoughts and feelings when you purify the air they breathe.' He supported liberally the movement for establishing coffee-houses, and he looked with great hope to the co-operative movement as averting or mitigating industrial conflicts. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Trifles, and that what I neglect is of the greatest Importance: In short, I find a Contest in my own Mind between Reason and Fashion. I remember you once told me, that I might live in the World, and out of it, at the same time. Let me beg of you to explain this Paradox more at large to me, that I may conform my Life, if possible, both to my Duty and my Inclination. I am, Your ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... (removing the handkerchief). You have fairly earned your release. By the way, do you remember an old paradox upon this subject, "What nobody cares to give away, ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the youngest quantities of art and character taken together that ever arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to something more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... banter from Carnaby, professing to despise a man who knew nothing of game but its taste. The conversation reverted to technicalities of sport, full of terms and phrases unintelligible to Harvey; recounting feats with 'Empress' and 'Paradox', the deadly results of a 'treble A', or of 'treble-nesting slugs', and boasting of a 'right and left with No. 6'. Hugh appeared to forget all about his domestic calamity; only when his guests rose did he recur to it, and with an air of contemptuous impatience. But he made a sign to Rolfe, requesting ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... 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 perhaps ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... always the unexpected that happens," receives in this country a confirmation from an unlooked-for quarter, as does the fact of human nature being always, discouragingly, the same in spite of varied surroundings. This sounds like a paradox, but is an exceedingly simple statement ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... vessels of the skin, and renders them less capable of being affected by a smaller degree of heat. Thus we see that the effects of the hot and cold bath are different and opposite; the one debilitates by stimulating, and the other produces stimulant or tonic effects by debilitating. This seeming paradox may, however, be easily explained by the principles we have laid down; and though the hot and cold bath produce such different effects, yet it is only the same fluid, with a small variation in the degree of temperature; but these effects ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... 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 ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... regulate the essential activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained: to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell, perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence but also in the next. Their vows were poverty, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... his life, shall lose it;" the divine paradox was his text, and he told Christina plainly that by saving for herself this life of wider experience and greater opportunity, she was missing the one great opportunity that comes to all souls. She ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... exceedingly monotonous and real, and further, are a 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
... down in Kent The students' time is not misspent. Some of the arts at any rate Thrive in this Eden up-to-date; And doubtless each girl-gard'ner tries To win the term's Top-dressing Prize, Or trains her sense of paradox (While gathering "nuts" and "plums" and stocks) By taking Flora's new degree— "Spinster of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... often been remarked that to steal a valuable Violin is as hazardous as to steal a child; its identity is equally impregnable, in fact, cannot be disguised, save at the price of entire demolition. To use a paradox, Violins, like people, are all alike, yet none are alike. The indelible personality of the best Violins has been a powerful agent in the cause of morality, and has deterred many from attempting to steal them. We have, however, instances of undiscovered robberies of valuable instruments, and ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... involving absolute isolation; not even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience to law, a paradox beyond ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... stateliness, even awfulness, when awe was needed. Remember that, if, again, the Gospels are to be believed. He alone, of all personages of whom history tells us, solved in His own words and deeds the most difficult paradox of human character- -to be at once utterly conscious, and yet utterly unconscious, of self; to combine with perfect self-sacrifice a perfect self-assertion. Whether or not His being able to do that proved ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... common to speak of Shakespeare as a miracle of spontaneous genius, who did his best things by force of instinct, not of art; and that, consequently, he was nowise indebted to time and experience for the reach and power which his dramas display. This is an "old fond paradox" which seems to have originated with those who could not conceive how any man could acquire intellectual skill without scholastic advantages; forgetting, apparently, that several things, if not more, may be learned in the school of Nature, provided one have an eye ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... those who have no real character to show. Wherein is a paradox. Those who have got any—well, don't show it, either on ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... that neither of them knew how to break at once 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 equally true ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... felt no interest save a desire to avoid them, and at last reached the street. To be out of doors in the air was something, though there was no wind, but a motionless still atmosphere which nothing disturbed. The streets, indeed, were full of movement, but not of life—though this seems a paradox. The passengers passed on their way in long regulated lines,—those who went towards the gates keeping rigorously to one side of the pavement, those who came, to the other. They talked to each other here and there; ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... cry of paradox when scholars, struck by some historical error, attempt to correct it; but, for whoever studies modern history to its depths, it is plain that historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs precisely as the newspapers of the day, or most of them, express ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... rifle bullet whistled over our heads. We had been seen by a German sniper, so we quickly crouched low behind the trench wall. I found myself right over the grave of one of the Germans, and was rewarded by finding on it a piece of German shell, grim paradox ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... British Royal Artillery, had met his fate by his side, and there was something soldierly in the way he bore himself in his vanity of dress. Not that I think the dandies are the best soldiers—that is merest popular paradox. To me it is as ridiculous for a man to array himself in fine clothes when he is going to kill or be killed, as it would be for him to put on gewgaws when he was going to be hanged. As Leader disappears from my account of Carlist doings ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... 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 • Robert Ballantyne
... to call and bring some of her work. Flamby had never forgotten the visit. The honey of Miss Kingsbury was honey of Trebizond, and it poisoned poor Flamby's happiness for many a day. Strange is the paradox of a woman's heart; for Flamby, well knowing that this spinster's venom was a product of jealousy—jealousy of talent, super-jealousy of youth and beauty—yet took hurt from it and hugged the sting of cruel criticism to her breast. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... guilty—criticised, carped, sent much haughty advice, depressing sympathy, and malignant prophecy. Review articles, based on no real knowledge of Russia, announced a 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, official corruption, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... He suddenly deserted paradox and levity, and became serious. "My dearest, think of this! Suppose I were to lose you, here in the dark!... Oh, I know all that about duty—I know! I would not kill myself at once, because it would be unkind to Irene. But suppose ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... greatness already 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 ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... unstoppered the cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge. For a minute he paused, wondering if there were other continuums or only this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tipped the bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran down into the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of the ocean. He poured until the bottle was empty ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... 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 ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class—and there is neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase—should be patterned on the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The characteristic ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—-could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lithe, various creature, this Amilcare Passavente, his own paradox. Quick as a bird of prey he was, and at times as inert; dark as night, eagle-faced, flat-browed, stiff and small in the head, clean-featured, with decisive lips. A very fluent speaker, hoarse in voice, but cunning in the vibrations ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the Rosalinds of the bicycle, at this period of my life, was but slight, and thus no familiarity with the tweed knickerbocker feminine took off the edge of my delight on first beholding Nicolete clothed in like manhood with ourselves, and yet, delicious paradox! looking more like a ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... me to one closing reflection. When 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 ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the imagery of war. In the beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most savage act of man into the symbol ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... By what name will you designate the dungeon, the rack, the inflections and tortures of tyrants? Will you say with the Mystics[1] that the soul derives pleasure from the torments of the body? You are not bold enough to hold such a doctrine—a paradox not to be maintained. This happiness, then, that you prize so much, has a thousand drawbacks, or is, more properly speaking, but a tissue of sufferings through which one hopes to attain felicity. If by ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... guide of life, we cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous argument against miracles was logically valid after all was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... certain positions; but they are circumstances which must be fairly met; circumstances which if one writer overlook, others will not; circumstances which the critic will insist on; and circumstances which, if the dazzle of a paradox, or the appeal to the innate and universal sympathy for antiquity keep them in the background for a while, will, sooner or later, rise against the author who ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... at these, like Doaters fonde, Or Menn that love in Paradox to deale; Yett, as the Sunn grew warme, throughout the Londe, All Menn the more ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... misfortunes on our selves; as when to the governor who complained of thieves he said: "If you, sir, were not covetous, though you should reward them for it, they would not steal." His ideal of greatness predicts Marcus Antoninus. At the same time, he abstained from paradox, and met the ingrained prudence of his nation by saying always: "Bend ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... he would have at the Board, being head in the Queen's favour, concurred, and did alike conspire his remove and ruin. But into Ireland he went, where he did the Queen very great and many services, if the surplusage of the measure did not abate the value of the merit, as after-time found to be no paradox to save the Queen's purse, but both herself and my Lord Treasurer Burleigh ever took for good service; he imposed on the Irish the charge for bearing their own arms, which both gave them the possession and taught them ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... throw light on this paradox. If the ancients had more intellect than us, it is that the brains of those times were better ordered, formed of firmer or more delicate fibres, filled with more animal spirits; but in virtue of what were the brains of those times better ordered? The trees ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... was the direct result of his influence and example, and since the movements and ideas which have moulded the Church of England to-day could have found no fitting soil for their development if they had not been preceded by the Evangelical movement, it is no paradox to say that the Church of England to-day is what it is because John Wesley lived and taught in the last century.... He remains the greatest, the most potent, the most far-reaching spiritual influence ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... spoke of secession. Moreover, the wealthy merchants and bankers of New England declined to subscribe to the national loans when the Treasury at Washington was bankrupt, and vast quantities of supplies were shipped from New England seaports to the enemy in Canada. It was an extraordinary paradox that those States which had seen their sailors impressed by thousands and which had suffered most heavily from England's attacks on neutral commerce should have arrayed themselves in bitter opposition to the cause and the Government. It was "Mr. Madison's War," they ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... is always a paradox. He must look as though he gave his clothes no thought and as though literally they grew on him like a dog's fur, and yet he must be perfectly groomed. He must be close-shaved and have his hair cut and his nails in good order (not too polished). His linen must always be immaculate, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... "What do readers read?" and the tables of class-percentages in the annual reports of those institutions show that librarians are at least making an attempt to satisfy these queries. But a question that is still more fundamental and quite as vital is: Do readers read at all? This is not a paradox, but a common-sense question, as the following suggestive little incident will show. The librarian-in-charge of a crowded branch circulating-library in New York City had occasion to talk, not long ago, to one of her "star" ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... confessional follow him into the street and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the general condition of things, let them not be thereby disheartened. Let them carry in their minds this divine paradox, that it is far more important to every man that he should do his utmost for Humanity than it ever can be for Humanity that any one man should ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... professor: no one, least of all students, would have been moved to respect him at first sight: rather short in stature, markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier with every mark of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never regard him as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that order always existed in his class-room. ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eminently agreeable." University members, he added, should come always in pairs: one to represent the high University ideal, embodied only in a very few; his colleague reflecting the mob of country parsons who by an absurd paradox elect to Parliament. Jebb was the ideal Cantab.; didactic, professorial, the Public Orator; seeming incomplete without a gown: but for his rare and apt appearances, he might have ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... gotten along with coquetry in connection with the wooing instinct, and having no activity through which their behavior is standardized, become difficile, unreal, inefficient, exacting, unsatisfied, absurd. And we have also the paradox that the same woman can be the two things at different times. There is therefore a basis of truth in Pope's hard saying that "Women have no characters at all." Because their problem is not to accommodate to the solid realities of the world of experience and sense, ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... to make my peace with my mother was not surprising, but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing its weakness, and yet ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Mr. Stanley of Professor Rigg, "of Hegel's paradox, that nothing is equal to being, and that if being and nothing ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... of this war, as the master mind of all the ages said of adversity, that "its uses are sweet," even though they be as a precious jewel shining in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. While the world-war has brutalized men, it has as a moral paradox added immeasurably to the sum of human nobility. Its epic grandeur is only beginning to reveal itself, and in it the human soul has reached the high water marker of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy |
