"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... likely to misunderstand and misrepresent their real opinions. It appears to me that different tribes give a different account of their belief, but all generally so absurd, so vague, unsatisfactory, and contradictory, that it is impossible at present to say with any certainty what they really believe, or whether they have any independent belief at all. Mr. Moorhouse, who has taken great pains in his inquiries among ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... their despatches that there was any rumour of any extraordinary occurrence in the Highlands. Reports that some of the Macdonalds had been slain did indeed, in about three weeks, travel through Edinburgh up to London. But these reports were vague and contradictory; and the very worst of them was far from coming up to the horrible truth. The Whig version of the story was that the old robber Mac Ian had laid an ambuscade for the soldiers, that he had been caught in his own snare, and that he and some of his clan ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matter of angels, neither was it a matter of this man's thought, or that. At bottom, it seemed all questions could be brought to plain terms—What do I think? I, alone in the big, black, contradictory world. Julia realised it, and asked herself what it mattered if he, if they, if all the world called it wrong? What—pitiless, logical question—was wrong? Why should to take in one case be so called, and in another not? By whose word, and by what law was a thing thus, and why was she ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... doomed to perpetual exile a Oasis, a solitary spot in the midst of the sandy deserts of Libya. [14] Secluded from all human converse, the master-general of the Roman armies was lost forever to the world; but the circumstances of his fate have been related in a various and contradictory manner. It is insinuated that Eutropius despatched a private order for his secret execution. [15] It was reported, that, in attempting to escape from Oasis, he perished in the desert, of thirst and hunger; and that his dead body was ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... as easily conceive of some part of space where the same Infinite Intelligence, contemplating a similar train of unfruitful motions, finds that at no time in the future will the equilibrium be disturbed. But where evolution is progressing this is no longer conceivable, as being contradictory to the very idea of progressive development. In this ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... delight so intense as that to which he had at last attained, must necessarily be the very quintessence of iniquity. Being resolved to go through with it at all hazards, he felt proportionately wild and reckless. Such a state of commotion was there in his heaving bosom, owing to contradictory and conflicting elements, that he felt at one moment inclined to lie down and shout for joy, and the next, to sink into the earth ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... was over the plot thickened; a letter was brought to the Marquis from my adopted father the Comte de Rouille stating that such contradictory reports had been received, that he could not ascertain the truth. From one he heard that his eldest son was alive, and at the chateau; from others that he had been murdered: others congratulated him in their letters upon the escape of one of his sons. He requested the Marquis to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... has been evolved. The body of scientific evidence which has now been collected in favour of the general theory of evolution is simply overwhelming; and in the presence of so large an analogy, it would require a vast amount of contradictory evidence to remove the presumption that human conscience, like everything else, has been evolved. Now, for my own part, I am quite unable to distinguish any such evidence, while, on the other hand, in support of the a priori presumption that conscience has been evolved, I cannot conceal from ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... sight, that this is very much opposed to what I have said before, that democratic nations derive their love of theory from the excitement of their active life. A more attentive examination will show that there is nothing contradictory in the proposition. Men living in democratic countries eagerly lay hold of general ideas because they have but little leisure, and because these ideas spare them the trouble of studying particulars. This is true; but it is only to be understood to apply to ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... passive listeners in his own fantastic endless fashion. And ever and again Lawford would find himself intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... not mean to propose a peace treaty. The general social antagonism which has taken hold of our entire public life to-day, brought about through the force of opposing and contradictory interests, will crumble to pieces when the reorganization of our social life, based upon the principles of economic justice, shall have become ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... He claimed that this power was shown in the making of yearly instead of permanent appropriations for the civil list and military establishments, yet when the House desired to strengthen public credit it had rendered the appropriation for those objects permanent and not yearly. It was, therefore, "contradictory to suppose that the House was bound to do a certain act at the same time that they were exercising the discretionary power of voting upon it." The debate determined nothing, but it is of interest as the first declaration ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... perfectly illustrates his singular and apparently contradictory character. Hamilton used to say of Burr, that he was great in little things, and little in great things. Girard in little things frequently seemed little, but in great things he was often magnificently great. For example: the old bank had been accustomed to present ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... had been previously said than in direct and clear revelations. The widow, most unfortunately for her means of information, was with "neighbour Stone" when the connected narrative was given, and all that she knew was disjointed, obscure, and a little contradictory. Still, it was sufficient to set her thinking intensely and sufficient to produce a material influence on the future fortunes of the Sea Lion, as will appear in ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... suppose you had to represent, with counters the contradictory to "no Cakes are new", which would be "some Cakes are new", or, putting letters for words, "some Cakes are x", how would you ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... by any intervening objects, and the whole hanging over declivities, is alone great; but to this the addition of a constant roar of falling water, either quite hid, or so far below as to be seen but obscurely, united to make those impressions stronger. No contradictory emotions are raised; no ill-judged temples appear to enliven a scene that is gloomy rather than gay. Falling or moving water is a lively object; but this being obscure the noise operates differently. Following the road a little further, there is another bold rocky projection ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... opinions differed concerning the climate of the colony. Dr. Madden could obtain only contradictory accounts. [Footnote: See Wanderings in West Africa, for details, vol. i. p. 275.] There is a tradition of a Chief Justice applying to the Colonial Office for information touching his pension, the clerks could not answer him, and he presently found that none ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... "gest", a word which may mean either 'guest' or 'stranger,' and it is often difficult, as here, to tell to which meaning the preference should be given. (2) "Eleven" translates the M.H.G. "selbe zwelfte", which means one of twelve. The accounts are, however, contradictory, as a few lines below mention is made of twelve companions of Siegfried. (3) "Vair" (O.F. "vair", Lat. "varius"), 'variegated', like the fur of the squirrel. (4) "Known". It was a mark of the experienced warrior, that he was acquainted with the customs and ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... studious; she had no one particular talent, unless it was an untrained and birdlike voice; she was always more or less in hot water about her lessons, always behindhand in her tasks, always leaving undone what she should do, and doing what she should not do. She was a contradictory, erratic creature—jealous of no one, envious of no one—dearly loving a joke, and many times inflicting pain from sheer thoughtlessness, but always ready to say she was sorry, always ready to ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... of Congress the actual struggle for the possession of Kansas commenced. After the passage of the Kansas bill we had reports in the newspapers of gross frauds at pretended elections of rival legislatures, of murder and other crimes, in short, of actual civil war in Kansas; but the accounts were contradictory. It was plainly the first duty of Congress to ascertain the exact condition of affairs in that territory. This could not be done ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... have expressed great disgust that low-born burghers should presume to meddle with so important an enterprise, which of right belonged to their family. Thus, in the midst of these altercations and contradictory schemes; the month of July wore away, and the city was reduced to its ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Vindicianus, who was then Proconsul, placed the crown, as he says, upon his "disordered head." The future Father of the Church writing for the theatre—and what a theatre it was then!—is not the least extraordinary thing in this life so disturbed and, at first sight, so contradictory. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... should get under the shelter of the dead ground which they had just quitted, but his death immediately afterwards left matters in a confused condition. The night was black, the ground broken, a hail of bullets whizzing through the ranks. Companies got mixed in the darkness and contradictory orders were issued. The leading company held its ground, though each of the officers, Brett, Carey, and Butler, was struck down. The other companies had retired, however, and the dawn found this fringe of men, most of them wounded, lying under the very rifles of the Boers. Even ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the King's execution, and the long frost, when he, Reuben, was last in London. His evidence was confused and confusing; and he drew upon himself much good-natured ridicule from the junior who opened the case. Out of various muddle-headed answers and contradictory statements the facts of Lord Fareham's unexpected appearance at the Manor Moat, his account of his lady's illness, and his hurried departure, carrying the young madam with him on horseback, were elicited, and the story of the ruse by which Mrs. Angela Kirkland had been beguiled from ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... Charles Hotham's reports, it is possible that the acts of his opponents may not obtain strict justice. But it is admitted on all sides that Sir Charles acted with the most perfect good faith; and the accounts given by the insurgents are far too contradictory and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... be very difficult to compose a formal biography of Shelley, because he was such a vague, imaginative, inconsistent creature. The documentary evidence is often wholly contradictory, for the simple reason that Shelley had no conception of accuracy. He did not, I am sure, deliberately invent what was not true; but he had a very lively imagination, and was capable of amplifying the smallest hints into elaborate theories; his memory was ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my return to New Sestros. The coast was full of odd and contradictory stories about our capture. When the tale of my death at Sierra Leone by drowning, in a fit of drunkenness, was told to my patron Don Pedro, that intelligent gentleman denied it without hesitation, because, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... each element. He therefore gave the formula HO to water, and HN to ammonia. When more than two compounds were known he assumed that the most familiar or the most stable one had the simple formula. He then determined the atomic weight as explained above. The results he obtained were contradictory and very far from satisfactory, and it was soon seen that some other method, resting on much more scientific grounds, must be found to decide what compounds, if any, have a single atom of each ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... hand, the ministry had proved too weak to support a story involving the character of men of rank and importance, and resting upon the credit of a person of such indifferent fame as Morris, who was, moreover, confused and contradictory in his mode of telling the story. Macready was even able to supply me with a copy of a printed journal, or News-Letter, seldom extending beyond the capital, in which the substance of the debate was mentioned; and with a copy of the Duke of ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 source ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... academic tradition, and only because of what appeared a violation of the tradition as he understood it, to have arrayed himself in violent opposition: a situation which rendered him in work and in life contradictory to his natural instinct. It is the old story of the defect of system. Even the most cunningly devised cannot make a place for all the many manifestations of temperamental activity. Like Gericault, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... he forgotten himself more. This egotism was probably not wanting to his poetry, but much may be excused him on account of his youth. It is difficult to form an opinion of his style; the epithets, gravis, vehemens, exilis (which apply rather to his oratory than to his poetry), seem contradictory; the last strikes us as the most discriminating. Besides short elegies like those of Catullus, he wrote an epic called Io, as well as lampoons against Pompey and other leading men. We possess none of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... forgiving because they themselves felt need of forgiveness? He had been deeply shocked by the docility with which they followed the codes of the service: even when he had committed his blunder of the contradictory prayers, they had murmured the words automatically, without protest. To the terrific solemnities of the Litany they had made the responses with prompt gabbling precision, and with a rapidity that frankly implied impatience to take the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... 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 and feverish folly, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... resources. When the two Kirks united, in 1900, then, the Free Kirk either abandoned the doctrine of which, in 1851, she said that 'she holds it still, and through God's grace ever will hold it,' or she regarded it as a mere pious opinion, which did not prevent her from coalescing with a Kirk of contradictory ideas. The tiny minority—the Wee Frees, the Free Kirk of to-day—would not accept this compromise, 'hence these tears,' to leave differences in purely metaphysical theology out ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... cloud-depths, is possibly the Python (Budh-nya).[10] There is here a touch of primitive belief in an old enemy of man—the serpent! But the Budhnya Snake has been developed in opposite ways, and has contradictory functions.[11] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... partly in Paris, during the stormy period of Louis the Sixteenth's flight and capture, and the fierce contest between the Girondins and Robespierre. Five books are then occupied with an analysis of the internal struggle occasioned by the contradictory influences of rural and secluded nature in boyhood, and of society when the young man first mingles with the world. The surcease of the strife is recorded in the fourteenth book, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... never to return home again." Even his horse seemed to have a foreboding of evil. He shied, as Werner Steiner relates, and as many saw with terror, backwards. Too sagacious not to observe that he must encounter contradictory measures, the lukewarmness of allies, and secret treachery, which he more than once predicted; too manly to retire now in the hour of need; too full of confidence in God, not to believe that He would protect His own Gospel, though it should for the moment call for its martyrs, he acknowledged ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... the prose romances the names of real persons are assigned as the writers; but the same romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of any of these prose romances. Ritson has aptly treated these pseudonymous translators as 'men of straw.' We may say of them all, as the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... themselves to 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, and giving each other a real standing ground and equilibrium. ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... received from the secretary at war in three successive letters [379] [See note 3 B, at the end of this Vol.], touching the relief of Minorca. Mr. Fowke alleged in his own defence, that the orders were confused and contradictory, and implied a discretionary power; that the whole number of his garrison did not exceed two thousand six hundred men, after he had spared two hundred and seventy-five to the ships commanded by Mr. Edgecumbe; that the ordinary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... turns to him as a personality almost unequaled in fiction and makes a novel out of his career, the plain ordinary world may gain some conception of this "father of the German labor movement." This is no place to deal with certain deplorable and contradictory phases of his life nor even with some of his mad dreams that led Bismarck, after saying that "he was one of the most intellectual and gifted men with whom I have ever had intercourse, ..." to add "and it was perhaps a matter of doubt to him whether the German Empire would close with the Hohenzollern ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to revolve about some one of these, as the sun. That supposition was tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves as parts of a most harmonious system. 'Something,' he goes on to say, 'analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my inquiry—the human understanding. All others had sought their ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sight to be an application to Ireland of institutions which, as they have been found to answer their purpose in such countries as Canada and Victoria, may also prove successful in Ireland. The appearance is delusive. The true reasons why the Colonial system, self-contradictory as it is in theory and unsatisfactory as it sometimes is in practice, has produced harmony between England and her dependencies, are that the colonies are far distant and are prosperous, that they feel pride in their relation to the mother-country, that whilst ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... demeanour, who, whenever he ventured to make an observation, was snapped up short by one of the vixenish ladies before-mentioned. Lastly, the two vixenish ladies and the heavy gentleman were giving the driver contradictory directions, all tending to the one point, that he should stop at Mrs. Bardell's door; which the heavy gentleman, in direct opposition to, and defiance of, the vixenish ladies, contended was a green door and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... tests it. In this sense Kant distinguished an analytic from a synthetic judgment, as one in which the predicate is involved in the essence of the subject. Such judgments are also known as verbal, as opposed to real or ampliative judgments. The processes of synthesis and analysis though formally contradictory are practically supplementary; thus to analyse the connotation is to synthesize the denotation of a term, and vice versa; the process of knowledge involves the two methods, analysis being the corrective of synthetic empiricism. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... returned Alida, half tempted, by the wild and excited eye of her companion, not withstanding all the contradictory evidence which surrounded him, to believe she was addressing one of the very rovers in question. "The book was lent me by a brave seaman, who holds himself in readiness to repress their depredations; and while reading of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... directly against its authority. There are those who hope, there are those who are sure, that in the incessant investigation of facts, physical, political, and moral, something or other, or many things, will sooner or later turn up, and stubborn facts too, simply contradictory of revealed declarations. A vision comes before them of some physical or historical proof that mankind is not descended from a common origin, or that the hopes of the world were never consigned to a wooden ark floating on the waters, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... presence, shy and self-distrustful. Especially was this so if you were a lady (how amazingly he got on in after years with some of you, what agony others endured till he went away!), and it is the chief reason why there are such contradictory accounts ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... around them; and only this thousandth part they have noticed. But the creative mind builds up a living picture out of the thousands of aspects most of us are congenitally blind to. This is what Jefferies has done in "Amaryllis at the Fair." The book is rich in the contradictory forces of life, in its quick twists and turns: we feel in it there is nature working alike in the leaves of grass outside the Idens' house, in the blustering winds round the walls, and in the minds of the characters indoors; and the style has the ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... nearer the surface. The man who had charge of the baths assured me that in summer the water is hotter and more plentiful than in winter. The former circumstance I should have expected, from the less mixture, during the dry season, of cold water; but the latter statement appears very strange and contradictory. The periodical increase during the summer, when rain never falls, can, I think, only be accounted for by the melting of the snow: yet the mountains which are covered by snow during that season, are three or four leagues distant from the springs. I have no reason to doubt ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Miss Abbott, and closed her eyes wearily. Each moment her difficulties were increasing. She wished that she was not so tired, so open to contradictory impressions. She longed for Harriet's burly obtuseness or for the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... misconception is shared both by the reviewers and the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed—a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often apparently insincere—still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger's legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Patsy, as Orlando's mother fluttered into the garden like a gorgeous hen with wings outspread, her clothes a riot of contradictory colours, all of them insistently bright, "d'ye know what this place is—this terry firmy on which we stand, that's wan mile wan way, an' half a mile the other? Ye don't? Well, I'll tell ye: it's a zoolyogical gardin. Is it like a human bein' she is, the dear ould wumman there? Isn't ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... another like fault: that the Duke of Albemarle seems to be able to answer them; but he thinks that the Duke of Albemarle and the Prince are contented to let their Narratives sleep, they being not only contradictory in some things (as he observed about the business of the Duke of Albemarle's being to follow the Prince upon dividing the fleete, in case the enemy come out), but neither of them to be maintained in others. That the business the other night of my Lord Anglesey at the Council was happily ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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 ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... all nature. The real God of India is by himself without power; real efficacious power is attributed only to three divinities who exist externally to him. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, possessed of qualities in part contradictory and attributes that are mutually exclusive, have no other accord or harmony than that which results from the power of things itself, and which is found external to their own thoughts. Such is the Indian Trimurti. What an immense difference between this Triad ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... own fire. One of the village committee solemnly took off his hat and poured on oil. The great moment had come. Brenda Macrae approached the sacred pile, and, tremulous from the effect of much contradictory advice, applied the torch. Silence, thou Grieve and others, false prophets of disaster! Who now could say that Pettybaw bonfire had been badly built, or that its fifteen tons of coal and twenty cords of wood had ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... contradictory statements of the year of his birth, but it is probable he was born about 1270. His family was one of some distinction, and he is said to have been the younger of the two sons of Sir Malcolm Wallace, of Elderslie and Auchinbothie, in the neighborhood of Paisley. His mother, who according ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... with an absolute gusto, Lebrun did so. He interested his contemporaries immensely; no painter ever ruled more unrivalled. He fails to interest us because we have another point of view. We believe in our point of view and disbelieve in his as a matter of course; and it would be self-contradictory to say, in the interests of critical catholicity, that in our opinion his may be as sound as our own. But to say that he has no point of view whatever—to say, in general, that modern classic art is perfunctory and mere formulary—is to be ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... 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
... That you did not lose your head as the others did—the effect in such case being in proportion to the amount of time each remained in the room—points to the probability that the stupefying medium was not hypnotic, whatever else it may have been. But again, there is a fact which is contradictory. Miss Trelawny, who was in the room more than any of you—for she was in and out all the time and did her share of permanent watching also—did not seem to be affected at all. This would show that the influence, whatever it is, does ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... 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, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... himself in difficulty. The theology of his grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with demands as to feeling and inward action from which his soul turned with sickness and fainting. That they were repulsive to him, that they appeared unreal, and contradictory to the nature around him, was no proof that they were not of God. But on the other hand, that they demanded what seemed to him unjust,—that these demands were founded on what seemed to him untruth attributed ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... I must also grieve, to see you once more on the British shores,' said Sir Richard Glendale, and stopped short—a tumult of contradictory feelings ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... The plot is very skilfully mixed up, notwithstanding the difficulty that always must attend carrying on, in connection with each other, two interests of a totally distinct and opposite nature, connecting two contradictory agencies without either encroaching on the other, and conducting an alternation of serious and comic scenes to one end, without making them clash. This Mr. Morton has, to a considerable degree, successfully accomplished; making that which occasions the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... if he objects with full arguments, his adversaries have a perfect right to claim that he himself sets a poor example and that his psychology helps still more to increase that noisy discussion which he denounces as ruinous to the community. But in this contradictory situation the circle must be broken somewhere, and even at the risk of adding to the dangerous tumult which he condemns, the psychologist must break his silence in order to plead for silence. I shall have to go into all the obnoxious detail, for ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... loving woman, and wantonness instead of love? I have always suspected it. I defy any rational man to recompose, with a semblance of probability, the character Rousseau gives to the woman he loved, from the contradictory elements which he describes in her. Those elements exclude each other: if she had soul enough to adore Rousseau, she did not at the same time love Claude Anet; if she grieved for Claude Anet and Rousseau, she did not love the young hair-dresser. If she was pious she did not glory in her weakness, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... 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 shipwreck ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... native accounts there is a great extent of lake country at this point. The general appearance of the country denotes a vast flat, with slight depressions; these form extensive lakes during the wet season, and sodden marshes during the dry weather; thus contradictory accounts of the country may be given by travellers according to the seasons at which they examined it. There is nothing to denote large permanent lakes; vast masses of water plants and vegetation, requiring both a wet and dry season, exist throughout; but there are no great tracts of deep water. ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... achievements of the principal actors in the story, but as participants. They heard unwonted accents from these actors and saw them behave in conduct which from moment to moment appeared strangely contradictory. There were mutterings of popular discontent, which, under threats, gave way to jubilant acclamation in the first great scenes in the beginning of the opera. There were alternate mockeries and adulations in the next scene in which the people figured; and running through ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... unfortunately, simultaneously at the end of his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them, his force being small. The Government had assured Colonel Starr that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... remarkable approximation—which converts a statement apparently contradictory, into a strong confirmation of the deduction to be obtained from the other physical facts grouped together by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harrass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... merwomen. Somewhat resembling Swift's inimitable creations, the Houyhnhnms for instance, they prove, amongst other things, that those who dwell in a denser element can justly blame and severely criticise the contradictory and unreasonable prejudices and predilections of mankind. Sayf al-Muluk (vol. viii. Night dcclviii.), the romantic tale of two lovers, shows by its introduction that it was originally an independent work and it is known to have existed in Persia during the eleventh century: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the head without imagining that it was his, some time after called on Mrs. Hayes, on separate occasions, to inquire for her husband, whose absence began to be noticed. Ashley and Longmore were mutual {51} friends, and their suspicions being excited by the contradictory statements which Mrs. Hayes had given to them, they went to look again at the head, when a minute examination satisfied them that it had belonged to Hayes. The apprehension of the murderers was the result. On the day they were brought ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... peculiar case, a very peculiar case," the Justice announced, as he began his verdict. "The evidence of the two parties is flatly contradictory. There are no witnesses outside the two principals. Each claims the other committed the assault, and I have no legal way of determining the truth. But I have my private opinion, Mr. Witberg, and I would recommend that henceforth you keep off of Mr. Watson's ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... the terror of the unfortunate passengers was very great— the more so that it was undefined. They saw the captain, however, every now and then come into the cabin and toss off a tumbler of strong rum-and-water, and then return on deck, and shout out with oaths often contradictory orders. The gale all this time was increasing, until it threatened to become as violent as the hurricane from which we had escaped. I could not help wishing that we had not left our leaky little schooner. ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... reflection. Every abuse carries with it its own remedy or palliation. Thus the excess of crude and hasty criticism, which has of late prevailed throughout the literary world, and threatened to overrun our country, begins to produce its own antidote. Where there is a multiplicity of contradictory paths, a man must make his choice; in so doing, he has to exercise his judgment, and that is one great step to mental independence. He begins to doubt all, where all differ, and but one can be in the right. He is driven to trust to his own discernment, and his natural feelings; and here ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... in varied and often contradictory faiths, brought up for the most part in ignorance and prejudice, having lived, some virtuously, some indifferently, some in complete abandonment to their lowest animal instincts, differing among themselves as to climate, language, customs, tastes and nationality, are here drawn together to live in ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... reach the fact, nor approach to it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle, mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is left in the government, no ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the classic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine; they perished by the sword or at ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... than family or kinship, and not many care to call old Francois Villon friend nowadays. There was a time——" He paused, running his hand down the long trail of his beard reflectively, a slender-fingered supple hand. La Mothe noted it was, a hand that had a distinct character of its own, just as the contradictory face had, though the finger-tips were less sensitive than in the days when their itching acquisitiveness had brought their owner to the cold shadows of the gallows. "Aye! there was a time. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... can one use but the word-of-all-work, love, which means so many variations and shades, and complications of passion, sentiment, vanity and attraction?—his love had greatly increased, was growing stronger: sometimes he wondered whether it was the mere contradictory, defiant obstinacy of the discouraged admirer; and, certainly, there was in his devotion a strong infusion of a longing to score off his tyrannising wife and the fortunate, amiable Percy. Nigel's jealousy of Percy—and not of Percy only, but in a ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... number as it stands, but this is very bad.) It is a mistake to think of it as a first article. The article itself is in the main a mistake. Firstly, the subject requires the greatest discretion and nicety of touch. And secondly, it is all wrong and self-contradictory. Nobody can for a moment suppose that "sporting" amusements are the sports of the PEOPLE; the whole gist of the best part of the description is to show that they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class. The greater part of them are at a miserable discount (horse-racing excepted, which ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... English archers flew into the courtyard. The confusion which reigned there was indescribable. The citizens with shouts of alarm took to their heels. The men-at-arms were powerless against this rain of missiles, and the knights, hastily closing their visors, shouted contradictory orders, which ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... reporters were as much at sea in regard to the Stirling-sixth-ward incident, as had been the rank-and-file in the convention. Three took their views from Maguire, and called it "shameful treason," and the like. Two called it "unprincipled and contradictory conduct." One alone said that "Mr. Stirling seemed to be acting conscientiously, if erratically." Just what effect it had had on the candidates none of the papers agreed in. One said it had killed Porter. Another, that "it was a purely personal matter without influence on the main question." The ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... complex, stable or unstable, barbarous or civilized, this society contains within itself its explanations of its being. Strange as a social structure may be, it can be explained; also its institutions, however contradictory. Neither prosperity, nor decline, nor despotism, nor freedom, is the result of a throw of the dice, of luck or an unexpected turn of events caused by rash men. They are conditions we must live with. In any event, it is useful to understand them, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... merrily, imitating him. "When to go up and when to come down!" he repeated with the same idiotic drawl and contradictory gesture. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... a council, which was convened at Trent in 1545. The Protestants refused to acknowledge its authority, and the emperor no longer affected fairness toward them. In 1546 he joined Pope Paul III. in a league against them, by a treaty in terms contradictory to his own public protestations. Paul himself was so imprudent as to reveal the secret, and it enabled the Protestants to raise a formidable army in defence of their religion and liberties. But the Electors of Cologne and Brandenburg, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... frowned. This somewhat contradictory evidence had very sensibly affected her; and when, a moment later, the coroner, having dismissed the witness, turned towards her, and inquired if she had anything further to say in the way of explanation or otherwise, she threw her hands up almost ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... natural, toward the wife of his bosom, even to a writer accused by several critics of sacrificing too much to manner. Lastly Paul Overt had a vague sense that if the gentleman with the expressionless eyes bore the name that had set his heart beating faster (he also had contradictory conventional whiskers—the young admirer of the celebrity had never in a mental vision seen his face in so vulgar a frame) he would have given him a sign of recognition or of friendliness, would have heard of him a little, would know something about "Ginistrella," would have an impression of ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... will not act without adequate knowledge, and thus cause disaster, if a sincere effort is made to provide them with knowledge. The money question has first place in multitudes of minds of all degrees or power. But a glance at most of the cure-all systems shows how contradictory they are. The majority of them make the assumption of honesty among mankind, to begin with, and that, of course, is a prime defect. Even our present system would work splendidly if all men were honest. As a matter of fact, the whole money question is 95 per cent. human ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... however, he perceived that Guillaume was now very pale and had closed his eyes. Had even he, with his faith in science, felt the doubt which is born of contradictory theories, and the despair which comes when one sees the fight for truth resulting in growth ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... room was not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here. However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy cabinet-piano ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... how long ago, how infinitely unimportant, seemed all those convolutions of trail and argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the Place du College the marshal's carriole was lost to sight in the gathering crowd, among whose numbers the most strange and contradictory reports from the field of battle were now beginning to circulate. The fog was clearing; the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... before I went to Pulaski, and "properly appreciated," instead of upon what I had gathered from General Thomas's orders to Stanley and subsequent orders to me about fighting Hood at Pulaski, absolutely contradictory to that stated in his report, "without risking a general engagement," and his assent to my radically different suggestions made after I assumed command at Pulaski, as stated in my report. It is not incumbent ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... complex and composite in its fundamental elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series of leading facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory as may appear this result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea within them is that special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous uniform of superficial ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... were so contradictory that she could not reach a decision regarding the action she should take and she bit her lips with vexation as she stood in ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... natural proneness to exaggerate their age which usually characterises men of advanced years, so that any ex parte statement of this kind must be received with due caution. Where, moreover, as in the present case, we have evidence of a directly contradictory kind furnished by independent witnesses, whose declarations in this respect are presumably disinterested, such ex parte statements are on the face of them unreliable. The balance of evidence in this case appears to rest on the side of the ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... equally probable. But then, instead of mocking at all, he sympathises with all, and expresses the one sentiment which may be extracted from their collision—the sentiment of reverence blended with scepticism. It is a contradictory sentiment, one may say, in a sense, but the essence of humour is to be contradictory. The language in which he utters himself was determined by his omnivorous appetite for every quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field of learning. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Barere,[2116] with others, all of them wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions. To one who is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State, property, religion, the Church, the ancient regime, the Revolution, the present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the parliament. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... like psychical or any other evidence, must be submitted to conscientious processes of testing and sifting. Contradictory instances must be hunted for sedulously. Nothing can be less scientific than to snatch up any traveller's tale which makes for our theory, and to ignore evidence, perhaps earlier, or later, or better observed, which makes against it. Yet this, unfortunately, in certain instances (which ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... book cannot be summed up briefly. It was printed as a whole at first, without the name of the place, in 1564, and next year at Lyons by Jean Martin. It has given, and even still gives rise to two contradictory opinions. Is it Rabelais' ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... demands that the philosophy of the complex vision attempts to satisfy. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its organ of research the balanced "ensemble" of man's whole nature. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its "material" the whole variegated and contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to feelings, which the natural human being with his superstitions, his sympathies, his antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his irrational intuitions, his hopes and fears, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... family had started Federalists, in the true meaning of the term; for their education, native sense and principles, had a leaning to order, good government, and the dignity of the country; but as factions became fiercer, and names got to be confounded and contradictory, the landed branch settled down into what they thought were American, and the commercial branch into what might properly be termed English Federalists. We do not mean that the father of John intended to be untrue to his native ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... and easy individual could not understand the dreamy moods into which his master fell, still less could he comprehend the gleams of quiet humour and expressions of intense seriousness, with other contradictory appearances, which occasionally manifested themselves in Leif's visage and demeanour. It was plain that there was much on his mind, and that much of that was gay as well as grave. Anders made several attempts to find out what was the matter, ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... is (ibid., p. 203) that 'the bands are separated by smaller and smaller spaces as the rate of movement of the rod becomes slower and slower'; and this is equivalent to saying that the distance between the bands diminishes as the rate of movement of the rod decreases. The statements are contradictory. But there is no doubt as to which is the wrong one—it is the first. What these authors have called 'distance between the bands' has here been shown to be itself a band. Now, no point about this illusion can be more ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... only in origin or the order of nature, whereas others, as Basil (Hom. ii In Hexaem.), Ambrose (In Hexaem. i), and Chrysostom (Hom. ii In Gen.), hold that formlessness of matter preceded in time its formation. And although these opinions seem mutually contradictory, in reality they differ but little; for Augustine takes the formlessness of matter in a different sense from the others. In his sense it means the absence of all form, and if we thus understand it we cannot say that the formlessness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... aircraft landed at a Finnish airfield. It is now known definitely that an ostensibly ill member of their group who was put aboard their plane in a stretcher was in reality a young American officer. Among other things, this explains the eighteen contradictory Five Year Plans announced by Peiping this week. CIA says they are going the way of the Russians. ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... 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 them as inspired. Thus the journals are not ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... to the exclusion of those who do not belong to their associations. Logic has something, perhaps not much, to do with political action, and it is almost inconceivable that a party can go on for long holding these two contradictory opinions. Which of them will be abandoned, the future only ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a prophet as the fulfillment of his most confident prediction. Jael looked all aghast, and her face splintered into the most contradictory lines in the effort to give expression to ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... passage attentively, I was surprised to find it contain a singular mixture of contradictory principles, and in the same breath, the sentiments of a philosopher and of a colonist; of an advocate for the Negroes, and of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... By their contradictory statements, ever-increasing embarrassment, and unveracious assertions, the jury were soon convinced of their guilt. The unhappy youth was their brother, and had inherited property from their mother, he being her child by a second husband. So these ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are dark and of practically no significance. There lies the irony of the portrait. The last words of the novel, the most biting surely that Turgenev ever wrote, contain the whole essence of On the Eve. On the Eve of What? one asks. Time has given contradictory answers to the men of all parties. The Elenas of to-day need not turn their eyes abroad to find their counterpart in spirit; so far at least the pessimists are refuted: but the note of death that Turgenev strikes in his marvellous chapter on Venice has still for young Russia an ominous ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... multiplicity of authors, could give us no conception of their history as a people. An author was still wanting to collect all these together, so as to present us with something like a continuous history. But to do this was no easy task: the materials were scanty and often contradictory; they were all written in a spirit hostile to the Gauls; a deep vein of prejudice and national partiality ran through and tarnished them all; the motives of that people were misrepresented, their actions falsified, the historians ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... and his coadjutors were all influenced by a Spanish proverb, which, though contradictory to reason and common sense, says Dubitat Augustinus, or it is contradicted by St Augustine; who, in the 9th chapter of the 21st book of his city of God, denies the possibility of the Antipodes, or that any person should be able to go from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... of as an heiress, therefore, even had there been no Emperor in the way, he would not have worshiped at the shrine. But now, behold the shrine, attractive before, newly and alluringly decked! Egon wondered much over his half-brother's apparently impulsive offer, and the contradictory command, which had, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... critical conditions here had informed you of affairs in this quarter. I had not written to you fully and frequently, first, because in the incessant change of affairs I would be exposed to give you contradictory accounts; and secondly, because the amount of the subjects to be laid before you would demand too much of ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the world. (107) Hence he will have to settle all legal difficulties, and solve all legal problems, that have accumulated since days immemorial, (108) and decide vexed questions of ritual concerning which authors entertain contradictory views. In short, all difference of opinion must be removed from the path of the Messiah. (109) This office of expounder of the law Elijah will continue to occupy even after the reign of peace has been established on earth, and his relation ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... over the leaves of her account book; irritated by this contradictory sense of being obliged to feel she had done an injury when she knew she really had not. So at last Laura thought she had a headache or something, and soon went ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... wounded at Borodino were brought in by the Dorogomilov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow, and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions out by the other gates. In spite of Rostopchin's broadsheets, or because of them or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory rumors were current in the town. Some said that no one was to be allowed to leave the city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had been taken out of the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave. Some said there had been another battle after Borodino at which the French had been ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... feature in the actions of Caligula lies in a certain nervous haste, which led him spasmodically from one obsession to another, often of a self-contradictory nature; moreover, he had the dangerous habit of wanting to do everything himself. Caligula seems to have a great fondness of the sea. The strolling-player side of his character was by no means limited to his military performances. He was passionately devoted ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... even where it is possible, yet 'tis so exceeding difficult that very few Persons in an Assembly are capable of it; and when they attempt it, if their Thoughts should be enquir'd one by one, you would find very various, wretched, and contradictory Meanings put upon the Words of the Hebrew Psalmist, and all for want of an Evangelical Translation of him. 'Tis very obvious and common to observe that Persons of Seriousness and Judgment that consider what they sing, are often forced to ...
— A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody • Isaac Watts
... did ill offices, by promising favor thereby, more than they had ground to engage. Some, under these temptations, regarded not as they should what became of others, so that they could thereby serve their own turns. Some have since acknowledged so much. If the confessions were contradictory; if witnesses uttered apparent falsehoods, 'the Devil,' the judges would say, 'takes away their memory, ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular expositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing in them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people's hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes, taught that it is perilous to meet a black ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Contradictory as it may seem, there was nothing which entertained and edified him more than the little fellow's interest in his tenantry. He had never taken any interest in them himself, but it pleased him well enough that, with all his childish habits of thought and in the midst of all his childish ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... him by explanations to any persons whomsoever; and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to keep to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as guests of the Countess of Romfrey. Contradictory indeed. Rosamund shook her head over him. For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing contradictory commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him, appears to be expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely does it rise and snap at such provocation. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Had he kept it entirely so for the present, he would have done well; but he is said to have divulged it to one or two officials at Berber; if so, it was a very regrettable imprudence, which compromised the defence of that town. But surely no man was ever charged with duties so complex and contradictory. The qualities of Nestor, Ulysses, and Achilles combined in one mortal could scarcely have availed to untie or ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... deputation went down personally to inspect the fixed and locomotive engines on that line, as well as at Hetton and Killingworth. They returned to Liverpool with much information; but their testimony as to the relative merits of the two kinds of engines was so contradictory, that the directors were as far ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... on his sofa, struck him as by no means contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration, and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... courtroom, too. It was broken but by one sound, a heartrending sigh from the prisoner. But nobody looked at him, and thank God!—nobody looked at me. Every eye was on the face of this young girl, whose story bore such an impress of truth, and yet was so contradictory of all former evidence. What revelations were yet to follow. It would seem that she was ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... preposterous 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 venture ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... better what Mysticism is; he would have avoided several hasty epithets, by the use of which he has, we think, deceived himself into the notion that he has settled a matter by calling it a hard name; he would have explained, perhaps, to himself and to us, many strange and seemingly contradictory facts in the annals of Mysticism. But he would also not have written so readable a book. On the whole he has taken the right course, though one wishes that he had carried it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... two Louis Riels, father and son, should lead in agitations that were somewhat contradictory. The elder Riel was a famous antagonist of the Hudson's Bay Company regime with its apparent or alleged monopoly in trade, and the younger Riel, while no lover of the Company, opposed the Canadian Government which was to replace it. The truth seems that they were both temperamentally ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... there is revealed to the astronomer a surface which is covered with an amazing number of shadings and markings which as yet have been incompletely interpreted. The faint nature of these indications has led to very contradictory statements as to their form; no two maps which have been drawn agree except in their generalities. There is reason to believe that Mars has an atmosphere; this is shown by the fact that in the appropriate season the region about either pole is covered by a white coating, presumably ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... there of disease or poison. Another account relates that the great sculptor went into exile at Elis, where he made his most famous statue, the Olympian Zeus, and that he was there convicted of theft and put to death. With such contradictory stories we cannot know the exact truth; but we do know that he went to Elis accompanied by distinguished artists. He was received with honor, and for a long time the studio that he occupied there was shown to strangers. The Olympians also ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... Atheism. That they flowed from the pen of a Bishop, is one of many extraordinary facts which have grown out of theological controversy. They are questions strongly suggestive of another. Is it possible to have experience of, or even to imagine a Being with attributes so strange, anomalous, and contradictory? To that question reason prompts an answer in the negative—It is plain that Bishop Watson was convinced 'no man by searching can find out God.' The case is, that he, in the hope of converting Deists, ventured to insinuate arguments highly favourable to Atheism, whose ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... is not voluntary in its action, but automatic, and even if a singer knew how the vocal cords should act it would not help him in the least to govern their action. The fact is that the results of laryngoscopic study of the vocal cords have been disappointing and contradictory and investigators have failed to define what correct laryngeal action is. There are those who even deny that the vocal cords govern the pitch ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... like a man who had imagined a full measure of physical powers and had envied them ... had been exasperated by the exuberant presentation of them... had felt a series of contradictory emotions when they had seemed ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... yet more inconsistent, still more deficient in poetical probability, and indeed intirely contradictory to Homer and nature. In all Homer's works, there are not two characters between whom there is a greater contrast and opposition, than between those of Achilles and Ulysses. They enjoy no quality in common, but that of valour; ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory, ambiguous, elusive. They began to get ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... Indeed, "the system of Lord Bacon" became a sort of cabalistic phrase. It meant anything and everything. It was like the English Constitution, venerable in authority and prescription, interpreted in contradictory methods, and never precisely defined. Few men undertook to study it with a zeal like that of Homer and his friend Lord Webb Seymour, when, in days of enthusiasm, they read and re-read the "De Augmentis" and the "Novum Organum," and Homer planned to do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... nation; besides, the national finances do not admit of its maintenance, and they are consequently satisfied with an embryonic organisation which is always insubordinate, distracted by incessant and contradictory reforms, copying foreign improvements as a poor girl copies the robes of a great lady. Believe me, there is nothing pleasant in living such a narrowed and monotonous life, with no other chance of glory but that of shooting a workman who protests ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... do. What trouble these matchless patriots had to overcome! Intrigue, treason, religious fanaticism, begrudging of supplies, the constant shortage of stores and provisions at every critical stage of a crisis, the contradictory instructions from the exasperating Tudor Queen: the fleet kept in port until the chances of an easy victory over England's bitterest foes had passed away! But for the vacillation of the icy virgin, Drake's Portugal expedition would have put the triumph of the Spanish Armada to the blush, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... tenderness, were interpreted in a variety of ways by the cackling society of the town, whose gossip often gave rise to fatal blunders, like those relating to the birth of Agathe and that of Max. It is not easy for the community of a country town to disentangle the truth from the mass of conjecture and contradictory reports to which a single fact gives rise. The provinces insist—as in former days the politicians of the little Provence at the Tuileries insisted—on full explanations, and they usually end by knowing ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... not exist, seeing the extension of space or internal place is not different from that of body. For since from this alone, that a body has extension in length, breadth, and depth, we have reason to conclude that it is a substance, it being absolutely contradictory that nothing should possess extension, we ought to form a similar inference regarding the space which is supposed void, viz., that since there is extension in it there is necessarily ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... 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 ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... piece it out finally from the narratives of the two tramps, and when he had returned to the Shorter home and listened to the contradictory and whole-souled improvisations of Shorter pere and ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... instructions in what they said, the duke intending that the innocence of Isabel should be plainly proved in that public manner before the whole city of Vienna; but Angelo little thought that it was from such a cause that they thus differed in their story, and he hoped from their contradictory evidence to be able to clear himself from the accusation of Isabel, and he said, assuming the look of offended innocence: 'I did but smile till now; but, good my lord, my patience here is touched, and I perceive these poor distracted women are but ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... instance, if I held no communication with you for a year, would it not be a wonderful proof of your love to and faith in me, if you kept on writing me and telling me your joys and trials? To go back—I have been a good deal confused by the contradictory testimony of different Christians, and am driven more and more to a conviction that human beings, at the best, are very fallible. We must get our light directly from on high. At the same time we influence each other for right or for wrong, and one who is thoroughly upright and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... back into something below our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... of offering prayer in order to obtain various needs presents the difficulty of reconciling the conception of an omnipotent, all-foreseeing God with the contradictory theory of a Father who requires prayer before caring for his children, an almighty God who will be turned from his course by human petitions. Man can do wonders in the way of conquering nature, but ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... my sister my first aim was accuracy, and my next to make her see what I saw; but beside the remarkably contradictory statements of the few resident Europeans and my own observations, I had little to help me, and realized every day how much truth there is in the dictum of Socrates—"The body is a hindrance to acquiring knowledge, and sight and hearing are ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... the inconsistencies hitherto observed in the religion of the ancients will disappear so soon as we obtain a clearer knowledge of their chronology; and events which now seem contradictory will be satisfactorily explained when placed in their proper order with regard to date. Religion, like everything else, is constantly shifting its position to accommodate itself to the changed mental conditions of its adherents; hence, ideas which at any given time in the past were perfectly suited ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... and which can create so much suffering to most of us as we conquer for them our awkwardness and our shyness? Let us pause for a moment, and try to be just. Let us contemplate these social ethics, which call for so much that is, perhaps, artificial and troublesome and contradictory. Society, so long as it is the congregation of the good, the witty, the bright, the intelligent, and the gifted, is the thing most necessary to us all. We are apt to like it and its excitements almost too well, or to hate it, with ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... capture of pirates may be too dearly purchased; but that, at the same time, the honour of the flag of the Order must be upheld at all hazards. Ah!" he broke off, seeing a slight smile on the young knight's face, "you think my orders contradictory? It may be so; but you know what I mean, and I fear not that you will blunder in carrying them out. Be prudent, and yet not over prudent. I mean, be not rash, unless there are such benefits to be obtained as would justify ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty |
