"Antithesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every instance to consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of a clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this plan. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... fingers. The most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably comfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine. In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most pretentious. The older ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Albany probably lurked most in its being our admired antithesis to New York; it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first fleeting vision, I apprehend, Albany itself must have been the scene exhibited. Our parents had gone ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... survival of the speculative ignorance of the dark ages, and the worship of Greek literature. The copious ridicule of the press has no effect upon this serious gathering. Its verbose platitudes and pretentious inanities continue to be repeated, furnishing almost as good an antithesis to science and philosophy as Mrs. Eddy and her disciples. There is no lack of fluency and ingenuity in the use of language, and occasionally there are glimmering and flashes of common sense, but to wander through the first report of the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... soft and bow, And smile if he but condescend to nod. Oh, yes, I'll do't. In tableaux once I played Uriah Heep, and made the character So "'umble" and so crawly, that for days I loathed my hands, and slapped my fingers well For having knuckles. Thus will I to the tyrant play the slave. An old antithesis. ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... Contrast and Antithesis are often used effectively to amplify definition, as in this sentence, which immediately follows ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... is a finite existence, and its antithesis would be an infinite, neither exposed to any attack from without nor in want of help from without, and hence [Greek: aei hosautos on], in eternal rest; [Greek: oute gignomenon, oute apollymenon], without change, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a mountain of blasted stones. Shoun Kelly, American, owned one of the outer towers of the great castle and the story of its ownership is the American antithesis of German ravage. Americans were always faithful tourists to Coucy; but among them, one loved more than all the glorious old ruin and its story which began with Enguerrand, the Sire of Coucy, in the year 1210. This was the late Edmund Kelly, of New York ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... services in nonconformist chapels; but it is not so easy, while he remains a nonconformist, to understand, or to feel any considerable degree of sympathy with, his tendency towards practices which are the very antithesis ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... follows:—All is GOOD in the noble morality which proceeds from strength, power, health, well-constitutedness, happiness, and awfulness; for, the motive force behind the people practising it is "the struggle for power." The antithesis "good and bad" to this first class means the same as "noble" and "despicable." "Bad" in the master-morality must be applied to the coward, to all acts that spring from weakness, to the man with "an eye to the main chance," who ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... from its odor.] an atmosphere, they are summoned to weather at starting. Coming, however, to the special case of Mrs. Schreiber's household, I am bound to report that in no instance have I known young ladies so thoroughly steeled against all the ordinary host of petty maladies which, by way of antithesis to the capital warfare of dangerous complaints, might be called the guerilla nosology; influenza, for instance, in milder forms, catarrh, headache, toothache, dyspepsia in transitory shapes, etc. Always the spirits of the two girls were ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... The antithesis of art in method is science, as Coleridge has intimated. As the latter aims at the particular, so the former aims at the universal. One would have truth of detail, the other truth of ensemble. The method of science may be symbolized by ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... not entirely to his satisfaction; for he had spoken with too distinct a sincerity to please his own critical taste, which had been educated to delight in acute antithesis and culminating sentences—the grand Biscayan billows of rhetorical utterance, in comparison wherewith his talk was like the little chopping waves of a wind-blown lake. But he had, as he could see, produced an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... allusion to chaos in the one than in the other. The earth-disk lay in its watery envelope, like the yolk of an egg in the glaire, and the spirit, or breath, of Elohim stirred the mass. Light was created as a thing by itself; and its antithesis "darkness" as another thing. It was supposed to be the nature of these two to alternate, and a pair of alternations constituted a "day" in the sense of an ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... with metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... wore a somewhat ample ring with a diamond in it, and his watchchain was too heavy and prominent, but there was a suggestion of coarseness about him. Her father, leaning forward in his chair with an air of languid curiosity, the card in his slender fingers, appeared his antithesis, and yet the girl fancied there was a resemblance in the expression of the two faces. She also felt her dislike for the stranger increased when she saw for the first time the look of greed and cunning ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the passionate notes of the Hungarian czardas, resembled some vision of a painter, some embarkation for the dreamed-of Cythera, realized by the fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great lord, here in nineteenth century Paris, close to the bridge, across which streamed, like a living antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, full ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... self-abnegation, but much sound and worldly wisdom, in the Pilgrims selecting "the best position on the whole coast" of America for their settlement; and there is as little truth in the statement, though a good antithesis—the delight of Mr. Bancroft—that the Pilgrims were conducted to "the most barren and inhospitable part of Massachusetts" for "actual settlement," as appears from the descriptions given of it by Governors Winslow and Bradford and ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... definition of faith as 'a means of believing that which we know not to be true'—would be avoided if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and which cannot be established by any mere logical ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Its absolute antithesis were the gambling dens of '49. Built over-night, destined to remain if the mines were rich, and to melt away if they pinched out, the gambling hells were sometimes the veriest makeshifts. Canvas covered, dirt floored, except for the dancing platform, ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... according to Hegel, "no motionless, eternally self-identical and unchangeable being, but a living, eternal process of absolute self-existence. This process consists in the eternal self-distinction, or antithesis, and equally self-reconciliation or synthesis of those opposites which enter, as necessary elements, into the constitution of the Divine Being. This self-evolution, whereby the absolute enters into antithesis, and returns to itself again, is the eternal self-actualization ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... antithesis between Helden (heroes) and Haendler (hucksters), with which all Germany is ringing, is an illustration of the romantic quality that vitiates their intelligence. In spite of the fact that they are one of the greatest trading and ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... charity. I do not mean only the material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the antithesis of fraternity, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... "the Alps were the spectacle, the spectator was an idiot! I forgot myself in this frightful antithesis: man face to face with nature; Nature in her superbest aspect, man in his most miserable debasement. What could be the significance of this mysterious contrast? What was the sense of this irony in a solitude? Have I the right to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... extremely rare, carelessly letting fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his strength lay. In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient to observe the great contractor ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... may be connected together in one great cycle by means of a common destiny running through the actions of all. Hence the restriction to the number three admits of a satisfactory explanation. It is the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. The advantage of this conjunction was that, by the consideration of the connected fables, a more complete gratification was furnished than could possibly be obtained from a single action. The subjects of the three ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... originated, except that "in the beginning" it was called into existence by the fiat of Him whom we Christians worship as our God, the Creator. Thus we reach the conception of the universe as that of a great clock gradually running down, which is certainly the antithesis of that picture so long held before us by the advocates ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... Denver did not belong to the florid, white-haired, hearty school of sea-dogs which is more common in works of fiction than in the Navy List. On the contrary, he was the representative of a much more common type which is the antithesis of the conventional sailor. He was a thin, hard-featured man, with an ascetic, acquiline cast of face, grizzled and hollow-cheeked, clean-shaven with the exception of the tiniest curved promontory of ash-colored whisker. An observer, accustomed to classify men, might ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the two modes of life which made up, between them, the experience of the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon (nee Horatia Grenville) are too cleanly severed by the estranging Channel to be brought into sharp antithesis, except in the heart of the one woman. And, since it is difficult to understand why anyone so British in her independence and aloofness should have surrendered her heart to the first good-looking Frenchman who came her way, we never get to be on very intimate terms with that organ. The construction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... to tempt me with your paltry emeralds you once held the life of Perion in your hands?" Demetrios unfastened his sword. He grasped the hand of Melicent, and laid it upon the scabbard. "And what do you hold now, my wife? You hold the death of Perion. I take the antithesis to be neat." ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... a youngish man, pale, bald, and with feminine hands and a hard mouth, with a continual and visible contraction of the lower jaw, which was extraordinarily developed. The other was a thickset man of mature years with a freckled face, bushy red beard and the neck of an ox. The one seemed the antithesis of the other, and their disparity excited Sperelli's curiosity and attention. They set out upon a table bandages and carbolic acid for disinfecting the weapons. The smell of the acid diffused itself through ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... is the antithesis of greatness. The British Empire, like the Roman, was built up by dull men. It may be we shall be ruined by clever ones. Imagine a regiment of lively and eccentric privates! There never was a statesman yet who had not some ballast of stupidity, and it seems to me ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... critically to deny that we now get into the region where work is more interesting because of its authorship than it would be if its authorship were different or unknown. To put the same thing in a sharper antithesis, Fielding is interesting, first of all, because he is the author of Joseph Andrews, of Tom Jones, of Amelia, of Jonathan Wild, of the Journal. His plays, his essays, his miscellanies generally are interesting, first of all, because they were ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... wonder. It is one of the very few impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man, with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always affix very precise ideas to the words he used!" Then we ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... creature, of a large, somewhat bold type, with a passionate glow of strong youth and health in every feature of her well-shaped face. She was taller than her diminutive husband, and, in every detail of expression, his antithesis. She wore a dress with some pretensions to display, and suggesting a considerable personal vanity. But it was of the tawdry order that was unconvincing, and lacked ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... gentle being who called him father. The only disinterested sympathy his letters breathe is for her; and the feeling and sense of duty they manifest offer a remarkable contrast to the parallel record of a life of unprincipled schemes, misused talents, and heartless amours. As if to complete the tragic antithesis of destiny, the beloved and gifted woman who thus shed an angelic ray upon that dark career was soon after her father's return from Europe lost in a storm at sea while on her way to visit him, thus meeting a fate which, even at the distance of time, is remembered with pity. Her wretched father ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... unnaturally, suggested the idea that the objects of our knowledge are different from objects as they are. "That the real nature of things is very different from what we make of them, that thought and thing are divorced, that there is a fundamental antithesis between them," is, as Hegel said, "the hinge on which modern philosophy turns." Educated opinion in our day has lost its naive trust in itself. "The natural belief of man, it is true, ever gives the lie" to the doctrine that we do not know things. "In common life," adds Hegel, "we reflect ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... gives his style the semblance of being "scamped" with the object of saving study and trouble. Mr. Payne (ix. 379) deems it an "excrescence born of the excessive facilities for rhyme afforded by the language," and of Eastern delight in antithesis of all kinds whether of sound or of thought; and, aiming elaborately at grace of style, he omits it wholly, even ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already ... accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. ... In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Lady Merceron and her brother in law took counsel, he strolled through the moonlit shrubberies with Mrs. Marland, and Mrs. Marland was very sympathetically interested in him and his pursuits. She was a little eager woman, the very antithesis in body and mind to Millie Bushell; she had plenty of brains but very little sense, a good deal of charm but no beauty, and, without any counterbalancing defect at all, a hearty liking for handsome young men. She had also a husband in ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... from the slumber of a forty years' peace, and took down disused weapons from the wall, and donned a rusted armor. It was a time rife with romantic episodes, and, as such seasons must ever be, fraught with peril to the prudence of womankind. There was perpetual recurrence of the striking antithesis which happened at Brussels before Waterloo, when the roll of the distant cannon at Quatre Bras mingled with the music of the duchess's ball. The coldest reserve is apt to melt rapidly, and the most skillful coquetry is brought to bay, when opposed to pleading urged ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... how she writes her books, and the answer is: "Just in the same way as you do your woman's work, your netting or your tapestry." She is said to have the intelligence of an angel and even more heart than talent. With her fixed, set gaze, her dark complexion and her masculine ways, she is the exact antithesis of the fair Beatrix. She is constantly being compared to the latter, and is evidently preferred to her. It is very evident from whom Balzac gets his information, and it is also evident that the friendship between the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... have already seen, as well as the courtesies with which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their dissidence was ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... a few notes on the political position of Khorasan," he said, glancing with slight apprehensiveness at the other's face. He was a small, shy man, with few social attainments but an extraordinary amount of learning—the antithesis of the alert ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the leaven fermenting religion; it is palpably working in the sermons, Sunday schools, and literature of our and other lands. This spiritual chemicalization is the upheaval produced when Truth is neutralizing error, and impurities are passing off. And it will continue till the antithesis of Christianity engendering the limited forms of a national or tyrannical religion yields to the church established by the Nazarene prophet and maintained on the ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... sad and terrible destiny of the king imprisoned in the Bastille, and tearing, in sheer despair, the bolts and bars of his dungeon, the rhetoric of the chroniclers of old would not fail to present, as a complete antithesis, the picture of Philippe lying asleep beneath the royal canopy. We do not pretend to say that such rhetoric is always bad, and always scatters, in places it should not, the flowers with which it embellishes and enlivens history. But we ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... menace is immediate. Bolshevism is not only the antithesis of Capitalism but its mortal enemy. If Bolshevism persists and spreads through Central Europe, India and China, capitalism will be wiped ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... of British captains, officers, or men. At the same time, I do not mean to suggest that the rest of the mercantile marine was, or ever could be, composed of Puritans. But the men I have been trying to describe were the very antithesis of the typical British tar. Many of them were, constitutionally, criminals, who had spent years compulsorily on the Spanish main, when not undergoing punishment in prison. Having been shipmate with some of them I am able to speak of ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... etiam sudoribus applicandum, quod victuales expensae longe quidem positae, sed tamquam in urbe Regia natae [I do not quite understand this antithesis] sine querela ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... me of Petrarch, mentioning Rousseau with aversion. He disliked his very eloquence, as he said it owed all its merits to antithesis and paradox. Haller was a learned man of the first class, but his knowledge was not employed for the purpose of ostentation, nor in private life, nor when he was in the company of people who did not care for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Even the great national movement which Mr William O'Brien re-created in the United Irish League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute antithesis of all free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... uncompromising. She felt that it was out of place any longer to pity him. He was the slave of his passion; but his passion was strong. In her reaction against the splendid civility of Severn's silence, (the real antithesis of which would have been simply the perfect courtesy of explicit devotion,) she found herself touching with pleasure on the fact of Richard's brutality. He at least had ventured to insult her. He had loved her enough to forget himself. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... capable of governing the state, of taking measures beforehand, and of understanding and solving the difficulties of home and foreign affairs? By no means. Then is it fit to elect its own magistrates? Well, it might do that. Thus he had been led away by this antithesis so far as to say: Able to govern?—Certainly not! Able to elect its own magistrates? Admirably! The explanation of the whole paragraph which I have just quoted lies in the conclusion, which runs as follows: "All these things are matters of fact ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of this period was essentially marked by a dominant tendency, so was also its antithesis, the contemporary national authorship. While the former aimed at neither more nor less than the annihilation of Latin nationality by the creation of a poetry Latin in language but Hellenic in form and spirit, the best and purest ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... waned it filled the dark alleys with a wonderful golden haze. Into this came leaping and shouting a herd of little collegians with a couple of long-skirted Jesuits striding at their heels. We all know—I make the point for my antithesis—the monstrous practices of these people; yet as I watched the group I verily believe I declared that if I had a little son he should go to Mondragone and receive their crooked teachings for the sake of the other memories, the avenues ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... would be less of a philosopher, and more of a—" The Parson had the word "Christian" at the tip of his tongue: he suppressed a word that, so spoken, would have been exceedingly irritating, and substituted, with inelegant antithesis, "and more of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... criticism which need not be transcribed. Going on to the seventh stanza he says, "In the third line of it, she loses her antithesis. She must spoil her man, as well as make a poet out of him—spoil him as the reed is spoilt. Should we not read the ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... administration of Foreign policy in a manner that has been injurious to the interests of Norway. This was emphatically conceded during the hottest days of the Stadtholder conflict in 1861. It is remarkable that in the present day, when the want to prove an antithesis in Norway, they can never produce anything but the episode from the beginning of the Union—the well known Bodoe affair in 1819-1821—an episode concerning which Norwegian investigations of recent date, have served to place Swedish ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... without care and watchfulness. Then he adds, "And our mere defects prove our commodities." Our deficiencies, our weaknesses (the sense of them), make us use such care and exertions as to prove advantages to us. Thus the antithesis ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only means of escape from so brutal a regime. That the state of nature was so distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural state, reason shows us that men are ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... creation, a clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatizing (if you will have it) of an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithesis," after all, touches the root of the matter), for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or space, as the case may be, with all that that implies—colour, value, proportion, all the convincing incidents of form—is simply ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the outstanding personalities in New York, despite her youth, is the antithesis of the two previous examples of successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession than she. People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius of Mr. Morgan's Library, take for granted ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... poet, "I broke down, not being able to get an appropriate rhyme to flat." A wag who was present suggested fat, pointing out that the dog's increased bulk by the snow falling on his back fully justified the meaning, and, what is of equal importance in Chinese poetry, the antithesis. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... "the Local Education Authority alone has the right to prosecute, but——" He did not state his antithesis. They had come to the crux which Crashaw had wished to avoid. He had no influence with the committee of the L.E.A., and Challis's recommendation would have much weight. Crashaw intended that Victor ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... It would have been a splendid object lesson, she thought, to all those idealists who seek mass perfection in any phase of human endeavor, since here they might discover the truth that absolute perfection is as little to be desired as is its antithesis. ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives his texture the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... has a tendency to suggest its antithesis. Notice how the meaning changes by merely putting the emphasis on different words in the following sentence. The parenthetical expressions would really not be needed ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... course these are, as the lawyers say, only ex parte statements of the truth; still they are usually accepted. Oxygen gas will ignite a red-hot match, but hydrogen will extinguish an inflamed one, though it will itself burn. You generally think of water as the great antithesis of, the universal antidote for, fire. The truth is here again only of an ex parte character, as I will show you. If I can, by means of a substance having a more intense affinity for oxygen than hydrogen has, rob water of its oxygen, I necessarily set the hydrogen ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... of the same movement, blow out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance. He is equally free from a strained antithesis, which would have been inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect required by Byron's art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible quality of his genius. In the preface to Marino Faliero, a composition that abounds in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... confidence in the value of Biblical criticism—both of the liberal school (Graetz) and the conservative (Margoliouth)—to come across so complete an antithesis. But things are not quite so bad as they look. Each critic is half right—Margoliouth in believing the pastoral pictures of Canticles true to Judean life, Graetz in esteeming the pastoral pictures of the Idylls true to Sicilian life. The English critic supports his theme with ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... nevertheless full of the highest poetic beauty. Besides, it has been pointed out to me that even the Hebrew poems, like the Egyptian, follow certain rules, which however I might certainly call rhetorical rather than poetical. The first member in a series of ideas stands in antithesis to the next, which either re-states the former one in a new form or sets it in a clearer light by suggesting some contrast. Thus they avail themselves of the art of the orator—or indeed of the painter—who brings a light color into juxtaposition with a dark ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... protest against the thesis "Diaspora," its opposite came to life, the antithesis "Palestine." Political Zionism sprang into being, loudly proclaiming that emancipation was a failure; that Judaism had no chance of life in the Dispersion, and that the only salvation of Jewry lay in being transferred to Palestine. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... that there is anything of the sort," said Oxenden. "It is a plain narrative of facts; but the facts are themselves such that they give a new coloring to the facts of our own life. They are in such profound antithesis to European ways that we consider them as being written merely to indicate that difference. It is like the Germania of Tacitus, which many critics still hold to be a satire on Roman ways, while as a matter of fact it is simply a narrative of German ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... this, and I see no reason to doubt that Shakespeare often did it, or to suppose that his method of constructing and composing differed, except in degree, from that of the most 'conscious' of artists. The antithesis of art and inspiration, though not meaningless, is often most misleading. Inspiration is surely not incompatible with considerate workmanship. The two may be severed, but they need not be so, and where a genuinely poetic result is being produced they cannot be so. The glow of a first ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... in this, as in so many other matters, are at once close kindred and sharp antithesis. Each is mentally crippled by the corruption of its educational system by an official religious orthodoxy, and hampered by a Court which disowns any function of intellectual stimulus. Neither possesses a scientifically ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... with the rest of the dialogue. The philosopher naturally desires to pour forth the thoughts which are always present to him, and to discourse of the higher life. The idea of knowledge, although hard to be defined, is realised in the life of philosophy. And the contrast is the favourite antithesis between the world, in the various characters of sophist, lawyer, statesman, speaker, and the philosopher,—between opinion and knowledge,—between the conventional and ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.' This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank confession was, 'for anything that I can see, foreigners ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... corrupt, bad citizens in short, and the other patriots, philosophers, and the virtuous, that is to say, those belonging to the sect.[1128] Thanks to this reduction, the vast moral and social world with which they deal finds its definition, expression, and representation in a ready-made antithesis. The aim of the government is now clear: the wicked must submit to the good, or, which is briefer, the wicked must be suppressed. To this end let us employ confiscation, imprisonment, exile, drowning and the guillotine and a large scale. All means ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Elizabeth's courtiers had three principal characteristics, which the reader will perceive in the extracts hereafter to be given—a pedantic exhibition of learning, an excess of similes drawn from natural history, usually untrue to nature, and a habit of antithesis, which, by constant repetition becomes exceedingly wearisome. Euphues, wishing to convince his listeners of the inferiority of outward to inward perfection, pursues ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... antithesis was, perhaps, borrowed from an Epigram entitled 'Posthumous Fame', included in Elegant ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... reasons of our excellence, and set to work to re-establish it. Of course the vilest cooking in the kingdom is found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... The very greatest and best of them, as St. Paul and St. Augustine, have passed through a violent struggle and a radical revolution, and their whole theological system and religious experience rested on the felt antithesis of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... from one point of view, is a complete antithesis to that of the melancholy Dane. In the latter we see and think of Booth; in the former, his household friends, watching My Lord Cardinal from first to last, have nothing to recall him to their minds. The man is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... age, which is preeminently occupied with physical science and material comfort and aggrandizement, is also eminently productive in good poetry. There should be no antithesis between the words physical science and poetry. The secrets of the Universe, the ways of God's working, are surely the highest poetry; but the greater number of scientists have willed a divorce between the material and the spiritual, and decry that very imaginative faculty which, in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and "generous heart" which are the only fruitful agencies of accomplishment. Finally, the "Great Peace" as the supreme object of thought and act and aspiration for us, and for all the world, at this time of crisis which has culminated through the antithesis of great ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word ingentem, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided,—Aesop the slave and the Athenians,—must be read as an appoggiatura, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line—"Servumque ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... "civil," here applied to night, at once assured me of the accuracy of the proposed reading, it having evidently suggested itself as the antithesis of "rude" just before applied to day; the civil, accommodating, concealing night being thus contrasted with the unaccommodating, revealing day. It is to be remarked, moreover, that as this epithet civil is, through its ordinary signification, brought into connexion with what precedes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the passive voice of the verb edo, there exists necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the very ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... been the recent history of the other great branch of the Christian Church—a history developed where it might have been least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly present a more striking antithesis ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... LIPPI, born in Florence about 1406, and dying there in 1469, was the exact antithesis of Fra Angelico, both in his private life and in the method of his painting. He was just as earthly in both respects as Fra Angelico was heavenly. As a child he was put with the Carmelites, and as he showed an inclination for drawing rather than for study, he was allowed ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... potentates as I knew in the days before they 'assumed the purple.' I am reading Gibbon, and see nothing but this d—-d colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (vide Coleridge and Eastlake's Goethe)—even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (vide Coleridge, etc.) Is this aesthetic? is this exegetical? How glad ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... noted that the poet is picturing no morning cloud or storm or eclipse; but his grief is that he has had his morning and his noon and that he is now at "age's steepy night" because his sun has travelled so far in his life's course. The Sonnet seems to be the antithesis of Sonnet VII., quoted at page 22. The metaphor is the same, comparing life to the daily journey of the sun. In each, the poet views the steep of the journey, the earlier and the later hours of the day; and while he finds that his friend's age is represented by the sun passing from ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... gay laughter of a woman or the chatter of children could be heard, for the red Martians are a social, pleasure-loving people—in direct antithesis to the cold and morbid race of ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Ghosts came to our town. The humor of the prospect was the sort too deep for tears. My pastor and I reread the William Archer translation that we might be alert for every antithesis. Together we went to the services. Since then the film has been furiously denounced by the literati. Floyd Dell's discriminating assault upon it is quoted in Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent number of The Little Review. But it is ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... novel is a subject which naturally engages the attention of the novelist-critic. Romantic fiction, he thinks may have sufficient justification if it acts as an opiate for tired spirits. A significant antithesis between his point of view in this matter and the more common attitude taken by critics in his time is illustrated by two reviews of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, to which we may refer, though the book was later than ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... observe how exactly the Javanese and Toradja observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it. The Indian sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja wizards may not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the forest, and even ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... whom Virgil calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, [Footnote: Paradiso, xx. 68.] and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Probably the man would have been quite content to be a village Kapellmeister. His life being reasonably complete, his spirit would not have roamed the Universe crying for rest. The ideals of his wife were so low and commonplace that she influenced his career by antithesis. His soul was ahungered for the bread of life, and stones were given him in way of the dull, the ugly, the affected, the smug, the ridiculous. Wagner's life was a revolt from the ossified commonplace, a struggle for right adjustment—a heart tragedy. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... of Climping, there is nothing to say, except that popular rumour has it that its minute and uninteresting church (the antithesis of Climping) was found one day by accident in a bed ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... assigned a place above all others, is that of Kant in his "Kritik." Here we find two opposing propositions—the thesis that the universe occupies only a finite space and is of finite duration; the antithesis that it is infinite both as regards extent in space and duration in time. Both of these opposing propositions are shown to admit of demonstration with equal force, not directly, but by the methods of reductio ad absurdum. The ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... woman; and the woman who once accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—the male, active and aggressive; the ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... at a glance, and carved them on his soul. The fair Beatrix and the dark Felicite might have sat for those contrasting portraits in "keepsakes" which English designers and engravers seek so persistently. Here were the force and the feebleness of womanhood in full development, a perfect antithesis. These two women could never be rivals; each had her own empire. Here was the delicate campanula, or the lily, beside the scarlet poppy; a turquoise near a ruby. In a moment, as it were,—at first sight, as the saying is,—Calyste was seized ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... certainly not going too far to notice the circumstance that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the two sorts of men that we have described—that a great moral passion is fatal to the gentler and more caressing amenities of life, and vice versa. The man of morals has a certain character, and the man of honour has a quite different character. ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan |
