"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would die so that I could be married. Oh, the time was so long!" She threw her arms up with a gesture of shuddering weariness; then clasped her hands between her knees, and staring at the floor, began to speak. Her words poured out, incoherent, contradictory, full of bewilderment and pain. "Yes; I wasn't very happy, except just at first. After a while I got so tired of Lloyd's selfishness. Oh—he was so selfish! I used to look at him sometimes, and almost hate him. He always took the most comfortable ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful, sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... again!' The 'complainant' did not even return thanks for this medical counsel, but sipped his toddy in silence, and soon after left the room, 'uttering never a word.' . . . THERE have been various surmises, and sundry contradictory statements, in relation to the work superscribed 'Count D'Orsay on Etiquette,' which we noticed at some length in our December issue. Mr. WILLIS, of the 'New Mirror' weekly journal, seems to question its having been written by the COUNT, but expresses his belief that he may have loaned ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... alienated feeling, if not of alienated act. All the symptoms were abroad which provide disaffection with its opportunity; and in the natural confusion which attended the revolt from the papacy, the obligations of duty, both political and religious, had become indefinite and contradictory, pointing in all directions, like the magnetic ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... precious time had been lost, through his obstinate objection to the presence of a medical man at his bedside. Generally speaking, he appeared to be in a delicate state of health. His nervous system was out of order—he was at once timid and contradictory. When I spoke to him in English, he answered in Italian; and when I tried him in Italian, he went back to English. It mattered little—the malady had already made such progress that he could only speak a few words at a time, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... morality or human nature, and am not responsible for either: but people who are given to moods act as I have described; sometimes they like one person and sometimes another." Perhaps she was thinking not so much of moody natures as of those contradictory characters who have inherited the traits of very dissimilar ancestors. She wrote another novel which she herself liked much better and had great hopes of, which was lost in some miraculous way by her publisher Mr. Fields. He paid her for it what many people would consider a handsome compensation—exactly ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was most dangerous to mistake it. It was part of her pleasure to find in her favourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, as her own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or the prudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... unless it be from bad to good. Men will possess their varying notions, and some, though lacking a knowledge of the best prison interests, will persist in having their peculiar views put in practice, however conflicting and contradictory. It is also now liable to be left largely in the hands of the warden to be run as he wills, besides being exposed to the unfavorable effects of political party influence. Finally, the institution can receive only its part of the largely divided ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... these and to various other parts of the subject, I began to see as it were with new eyes; I was enabled to make several necessary discriminations, to reconcile things before seemingly contradictory, and to answer many objections which had hitherto put on a formidable shape. But most of all was I rejoiced at the thought that I should soon be able to prove that which I had never doubted, but which had ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... out of Ronador's face. The fire, roused by the specter he had fought this many a day, burned itself quite to ashes and left him cold and sullen. He had played and lost. And he was an older and quieter man for the losing. Whatever else lay at the bottom of his contradictory maze of dark moods and passions, he had courage and the curse of conscience. There were black memories struggling ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... one another, and apparently without the interference of electric bodies. I say apparently so, because the air seems to be in a great measure concerned in those experiments, and perhaps the whole effect may be produced by that surrounding medium. But, though the irregular, contradictory, and unaccountable effects observed in these experiments do not as yet furnish any satisfactory theory, and though much is to be attributed to the circumambient air, yet the metallic substances themselves seem to be endowed with properties peculiar ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... ought not to believe what Reason authoritatively denies, that at which the sense of right revolts, that which is absurd or self-contradictory, or at issue with experience or science, or that which degrades the character of the Deity, and would make Him revengeful, malignant, cruel, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... my life again like this," she said. "I've never lived. I've never done the things I wanted to do. There was always some one or something to keep me back. Now, for a week or a fortnight, I shall live—live! nothing and no one shall keep me back." She knew how absolutely contradictory this was, after taking so much pains to "let the 'forest creature' down gently," and begin all over again. But she did not care. Nothing mattered, except that she could not send him to Mrs. Gaylor. As gaily as she had embarked upon ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by laying the foundation of domestic existence upon a relation contradictory to the first principles of social justice, must, from the very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to raise our imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the better as would be made by its removal. ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... so the fighting in Poland continued to be of a very confused kind, the telegrams from both sides being most contradictory, but on the whole the advantage seemed to remain with the Russians, who recorded their victories in very striking figures of killed and captured during their defence of several rivers tributary to the Vistula on its left bank. Hindenburg the redoubtable—the only General worth a rap (or a "damn," ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 21, Dec. 30, 1914 • Various
... Joseph's had arisen before, all waited to hear Jesus, but his thoughts having seemingly wandered far, they all fell to argument and advised Joseph in so many different ways that he did not know to whom to accede so contradictory were all their notions of fairness; and, the babble becoming louder, it waked Jesus out of his mood, and catching Joseph's eyes, he asked him if he whom our Father sent to establish his Kingdom on earth ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... conscience had been asleep, and was just waking to painful life. For nearly four years had Grena Holland soothed her many misgivings by some such reasoning as that of Mr Justice Roberts. She had conformed outwardly: had not merely abstained from contradictory speeches, but had gone to mass, had attended the confessional, had bowed down before images of wood and stone, and all the time had comforted herself by imagining that God saw her heart, and knew that she did not really believe in any of these things, but only acted ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... register of the place and date of Milton's marriage with Mary Powell has not been found. (2) On the whole, however, Phillips's recollections about the marriage are so circumstantial, and there is such a likelihood of their being true, that, until contradictory records shall be produced, it seems right to accept his dating. But then his explanation of the cause of his uncle's speculations about divorce must be wrong. The cause in that case cannot have been the obstinate refusal of his wife to return; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... recited in low and measured tones one of his own poems, caring little or nothing whether his neighbors attended to him or not. The glib tongue of the Marchese Gualdro ran on smoothly and incessantly, though he frequently lost the thread of his anecdotes and became involved in a maze of contradictory assertions. The rather large nose of the Chevalier Mancini reddened visibly as he laughed joyously to himself at nothing in particular—in short, the table had become a glittering whirlpool of excitement ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... aloofness nor any other aloofness contradictory to the best American traditions or loftiest human purposes. Our fortunate capacity for comparative self-containment affords the firm foundation on which to build for our own security, and a like foundation on which to build for a future of influence and importance in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... meaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same way—frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... which began early in the morning, and lasted throughout the day. I remained at headquarters with all the household of the First Consul, where we were almost within range of the cannon on the battlefield. Contradictory news constantly came, one report declaring the battle completely lost, the next giving us the victory. At one time the increase in the number of our wounded, and the redoubled firing of the Austrian cannon, made us believe that all was lost; ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the barren ranges of the Alleghanies, the fertile uplands of the Unakas, the luxuriant blue-grass regions, the rich bottom lands of the Ohio and Mississippi, the wide shores of the inland seas, or the stretches of prairie increasing in width beyond the Wabash—seemed strangely contradictory, and no one had been able to patch these reports together and grasp the real proportions of the giant inland empire that had become a part of the United States. It was a pathless desert; it was a maze of trails, trodden out by ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... P—— called, and the talk became political and lugubriously desponding, and I suddenly found myself inspired with a contradictory vein of hopefulness, and became vehement in its defense. In spite of all the disastrous forebodings I constantly have, I cannot but trust that the spread of enlightenment and general progress of intelligence in the people of this country—the good judgment of those who have power and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... buildings. Are we to understand, then, that the architects thought of nothing but "hard utility," and that it was some aesthetic divinity that shaped their blocks, rough-hew them how they might? For my part, I cannot see how truth is to result from the clash of contradictory falsehoods. There are a few cities more splendid than New York; many more hideous. In point of concentrated architectural magnificence, there is nothing in New York to compare with the Vienna Ringstrasse, from the Opera House to the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Truth you were fain to contemplate. And know it is built up of the divers contradictory truths, in the same fashion as all colours go to make up white. The little children of Viterbo know this, for having spun their tops striped with many colours on the flags on the Great Market. But the doctors of Bologna never guessed the reasons for this appearance. Now in every ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... was the subject of neurotic disorder. The most important and serious essay in this direction is a little book of great interest and almost hypercritical acumen published recently at Naples. Signor Parlagreco lays great stress upon Michelangelo's insensibility to women, his "strange and contradictory feeling about feminine beauty." He seeks to show, what is indeed, I think, capable of demonstration, that the man's intense devotion to art and study, his solitary habits and constitutional melancholy, caused him to absorb the ordinary instincts ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... terrors on their heads, by announcing that the mass of the people had ceased to consider the endurance of their sway as synonymous with the prosperity of Venice. Popular tumults filled the streets and canals; universal confusion prevailed. The commanders of their troops and fleets received contradictory orders, and ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... in which she had been incarcerated only to learn that she had escaped months before, and that the German officer had disappeared at the same time. From there on the stories of the chiefs and the warriors whom he quizzed, were vague and often contradictory. Even the direction that the fugitives had taken Tarzan could only guess at by piecing together bits of fragmentary ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... defenders of their country. It is, we shall suppose, Seventy strong. Well, jot down three ploughmen, genuine clodhoppers, chaw-bacons sans peur et sans reproche, except that the overseers of the parish were upon them with orders of affiliation; add one shepherd, who made contradictory statements about the number of the spring lambs, and in whose house had been found during winter certain fleeces, for which no ingenuity could account; a laird's son, long known by the name of the Neerdoweel; a Man of tailors, forced to accept the bounty-money during a protracted strike—not ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... board in the like state; and an opposite report, that the poor dear boys had only made themselves sick with dainties out of Mrs. Schnetterling's, and it was all a cruel notion of that teetotal ritualist clergyman. Some boys would not speak, others were vague and contradictory, and many knew nothing, Horner and Campbell were absent. Clement much relieved her by giving an account of the matter, and declaring that he feared his own elder nephew was the cause of all the scandal, though he believed ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man, dewlapped like a bloodhound, and his hard blue eyes were close-coupled. The reptilian forehead did not signify a superior mentality, even as the slack, retreating chin denoted a minimum of courage. It was a most contradictory face. The features did not balance. Racey Dawson was not a student of physiognomy, but he recognized a weak chin when he saw it. If this man were indeed McFluke, then he, Racey Dawson, ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... that the kingdom of God under the Old Testament should serve as a substratum for the description of the kingdom of Christ. It can be demonstrated, from the intimations contained in this passage, in which the Messiah appears in His glory, how little it is contradictory to others, in which He is represented in His lowest humiliation. Through humiliation to glory,—this is the proposition which lies at the foundation of the announcements of the prophet concerning the destinies of the Covenant-people, and which he distinctly expresses in regard to Bethlehem. That ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... ad absurdum is a variety of analysis. Starting from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove, we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in various ways as reductio ad absurdum, proof per ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... up my mind to go, I set about learning the how and the where, with the usual results; much advice asked and unasked of a very contradictory sort. The American Legation with fine courtesy offered no counsel, but gave every possible help, securing for me the proper vises for my passports, even speeding the wheels of the slow-moving Wai-wu-pu ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... and reconversion of water and air, is still stoutly kept up. The contradictory experiments of chemists, leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids, to enable such subtle bodies to make a well defined impression on organs as blunt as ours: that it is laudable to encourage investigation, but ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and harmless people; who are then liable to accuse themselves of the greatest imaginary crimes, and have so much intellectual cowardice, that they dare not reason about those things, which they are directed by their priests to believe, however contradictory to human apprehension, or derogatory to the great Creator of all things. The maniacal hallucination at length becomes so painful, that the poor insane flies from life to become ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... "unfreemen". These were freed slaves who had wrought out or purchased their freedom, but who, although personally free, and at liberty to go where and serve whom they pleased, were not free to attend the legislative assemblies. They were unfree of the Things, and hence their apparently contradictory designation. They, however, enjoyed the protection and civil rights imparted by the laws, and to their class belonged all the cottars on the land paying a rent in work on the farm of the bonder or udaller, also the house-carles or freeborn indoormen, and the tradesmen, labourers, ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... Our pack-saddles had consequently to be altered to the dimensions of the bullocks; and, having to use the new ones for breaking in, they were much injured, even before we left Mr. Campbell's to commence our journey. The statements of what a bullock was able to carry were very contradictory; but in putting 250 lbs. upon them the animals were overloaded; and my experience has since shown me that they cannot, continually day after day, carry more than 150 lbs. for any distance. The difficulties which we met with for the first three weeks, were indeed very trying:—the loading ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism and as a means of wealth, the avarice ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... largely from the abnormal and pathological side; while the popular idea is based too much on fiction and drama which emphasize the high lights and make love solely an affair of emotion. We are not arguing for a rationalization of love, for the terms are almost contradictory; but we believe that more common sense could profitably be used in ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... was savage with shamefacedness, could not endure any spectator, and fairly hunted his cousin home to Ormersfield, where Louis prowled about in suspense—gave contradictory orders to Frampton, talked as if he was asleep, made Frampton conclude that he had left his heart behind him, and was ever roaming towards the ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... us in "antinomies," apparently contradictory pairs, pairs of poles, which, however, do not really contradict, or even limit, each other, but are only correlatives, the existence of the one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... when the conscience begins to speak its not ambiguous oracles, there does rise the conviction that there is much in us which it is impossible should be the object of God's love. Nor need I remind you how all these difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based on the contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of providence, and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved to have been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find mythologies and religions of all types and gods of every sort, but nowhere in all the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... not a single phrase of valid explanation or apology in these and other prominent clerical pronouncements I have read. They are superficial, contradictory, and vapid. Nothing is more common than for religious writers to protest that the conception of reality which is opposed to theirs is shallow. What depth, what sincere grip of reality, does one find in any of these pulpit utterances? Yet I have taken the pronouncements of official ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... of its own chicanery? The life, if it could be appreciated in its secret principles, might go far to illustrate the probable character of the death. The death, if its circumstances were recoverable, and could be liberated from the self-contradictory details in the received report, might do something to indicate retrospectively the character and tenor of that life. The life of Judas, under a German construction of it, as a spasmodic effort of vindictive patriotism and of rebellious ambition, noble by possibility, though erring ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... just we would be in our judgment of men if we realised that a man may be honestly two different men, and how this theory would explain that which in every man of high organisation seems sometimes to be contradictory! Aye, within five minutes some of us with mercurial natures can remember to have been two entirely different men in two entirely different worlds. Something said to us cheering or depressing; some tidings announced, glad or sad; some great kindness done for us, or some meanness practised ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... pantheism, with its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest form, and by which things apparently contradictory could be reconciled. Furthermore—and this is not the least important thing to consider when the work to be done is for the ordinary man as an individual and for the common people in the mass—it had also a tremendous apparatus for touching ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... that, after turning the matter over in my mind, with all the aid derived from a careful consideration of Mr. Gladstone's reply, I cannot get away from my original conviction that, if Mr. Gladstone's second proposition can be shown to be not merely inaccurate, but directly contradictory of facts known to every one who is acquainted with the elements of natural science, the ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the practice prevailing in Prague as against means quite contradictory to the moral principles of modern journalism, as in Prague the newspapers are forced to publish articles supplied by the Official Press Bureau, as though written by the editor, without being allowed to mark ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... for all records of these campaigns are fragmentary, confused, contradictory. The Normans fought, and had no time to write history. The English, beaten and crushed, died and left no sign. The only chroniclers of the time are monks. And little could Ordericus Vitalis, or Florence of Worcester, or he of Peterborough, faithful as he was, who filled up the sad pages of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... being gathered, Gustavus renewed his efforts to gain favor through the land. This he soon discovered to be no easy task. Surrounded by conspirators on every hand, he could not turn without confronting some new rumor. Stories of the most contradictory nature were set afloat each day. At one time the report was spread through Dalarne that he had cast Christina into jail. After that it was rumored that he was sending despatches frequently to Gotland, from which some persons caught the notion he was in secret league with Norby. This ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... is always meditating upon his own qualities, but not in the spirit of the conceited man who plumes himself upon his virtues, nor of the ascetic who broods over his vices. He prefers the apparently self-contradictory attitude (but human nature is illogical) of meditating with remorse upon his own virtues. What in others is complacency, becomes with him, ostensibly at least, self-reproach. He affects—but it is hard to say where the affectation begins—to be annoyed by the contemplation of his own merits. He ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... power of the Queen-mother, bringing in the Huguenots, and securing the crown to Alencon on the King's death. Down-stairs, the Ambassador and his secretaries sat anxiously striving to sift the various contradictory reports; up-stairs, Philip and Lady Walsingham were anxiously watching Berenger in what seemed the long-expected crisis, and Philip was feeling as if all the French court were welcome to murder one another so that they would only let Ambroise Pare come to his brother's ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pilot-cloth coat, and pocketed hands proclaimed him a sailor, there were one or two contradictory points about him. A huge beard and moustache savoured more of the diggings than the deep, and a brown wide-awake with a prodigiously broad brim suggested ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... aspect she would appear, she whose nature seemed to him so varied and contradictory, and whose face was the index to these changing phases. She came in quietly, a young girl, pale, inquiring, yet saying no word; but there was a sparkle in her gaze that made the blood leap for a moment to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... antiquity and authority; common and confessed notions; the natural and yielding consent of the mind; the harmony and coherence of a knowledge in itself; the establishing of principles with the touch and reduction of other propositions unto them; inductions without instances contradictory; and the report of the senses; are none of them absolute and infallible evidence of truth, and bring no security sufficient for effects and operations. That the discovery of new works and active directions not known before, is the only trial to be accepted of; and yet not that neither, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... proper conception of it, some of the profoundest thinkers, and some of the holiest spirits among mankind, have believed in this doctrine—have clung to it as a matter of life or death. Let them be assured of this, that whether the doctrine be true or false, it is not necessarily a doctrine self-contradictory. Let them be assured of this, in all modesty, that such men never could have held it unless there was latent in the doctrine a deep truth,—perchance ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... The spirit of enterprise in railroading was killed. Subjected to an obsolete and incongruous national policy, hampered, confined, harassed by multifarious, minute, narrow, and sometimes flatly contradictory regulations and restrictions, State and Federal, starved as to rates in the face of steadily mounting costs of labor and materials—that great industry began to fall away. Initiative on the part of those in charge became chilled, the free flow of investment capital was halted, ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn
... the bottom, has been serviceable in many diseases. Wherefore they say, it is not just to have recourse to a supernatural power for effects, which may be produced by the ordinary course of nature. But as far as I am able to judge of these contradictory opinions, a middle way between them seems to me ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... museum of Naples is a terra-cotta Victory in almost the identical action and drapery. As for Dumont d'Urville's statement that, when the statue was discovered, one hand held an apple and the other a fold of the drapery, the latter is obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the subject is so contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the statement made by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none of whom seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and hand now in the Louvre were really found in the same ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... For it is not always enough to shew that no intrinsic objections lie against the antiquity of the work in question. It may be so short, or so general in respect to its subject as to leave no room for contradictory and impossible sentences or expressions. It is not enough to shew that there were no reasons against such a literature being developed; since it is difficult to say what conditions absolutely forbid the production of a work ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... unconvincing and contradictory. Just now you were searching for the Earth, it was so diminished by distance, and if the Colossus had not betrayed it, you would have taken it for something else; and now you develop suddenly into a Lynceus, and distinguish everything upon it, the men, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... the nargueils, the rose baths of the old regime were jostled by the stories of the French nurses and English governesses and the Paris fashions of the new era. She had listened breathlessly, with her eager young zest in life, to the amazing and contradictory narrations of the tourists who were every whit as ignorant as she was, and her curiosity was on fire to see for herself. She felt that a chance in a thousand had ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... multiplying the means of obtaining information; for, no matter how imperfect and contradictory they may be, the truth may ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... enervating stairways of stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped after luncheon. There were pleasanter pastimes, even for the women, contradictory as this may seem. By eleven o'clock Courtlandt had finished the reading of his mail, and was now ready to hunt for the little lady of the Taverne Royale. It was necessary to find her. The whereabouts of Flora Desimone was of vital importance. If she had not yet arrived, ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... correspondent world of spirit; and though these latter be not equally developed in us all, yet they surely exist in all; else how is it that even the ignorant, the depraved, and the cruel will contemplate the man of unselfish and exalted goodness with contradictory emotions ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... remarkable gift for visualizing the little that he had read. Complexity of motive is all very well,—very human and very Italian; but the difficulty is that in this case it is not properly subordinated to a luminous dramatic idea. When a man's motives become so complex and contradictory that one does not know how to take him, he ceases to be available for the higher purposes of tragedy. That 'Fiesco' produces this bewildering effect is due to the fact that the inner logic of the piece had not been fully and consistently thought ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... experience of one of my pieces, the march from Tannhauser, being interrupted by storms of applause. The pleasure thus expressed was aroused, it seems, because the audience was surprised to find that my music, of which there had been so many contradictory reports, contained such long phrases of connected melody. Well satisfied as I was, both with the way in which the concert had been carried out and its enthusiastic reception, I had on the following days ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... into account the discouragements and drawbacks of the year. The sudden reaction consequent upon the change from slavery to what they hardly knew as freedom; the confusion incident upon military occupation (and the contradictory directions given concerning the year's crops); the abundance of money where the cotton-agents and officers were stationed, and the high wages promised and often obtained, at Hilton Head and Beaufort; the lateness of the cotton crop, the poorness of the seed, the uncertainty and doubt and ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... irreconcileable discrepancies are? For my own part, I freely renew in this place the challenge I gave in my IIIrd Sermon[18]. Let any one of these Gentlemen publicly and definitely lay his finger on one or more of these contradictory statements in the Gospels, during term-time; and within a week I hereby undertake publicly to refute him in the Divinity School of this University: and our peers shall be ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... a few words respecting the revolt of the Venetian States, which, in consequence of the difference of political opinions, has been viewed in very contradictory lights. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... cell and paddle for the unfortunate and began to be talked about on the playground and in the work-room. When she heard what had happened, Fouchette was conscience-stricken and ran to Sister Agnes for consolation. The latter was so confused and contradictory in her definition of right and wrong, as to how far one might go for Christ's sake, that Fouchette was left in doubt. And when Sister Angelique asked her for the name of the girl who committed an offence ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... ascertained." He speaks even more doubtfully of the persons supposed to be implicated, viz. the Shah and the commander-in-chief, than of the thing. Little, indeed, could have been known distinctly, where rumour ascribed to each separately the most contradictory acts and motives. Us it surprises, that Lord Keane has not publicly explained himself under such gloomy insinuations. But, in the mean time, this is plain, that the Shah is entitled to benefit by the doubts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... his majesty, and was now at the door with a letter to the commons. The loudest acclamations were excited by this intelligence. Granville was called in; the letter, accompanied with a declaration, greedily read: without one moment's delay, and without a contradictory vote, a committee was appointed to prepare an answer: and in order to spread the same satisfaction throughout the kingdom, it was voted that the letter and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... JODOCUS PRATENSIS or A PRATO, French musical composer, was born, probably in Cond in the Hennegau, about 1445. He was a pupil of Ockenheim, and himself one of the most learned musicians of his time. In spite of his great fame, the accounts of his life are vague and the dates contradictory. Ftis contributed greatly towards elucidating the doubtful points in his Biographie universelle. In his early youth Josquin seems to have been a member of the choir of the collegiate church at St Quentin; when his voice changed he went (about 1455) to Ockenheim to take ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... not in the least melancholy—a good and sufficient reason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials in his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 25, 26), "I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Here we have the true teaching of Christ, in his own apparently contradictory language. The saying, "Whoever believes in me shall never die," does not necessarily mean that his body will never die; and so the words, "Though he were dead, yet shall he live," certainly do not signify that his dead and decayed body shall receive new life. But ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... method, when he showed you that the artifice of contrast was founded but on one principle. And I am convinced that this is the only means of advancing science, of clearing the mind from a confused heap of contradictory observations, that do but perplex and puzzle the student when he compares them, or misguide him if he gives himself up to their authority; but bringing them under one general head can alone give rest and satisfaction to an ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... student, if he is intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries. Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of ignorance, equally unreal—a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he calls naivete. And these various ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... very great importance and the means of attainment multiform, but the dominant idea will always direct the continuous achievements; under their different manifestations—and these at times contradictory—they will never be other than the emanation of a direct thought, whose superior authority is closely united ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... never any question of fraud in the titles, hence they were entitled to patents years ago. Gordon did wrong, of course, in refusing to obey the orders of the Secretary of the Interior even though he knew those orders to be senseless and contradictory, but the women are the ones to suffer. The Government froze them out. This is only one instance of what delay and indecision at headquarters has done. I'll show you others before we are through. As for those two—You say ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... be equipped without money, the governor looked to the intendant for funds, and the intendant might object that the plans of the governor were unduly extravagant. Worse still, the commissions under which both held office were often contradictory. More than three thousand miles separated Quebec from Versailles, and for many months governor and intendant quarrelled over issues which could only be settled by an appeal to the king. Meanwhile ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... of dissolving partnership between the two coinciding series. Every moment the whole thing threatens to break down, but manages to get patched up again; it is this diversion that excites laughter, far more than the oscillation of the mind between two contradictory ideas. It makes us laugh because it reveals to us the reciprocal interference of two independent series, the real ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... impatiently while these strange phases passed before him. He listened angrily at the contradictory utterances. He felt the ignominy of our country's being at such a depth. He knew Germany too well to suppose that she could be deterred by President Wilson's messages. He saw something comic in shaking a long fore-finger and saying, "Tut, tut! I shall consider being very harsh, if you ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... England, founded on precedent and analogy. In the later ages of the empire, the number of law-books and records became so enormous, that it was no longer possible to determine the law with accuracy, and the contradictory decisions made at different periods, greatly increased the uncertainty. To remedy this evil, the emperor Justinian caused the entire to be digested into a uniform system, and his code still forms the basis of the civil ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... rulers of the ecclesiastical community. Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most of them finished their career. It is an instructive fact that no proof can be given, from ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... commonly used for this purpose,—such as long and short, broad and slender, open and close, or open and shut,—is made difficult, if not impossible, by reason of the different, and sometimes directly contradictory senses in which certain orthoepists [sic—KTH] have employed such terms. Wells says, "Vowel sounds are called open or close, according to the relative size of the opening through which the voice passes in forming them. Thus, a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... supreme moment of his agony, came inspiration. He must save them all with a lie! Queer that, queer and contradictory! Yes, after practicing the truth, he must save them all from ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... consideration, this would appear to be impossible. If every ray of light is propagated relative to the embankment with the velocity c, then for this reason it would appear that another law of propagation of light must necessarily hold with respect to the carriage — a result contradictory to ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... offer a contradictory opinion; for my sense of the saneness of things, would not allow me to take the story literally; then I shut them again, without saying anything. Somehow, the certainty in Tonnison's voice affected my doubts. I felt, all at once, less assured; though I was ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... Don't imagine that I want to become a procurator; I want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out of date and contradictory. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Eleanor refused to be serious about anything. The mischievous, contradictory, incalculable little devil that always lurked in her took full possession. She teased Quin, and laughed at him, leading him on one minute and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... does not wholly displease us." Yet it is difficult to assign a cause for this; no book is perhaps oftener unwittingly quoted, none certainly oftener unblushingly pillaged; upon none have so many contradictory ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... with equal confidence, by the orthodox and by the heretical parties; and the most inquisitive critics have fairly allowed, that if they had the good fortune of possessing the Catholic verity, they have delivered their conceptions in loose, inaccurate, and sometimes contradictory language. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... placed, to my no small surprise, as I could not have supposed the Pisanese sufficiently tolerant to admit profane sculptures within such consecrated precincts. However, there they are, as well as fifty other contradictory ornaments. ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... and adornment. That of a book involves two other demands mutually so contradictory that bookbinding has always offered a most attractive challenge to the skill of the handicraftsman. The first demand is that the book when closed shall form a well-squared and virtually solid block, like the rectangle of wood from which its first ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... imaginable physical disease, but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are. Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease, with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for only the carefully trained in all the requirements of ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... course, first and foremost the very belief in the existence of the gods. That they did not as a rule interfere with public worship, we may be sure; that was based firmly on "the Law." But, in addition, even sophists who personally took an attitude radically contradictory to popular belief had the most important reasons for being careful in advancing such a view. They had to live by being the teachers of youth; they had no fixed appointment, they travelled about as lecturers and enlisted ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... was born, and it is for ever associated with his memory. His name calls up a story often told, yet never clear, of a man who seemed to possess several distinct and contradictory personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero, a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan. The Buddhist ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... remains so to the last. We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye—only thus CAN we judge of him; and this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... been inconsistent and contradictory, unsatisfactory to myself, and, I have often suspected, cowardly, yet there was no consciousness at any time of intentionally having ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... famous upper hall with the four-and-twenty windows is one of the most contused and incoherent parts of the Nights and well-nigh defies the efforts of the translator to define the exact nature of the building described by the various and contradictory passages which refer to it. The following is a literal rendering of the above passage: "An upper chamber (keszr) and (or?) a kiosk (kushk, a word explained by a modern Syrian dictionary as meaning ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... going to New York every other week, and she raised no objection as his frivolous manner was very trying during sultry days; when he was away she could abandon herself to her day-dreams without fear of interruption. She thought hard, and her strong head often was puzzled by the cloud of contradictory witnesses her memory raised. But she cried no more ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... represented as men who have gone up to the sky; this is a natural way of accounting for their superterrestrial abode. Savage conceptions of the origin and history of such figures are usually vague, and their theologies fluctuating and self-contradictory; but there are two points as to which opinion is firm: the god is like men in everything except power, and his functions are universal. He represents not a monotheistic creed (which takes the whole world as the domain of God), but a narrow tribal acceptance of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one's own disposal so characteristic of many American faces. It was our friend's eye that chiefly told his story; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions, and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, ...
— The American • Henry James
... equanimity all the greater because it had only been held in check. For it should be emphatically understood that in the matter of occult training it is not so much a question of what we may already seem to possess, but of carefully and regularly practicing what we need. Contradictory as this phrase may appear, it is nevertheless true that though life may have trained us to this or to that, the qualities to serve us in occult training are those that we have acquired for ourselves. Should life ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... we parted. He sighed—the cheerful man sighed, as he opened the door for me. Women are contradictory creatures. That sigh affected me more than all his arguments. I felt myself blush for my own head-strong resistance to him as I took my leave and turned away ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... the form and extension of the image on the retina constantly change with the different position and distance of his hand in respect to his eye. The problem is thus set to the child's understanding: how to reconcile to his comprehension the apparently contradictory facts of the invariableness of the object together with the variableness of its appearance. This is only possible within a space of three dimensions, in which, owing to perspective distortions and changes, these variations of projection can be reconciled with the constancy of ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... bordering on misrepresentations; and evident omissions and absurdities on the part of educational philosophers. The weather bureau represents Old Reliability herself, in comparison with authors. What attitude shall the adult student assume toward such contradictory and faulty statements? Shall he regard himself as only a follower, taking each presentation of thought at its face value, sitting humbly at the feet of supposed specialists, and carefully preserving in memory as many of their principal ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... desire. The least politeness in the world prohibited her from going baldly in and demanding to see the woman. She couldn't, all at once, make convincing a sympathy or impersonal interest entirely contradictory to her insistent indifference. The best she could hope was for them to sail away as quickly as possible; when on the other side of the seas Gerrit would probably return to the simplicity of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they cursed Jimmy ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important. And different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence, it insists ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... has not changed during my absence; I can find no improvement in the twentieth-century society over that of the nineteenth, and in truth, it is not capable of any real improvement, for this society is the product of a civilization so self-contradictory in its essential qualities, so stupendously absurd in its results, that the more we advance in this would-be civilization the less rational, the less human we become. Your twentieth-century civilization is fitly characterized by the fact that, paradoxical as it may seem, the more we produce, the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... while Shakespeare is depicting Richard's heartlessness, he does his work badly; the traits, as I have shown, are crudely extravagant and even contradictory; but when he paints Richard's gentleness and amiability, he works like a master, every touch is infallible: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Hamilton, Argyll, and Lanark had actually retired. On October 22, from their retreat, the brothers said that they had heard of a conspiracy, by nobles and others in the king's favour, to cut their throats. The evidence is very confused and contradictory: Hamilton and Argyll were said to have collected a force of 5000 men in the town, and, on October 5, such a gathering was denounced in a proclamation. Charles in vain asked for a public inquiry into the affair before the whole House. He now raised ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... within him, and he could scarcely refrain from bidding Mattie quite roughly to hold her tongue and not tease him with her chatter. If she expected him in his present state of mind, which was at once contradictory and aggressive, to talk to her about the Challoners, she must just make up her mind to be disappointed, for he could not bring himself to speak of them to her just now: he wanted to hold counsel with his own thoughts and with Grace. He would call at the Friary again and see Mrs. Challoner, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... individual that Jesus Christ is God, and to another that He is only man? How can He tell me that the punishments of the wicked are eternal, and tell another that they are not eternal? One of these contradictory statements must be false. "God is not the God ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... strange discords, in a huddled mixture of 'Endymion' and the Book of Revelation, John Wesley's hymns and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes. I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions. In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... of those assembled there was not one, perhaps, who would not, in the hour of glory and of danger, have generously interposed his own frame between that of his companion and the steel or bullet of an enemy. Such are the contradictory elements which compose ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... notions, no doubt, and capable of much controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any way tenable) is concerned; but then the plain fact is that my Uncle Roland was as eccentric and contradictory a gentleman—as—as—why, as you and I are, if we once ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and the eyes of both fell on ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a little to find that he was born in a house "in a row," - a house, moreover, which at the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old. All that is contradictory. If the tenement selected for this honour could not be ancient and em- browned, it should at ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... heard you. You are full of happy ideas, many of them somewhat contradictory; but you have not yet fallen into any groove. To you freedom means rebellion; ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the Deity are of the most vague and contradictory nature, and the name of God conveys no more to their understanding than the idea of superiority. Hence they do not hesitate to apply the name to their chiefs. I was every day shocked by being addressed by that title, and though it as often furnished me with a text from which to tell them of ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... yet we see no reason to doubt that Miss Doten fully believes them to be simple records of facts known to herself. We do not doubt her truth and good faith; but we confess ourselves puzzled with the contradictory and inconsequent phenomena of modern spiritualism. These developments never bring any accession to our knowledge. In addition to the curious circumstances attending the creation of these poems, many of them are very beautiful. In those purporting to have been dictated by the spirit ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the next place, and that very briefly, to what lies side by side with this in the story, and at first sight may seem strangely contradictory of it, but in fact only completes the idea, viz. the majesties, calm consciousness of divine power by which He is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... have cast off the inconvenient yoke of consistency, at all events for the time. Will God condemn me for having simultaneously admitted that which my different faculties simultaneously exact, although I am unable to reconcile their contradictory demands? Are there not periods in the history of the human mind when contradiction is necessary? When the moral verities are under examination, doubt is unavoidable; and yet during this period of transition the pure and noble mind must still be moral, thanks to a contradiction. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... one part of the coast as well as to another; as to the localities treated of, as well as of the companions of Vespucius, there are no indications given of a nature to aid the historian. Not a single name is given of any well-known person, and the dates are contradictory in those famous letters which have given endless work to commentators. Humboldt says of them "There is an element of discord in the most authentic documents relating to the Florentine navigator." We have given an account ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every sect, confident in the derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... them to be Buffon's fourth class of (duplicate) monsters belonging essentially to one or the other sex, and related to its opposite only by some few characteristics. The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition, at least we find it in Genesis (i. 27) where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Character. Few Biblical characters manifested such contradictory elements of character. Early in life he manifested an earnest, conscientious and religious spirit. He was prayerful and sought above all else wisdom and that for the good reason that he might be able to rule well. He built the temple and thereby magnified ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... a question of sheriff alone. Clausen, the German saloon-keeper, and his gang were coming down on us like a pack of wolves on a sheepfold. Clausen, naturally enough, was considerably put out, simply because I was forced through the contradictory nature of conflicting circumstances to arbitrarily stand him up for the refreshments and smokes, and he appeared desirous of getting square. Fortunately for us, the high wind that had threatened ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... had neither the forethought, nor the experience, to anticipate all the embarrassments of a parliamentary government, they unwittingly committed themselves, and illegal acts are constantly resorted to, in order that the system may be upheld. The charter was bestowed ad captandum, and is a contradictory melange of inexpedient concessions and wily reservations. The conscription undermined the popularity of Napoleon, and Louis XVIII. in his charter says, "The conscription is abolished; the recruiting for the army and navy shall be settled by a law." Now the conscription ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... indirectly caused that great unhappiness, and at the same time so keenly resent her sympathy, which she could not easily express without speaking indignantly of Miss Starbrow—this seemed so strange, so almost incongruous and contradictory, that if the case had not been so sad she would have burst into a laugh. As it was she only burst into tears, and threw her ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, Oriental voluptuousness, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... writing of him, says "The character of General Gordon was unique. As it unfolded in its curiously varied but never contradictory aspects, you are reminded of Cromwell, of Havelock, of Livingstone, and of Captain Hedley Viccars. But Gordon's individuality stood out in its incomparable blending of masterfulness and tenderness, of strength and ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... force hypocrisy upon men who were bad enough without that. I allow a certain latitude; don't want to swim in hot water by quarreling with every madman or every dunce, but I do doubt any man's right to combine contradictory vices. Now these worthies are stupid yet wild, thick-headed ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... (the reverse, saying), "Give up acts." I ask, "Whither do persons go by the aid of Knowledge and whither by the aid of acts?"[979] I desire to hear this. Do tell me this. Indeed, these declarations about knowledge and acts are dissimilar and even contradictory.'" ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... bootmaker, who worked for his lordship from 1805 to 1807. Swift is still alive, and continues to reside at Southwell. His testimony as to the genuineness of the trees, and to the nature of Lord Byron's deformity, of which so many contradictory assertions have ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... will almost constantly discover certain virtues which have probably been acquired. But who shall say how much is due to heredity, and how much to environment and example? The problem becomes so complicated, the facts so contradictory, that it is impossible, amidst the mass of innumerable causes, to follow the track of one particular cause to the end. Let it suffice to say that in the only clear, striking, definitive cases where an intentional justice could have revealed itself in physical ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... duty, in obedience to your Majesty's gracious commands of this morning, proceeds to report to your Majesty what he finds to have taken place and to be in contemplation; but the accounts of the latter are so conflicting and contradictory, that his report must be as unsatisfactory to your Majesty as the state of the case is unintelligible ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... determined not to do so again. Thus two hungry souls, thirsting for each other's love, acted the cold part of casual acquaintances. Could the veil have been lifted, could the barriers have been broken down, what misery might have been spared! but it is ever thus. Humanity is contradictory and the heart's impulses are held ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... of making a point to destroy all admiration of gentleness in my opinion. "But you are grown very good now!" I added, "No, very bad I mean!" He knew I meant for speaking ; and I then gave him burlesqued, various definitions of good, which had fallen from Mr. Fox in my hearing, the most contradictory, and, taken out of their place, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... jurisdiction over the Spartans—truly a heinous interference with the internal affairs of an independent state! The Roman statesmen gave themselves as little concern as possible about this tempest in a nut-shell, as is best shown by the many complaints regarding the superficial, contradictory, and obscure decisions of the senate; in fact, how could its decisions be expected to be clear, when there were four parties from Sparta simultaneously speaking against each other at its bar? Add to this the personal impression, which most of these Peloponnesian statesmen produced in Rome; even ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... character were informed by those to whom they were accustomed to look up as teachers in religious matters, that the discoveries, of the truth of which they were so firmly convinced, and in which they took such justifiable pride, were contradictory to the teaching of the Bible, they were placed in a position of extreme difficulty. For this statement was, in fact, a demand made upon them that they should give up these discoveries as erroneous, or else renounce their ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... that is better than a Satire, (at least, a personal one,) with which I stand truly arraigned, and in atonement of which I am resolved to bear silently all criticisms, abuses, and even praises, for bad pantomimes never composed by me, without even a contradictory aspect. I suppose the root of this report is my loan to the manager of my Turkish drawings for his dresses, to which he was more welcome than to my name. I suppose the real author will soon own it, as it has succeeded; if not, Job be my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... but, in a manner, of those that ever were heard of; both of those wherein cities have fought against cities, or nations against nations; while some men who were not concerned in the affairs themselves have gotten together vain and contradictory stories by hearsay, and have written them down after a sophistical manner; and while those that were there present have given false accounts of things, and this either out of a humor of flattery to the Romans, or of hatred towards ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... assertions about God's foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre-existence of Christ,—things not only vague and inconsistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it is, that ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... RICHARD HEBER, Esq., the self-ejected member of the University of Oxford. Even yet I scarcely know how to handle this subject, or to expatiate upon a theme so extraordinary, and so provocative of the most contradictory feelings. But it were better to be brief; as, in fact, a very long account of Mr. Heber's later life will be found in my Reminiscences, and there is little to add to what those pages contain. It may be here only necessary to make mention of the sale of his wonderful library; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... member of so many Ministries and changed sides so often that it was not to be expected that he should escape charges of inconsistency. "Some do compare him to an eel," said Lockhart of Carnwath, "and certainly the character suited him exactly ... He had sworn all the most contradictory oaths, and complied with all the opposite Governments since the year 1648, and was humble servant to them all till he got what he aimed at, though often he did not know what that was." Almost every statesman of his time was as changeable as he was, but he possessed a capacity for business which ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... that the Sutra in question teaches the latter; the soul is everywhere. Ramanuga makes the same Sutra teach the very contrary. As a matter of fact, the Sutra in question seems to teach both these contradictory doctrines, perhaps because it registers different traditions. Sankara, however, explains further on that as long as the soul is passing through the changes involved in Samsara [ transmigration] it is limited and local, but on reaching Brahmanhood it becomes ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... took the queer sicht for a guid omen. It's unco strange hoo fowk 'll mix up God an' chance, seein' there could hardly be twa mair contradictory ideas! I min' ance hearin' a man say,'It's ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... tells a lie—Oswald knows that, of course. But an Englishman is not obliged to criminalate himself. The rules of honour and the laws of your country are very puzzling and contradictory. ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... in his eyes is disobedience to parents now, than when he commanded the rebellious son to be "stoned with stones until he died." Yet, how far below His standard are the ideas even of many Christian parents? "How different," says Wilberforce, "nay, in many respects, how contradictory, would be the two systems of mere morals, of which the one should be formed from the commonly-received maxims of the Christian world, and the other from the study of the Holy Scriptures;" and we are never more forcibly impressed with this difference than when we see it exemplified ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... representatives, protectors, elaborators and explorers of Christianity. When the Greeks visited the Slav country with their divine message, the Slavs were heathens. Their heathenism was like a confusing dream. Nature stood before them with its contradictory forces. The primitive Slavs regarded all the forces of Nature encircling a human creature as being alive and stronger than this creature. All the forces, whether friendly or unfriendly to man, are man like, anthropomorphic, and none of them are indifferent to human life ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... yesterday, Miss O'Gorman. They came back this morning without the woman; just walked in announcing they had come to stay and seemed to think we were expecting them. They said the young woman, whom they call Cousin Dink, had sent them. I have tried to question them, but their answers are confused and contradictory. I felt that perhaps it was better to wait for you and see what ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... with heart and soul was La Rochefoucauld. To him she devoted herself wholly; for him she sacrificed everything—duty, interest, repose, reputation. For him she staked her fortune and her life. Through him she exhibited the most equivocal and most contradictory conduct. It was La Rochefoucauld who caused her to take part in the Fronde; who, as he willed, made her advance or recede; who united her to, or separated her from, her family; who governed her absolutely. In a word, she consented ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. "You ask me to take love for granted," said Corydon to him once; "but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... birth; on the other, the dangers of property. Anna was usually my confidant, but on this subject I was tongue-tied, for I dared not confess that I had overheard the discourse with her father, and I was compelled to digest the contradictory doctrines by myself in the best manner ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper |
