"Paradoxical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this was bound to lead to the paradoxical state of affairs from which we began to suffer in the later nineteenth century. A paper had for its revenue not only what people paid in order to obtain it, but also what people paid in order to get their wares or needs known through it. It, therefore, could be profitably produced at a cost ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... caused the learned and paradoxical Hardouin to assert that all the works which have been attributed to the ancients, with the exception of the Georgics and the Natural History of Pliny, were the compositions of monks, was doubtless the very frequent repetition of scenes ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... interference is conservative in the midst of such a fearful accumulation of evidence as to result in quite the other direction, and that this kind of delay in tissue-change accumulates vital force, is as unscientific as it is paradoxical. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... in from China. You called to them: "Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting," Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. Paradoxical New England clerks, Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the "Song of Solomon" at night, So many verses before bedtime, Because it was the Bible. The dead fed you Amid the slant stones of graveyards. Pale ghosts who planted you Came in the night time And let their thin hair ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... and his ministerial disciples. Such is that well-earned popularity, the result of those extraordinary expeditions, so expensive to ourselves, and so useless to our allies; of those singular enquiries, so exculpatory to the accused and so dissatisfactory to the people; of those paradoxical victories, so honourable, as we are told, to the British name, and so destructive to the best interests of the British nation: above all, such is the reward of a conduct pursued ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ring of Roderick's voice, as he uttered these words, which sent them home with convincing force. He was not talking for effect, or the mere sensuous pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humoredly. He was talking passionately, desperately, and from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother's confidence. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... out of the entire bodies of several, of an ass, for instance, a cock and a crocodile, so as to produce an outrageous individual, with whom even a duck-billed Platypus would think twice before he fraternized—ornithorynchous and paradoxical ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... actual fact. The Fourth Estate is exalted into an acknowledged autocrat because it is allowed to have things all its own way; and your autocrat, whether he be a trade union official or he be a sceptred potentate or he be the President of a republic saddled with a paradoxical constitution, is an anachronism in principle and is apt to be a curse ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... here at 6:52 A.M., or (seemingly) at a time when the fight was raging and our success far from complete. Nay, had the telegram been flashed straight to Washington in the United States, it would have reached there something like 1 h. 44 m. after the local midnight of September 12. Paradoxical as this sounds the explanation of it is of the most simple possible character. The rate at which electricity travels has been very variously estimated. Fizeau asserted that its velocity in copper wire was 111,780 miles a second; Walker that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lecturer with the chuckle or the shrug of mere amusement or amazement. Moreover, if considered as a joke, a mere joke, and nothing but a joke, this gospel of the grin has hardly matter or meaning enough in it to support so elaborate a structure of paradoxical rhetoric. It must be taken, therefore, as something serious in the main; and if so taken, and read by the light reflected from Mr. Whistler's more characteristically brilliant canvases, it may not improbably ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... and which He does not in the least owe to us. The question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in the Christian religion? Is it true that there is one Mediator between God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus? In spite of the paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself, and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord. He knew and taught, what they have learned ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... perhaps in the multitude of the stories, paradoxical though it seem, that lies the strength. In the number of them (ninety-two "histories" there are) is an element of universality. It is like the broom: one straw does not make, nor does the loss of one destroy it; somewhere in the mass ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... could inflict; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... for the very opposite reason; it is because I hear him generally complained of as obscure, and as ambitiously paradoxical; two faults which I cannot tolerate: and the extracts from his writings which I have seen satisfy me that this judgment is a ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in suspense, open to discussion; controvertible; in question &c (inquiry) 461. vague; indeterminate, indefinite; ambiguous, equivocal; undefined, undefinable; confused &c (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that the friends of Nikita were altogether wrong in suggesting that those who voted for the Republicans or Communists were opposed to the union with Serbia in Yugoslavia. Both Republicans and (paradoxical though it sounds) the Communists resented this insinuation very bitterly; and considering that the leaders of both parties are pronounced antagonists of the old regime, and were indeed severally condemned to death by Nikita, it ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... temperature in the washer, and at that temperature it cannot carry with it more than a certain fixed proportion of moisture. The notion of partially drying a gas by causing it to pass through water may appear paradoxical, but a comprehension of physical laws will show that it is possible, and will prove efficient in practice, when due attention is given to the facts that the gas entering the washer is hot, and that it is subsequently to be stored ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... civilised society, always ready to commit new crimes, needs to be ceaselessly restrained by force and violence. The English Government therefore maintains a strong police. It is so efficient that in the midst of that infamous canaille the most perfect security reigns everywhere, and—what may appear paradoxical to those who do not know the details of the administration of the colony—fewer robberies are committed than in a European town of equal population. As to murder, I have never heard tell of a crime of the kind being committed ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... finite," but which, to avoid any future misunderstanding, we may, perhaps, be permitted to call the subjectively eternal, though, at the same time and in one sense, the subsistent existence, however paradoxical and unscientific the term may appear.* Life, the occultist says, is the eternal uncreated energy, and it alone represents in the infinite universe, that which the physicists have agreed to name the principle, or the law ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... may seem paradoxical, a study of other men is probably not necessary to the tragic poet. We find some of the great poets have lived a retiring, homely sort of life, without having a chance of witnessing around them an outburst ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... Nature, however invisible that essence may be, and howsoever much it has hitherto eluded the grasp of Science. Alchemy, Astrology, Occult Physiology, Chiromancy exist in Nature, and the exact Sciences—perhaps so called because they are found in this age of paradoxical philosophies the reverse—have already discovered not a few of the secrets of the above arts. But clairvoyance, symbolized in India as the "Eye of Siva," called in Japan, "Infinite Vision," is not Hypnotism, ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... despair and from gay and reckless licence, by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... experience, and after spilling an ocean of blood in those theological quarrels, that the evil was of a peculiar nature, and was both inflamed by violent remedies, and diffused itself more rapidly throughout the whole society. Hence, though late, arose the paradoxical principle and salutary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... vices, and particularly of this vice of intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has not a head of its own,—an intelligence,—a meaning,—a certain virtue, I was going to say,—but that might, perhaps, sound paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all body and tail. So I have found a very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the age he lived in as "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic."[1] It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron—in a word of the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... that his ladies and gentlemen, in the English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say it, not so greatly impressed by ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavourable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born "an age too late." For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mystics of the world. Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, "a simple creature, unlettered," yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought and ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... always said that England's difficulty would be Ireland's opportunity, but they did not reckon with the paradoxical character of the Irish people. England's difficulty has indeed been Ireland's opportunity—the opportunity of displaying that generous nature which has already contributed thousands of men to the Expeditionary Force, ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... land is like nearing truth in metaphysics), and ere we yet touched the beach, Borabolla declared, that we were already landed. Which paradoxical assertion implied, that the hospitality of Mondoldo was such, that in all directions it radiated far out upon the lagoon, embracing a great circle; so that no canoe could sail by the island, without its occupants being so ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... that will result from the adoption of this law: the very strength at which we are aiming necessarily makes us peaceful. That sounds paradoxical, but it is true. With the powerful machine which we are making of the German army no aggression will be attempted. If I saw fit—assuming a different situation to exist from that which in my conviction does exist'—to come ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... beautiful than landscape formed by hills rising suddenly out of perfect levels. As it is not my present purpose to treat of landscape in general, I will simply remark that the barrenness of a great part of the soil of the Eastern States is favorable to picturesque scenery. This may seem a paradoxical assertion to those who can see no beauty except in universal fatness; but unvaried luxuriance is fatal to variety of scenes, though it undoubtedly encourages the development of individual growth. An agreeable intermixture of various sylvan assemblages is one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... mile." Self-beguilement with what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to come over half a mile that she would have been powerless to face in the lump. The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect more than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness, is ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,—"I believe, because it is impossible,"—is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers maintained that there was not a verse, line, word, or even letter in ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... taking away the coffee-tray. Madame de Montcornet perceived that the princess and Madame d'Espard had a word to say to each other, and she drew around her d'Arthez, Rastignac, and Blondet, amusing them with one of those clever paradoxical attacks which ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... is, that the alternatives of the disjunctive conclusion of a Complex Dilemma should both point the same way, should be equally distasteful or paradoxical. 'Either inconsistent or unpatriotic': horrid words to a politician! 'Either no reality or no possible knowledge of it': very disappointing to an anxious inquirer! Thus the disjunctive conclusion is as bad for an opponent as the categorical one ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... startled somewhat by a request from Robert Visigoth, in the form of a note sent over to her desk, to remain after six to take some dictation. The big temporary-looking office with its absence of partitions and staring lack of privacy had become a paradoxical source of security to her. In all the eight weeks, three of which, it is true, he had spent in Chicago, she had not once encountered Robert Visigoth alone. She had subconsciously developed the habit of peering down the dark stairs that led to the stage door ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... little incidents that before had troubled her passed from her mind. She now yielded submissively to her sad allotment, believing, as during her sickness she had often been told, that afflictions come but for our own good, however paradoxical such a ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... accustomed," he continues, "to contrast the characters of instinct with those of intelligence—to say that instinct is innate, invariable, automatic, while intelligence is something acquired, variable, spontaneous—that it looks at first paradoxical to assert that instinct and ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... form the sense of light, rather than organs of seeing. Their almost paradoxical number at least, and the singularity of their forms, render it probable that they impel the animal by some modification of its irritability, herein likewise containing a striking analogy to the known influence of light on plants, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sounds paradoxical," returned the little man. "What I mean is, that the struggle of the life in it to unfold itself, rather than any thing else, was the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... learned or deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say,—of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... spirits of a lower civilization are conjured from the darkness of vanished centuries, to settle rules for the government of commerce, personal conduct, and the social relations of the times in which we live. There seems to be something paradoxical in the idea that the older the decision the better the law—the more ancient the commentator, the profounder the wisdom of his axioms. This might be well, were it true that civilization is 'progressing backwards,' the science of government retrograding. In that case, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... the moon's surface is the enormous magnitude of its volcanic crater formations. In comparison with these, the greatest on the surface of the earth are reduced to insignificance. Paradoxical as the statement may at first appear, the magnitude of the remains of the primitive volcanic energy in the moon is simply due to the smallness of its mass. Being only about one-eightieth part of the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of the Irish Bull, a paradoxical Bovine whose cross-eyed horns can toss a British commonplace in two ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... some as a paradoxical question; and yet it is not, if we accept the word see, in its fullest and broadest sense. Webster defines the verb see, as follows: "To perceive by mental vision; to form an adequate conception of; to discern; to distinguish; to understand; to comprehend." ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... well aware that Genet was sent here to stir up a civil war, and embroil us with Europe at the same time, and you have secretly sympathized with and encouraged him. I cannot make up my mind whether you are a villain, or merely the victim of a sublimated and paradoxical imagination. But in either case, I wish to be placed on record as asserting that you are the worst enemy the United States is cursed ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... that this saying of the Apostle's, 'Of whom I am chief,' paradoxical and exaggerated as it seems to many men, is in spirit that which all who know themselves ought to re-echo; and without which there is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... large number of cases represent a stage in social descent, the wreckage of larger industries whose owners are economically as dependent as the ordinary wage-workers, or even poorer and more to be pitied. Where, on the contrary, it is a stage in social ascent, the petty industry is, paradoxical as the idea may appear, frequently part of the process of industrial concentration. By independent gleaning, it endeavors to find sufficient business to maintain its existence. If it fails in this, its owner falls back to the proletarian level from which, in most instances, he arose. If it ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... mental eye she marked her two points, and then, starting from the first, made directly for the second. But she forgot to reckon with the law of tangents. She forgot, too, how paradoxical a creature was this Fanny Brandeis whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a parade—just the sheer drama of it—were the marchers G. A. R. veterans, school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political marching clubs; and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she stood over the white mound ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... I had all these, and when my reason and my honesty raised any doubt or suggested a "but" to this fabulous inventory of my qualities, my combative and paradoxical ego at once found a plain, decisive answer which ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... "Paradoxical as it may appear, the primary cause of the Glacial epoch may be, after all, an elevation of the temperature in the tropics, causing a greater amount of evaporation in the equatorial regions, and consequently a greater supply of the raw material of snow in the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... rather than peaceful. Dark alleys opened out frequently—alleys which coiled like snakes past cellar entrances, noisome rears of tottering tenements, to grease-fingered doors as impassive as the stolid faces of guards who drowsed behind them asleep to all save those who knew the deadly pass-word. Paradoxical doors which shut in, instead of out, danger! But Saul knew them and they knew Saul. He knew further the haunts of beginners, where opium is high and the surroundings are fairly clean, he knew the haunts of the confirmed, where opium is cheaper and where surroundings ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... child, born with the nature of other children, and having to learn wisdom and win virtue through the same process, should grow up sinless, appeared to me an event so paradoxical, as to need the most amply decisive proof. Yet what kind of proof was possible? Neither Apollos, (if he was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrew,) nor yet Peter, had any power of attesting the sinlessness of Jesus, as a fact known to themselves ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... might be expressed: Owe all men, that you may owe none; owe everything, that you may owe nothing. This sounds paradoxical. But one indebtedness is that of love, an obligation to God. The other is indebtedness to temporal law, an obligation in the eyes of the world. He who makes himself a servant, who takes upon himself love's obligation to all men, goes so ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... 1913. Paradoxical as it may seem, legislators now became more friendly. The Legislature of 1913 passed by a large majority in both Houses another referendum bill introduced by Senator Robert Glenn but it was vetoed by Governor McGovern on the ground that the voters should not ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... who has seen this whole set of phenomena in active operation. To me they have been for many years so familiar in the Alpine valleys, and their aspect in those regions is so identical with the facts above described, that paradoxical as the statement may seem, the presence of the ice is now an unimportant element to me in the study of glacial phenomena; no more essential than is the flesh to the anatomist who studies the skeleton ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... ill-considered, ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ill-advised, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Admiral, a stubborn mule. Louis XI. lived too soon, Richelieu too late. Virtuous or criminal, guilty or not in the Saint-Bartholomew, I accept the onus of it; I stand between those two great men,—the visible link of an unseen chain. The day will come when some paradoxical writer will ask if the peoples have not bestowed the title of executioner among their victims. It will not be the first time that humanity has preferred to immolate a god rather than admit its own guilt. ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... adept at literary form; but he used it only as a means. Complicated as his sentences occasionally are, he says many sharp, many brilliant, many epigrammatic things, he has the manner of the famous essayists, he is paradoxical (how many of his paradoxes are now truisms!); one fancies at times that one is almost listening to a creation of Moliere, but these fireworks are not merely a literary display, they are used to illumine what he considers to be the truth. Rien n'est beau ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the sound of the British Tally-ho! Now, whilst the followers of the Chesterfield kennel sought their foxes without the walls, we always knew where to look for ours within; and, whatever their success, we always found; nay, what may sound somewhat paradoxical, but is true nevertheless, the more we hunted, the more we found. Like their brothers of the "brush," our Reynards were sly fellows too, and would double and dodge, and get away sometimes, just ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... yet lack courage. That may seem to be a paradoxical statement, but if the reader will study carefully some of the men he knows, he will understand that this is the truth. Men may have plenty of confidence in themselves, but they may lack the courage ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... rest of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she rated that trusted retainer ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the Gladstonian Constitution denies in his recent pamphlet that the Government of Ireland Bill would, if passed, repeal the Act of Union. To follow the reasoning by which this denial is made good is beyond my powers. But there is one aspect in which the statement, paradoxical though it be, that the Union is not dissolved by the existence of an Irish Parliament, has a most serious meaning, which ought to command hearty and general assent. Under the Gladstonian Constitution, as under any form of Home Rule, the Government of the United Kingdom ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... disagreement and repugnancy" of two ideas; truth, as "the right joining or separating of signs, i.e., ideas or words." The object of knowledge is neither single ideas nor the relations of ideas to things, but the relations of ideas among themselves. This view was at once paradoxical and pregnant. If all cognition, as Locke suggests in objection to his own theory, consists in perceiving the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, are not the visions of the enthusiast and the reasonings of sober thinkers alike certain? are not the propositions, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... "to prove to you that I was correct when I asserted that there was no such thing in this world as liberty, paradoxical as it may appear, Liberty is but Liberty when in bondage. Release her, and she ceases to exist; she has changed her nature and character; ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... It may sound paradoxical, but it is in reality no exaggeration to say, with Guizot, [Essais sur l'Histoirs de France, p. 273, et seq.] that England owes her liberties to her having been conquered by the Normans. It is true that the Saxon institutions were the primitive cradle of English liberty, but by their own intrinsic ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... paradoxical relation of precept to practice? Why is this, the most hygiene-instructed country in the world, the Elysium of the patent-medicine and cocaine traffic? If we have only the expected divergence of achievement ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... shrewdness. It was with no base reservation that he kept up a desultory conversation, in the course of which Signor Giardini's nose not infrequently interposed between two remarks. Whenever Gambara uttered some elegant repartee or some paradoxical aphorism, the cook put his head forward, to glance with pity at the musician and with meaning at the Count, muttering in his ear, ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... hereafter obey his evil angel, and follow him, or his good angel, and become a great poet, depends upon himself; and above all upon his having courage to be himself, and to forget himself, two virtues which, paradoxical as it may seem, are correlatives. For the "subjective" poet—in plain words, the egotist—is always comparing himself with every man he meets, and therefore momentarily tempted to steal bits of their finery wherewith to patch his own rents; while the man who is content to be simply what God has made ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... all unmarried soldiers will marry, but doubtless they will not marry these women who have served and cheered them in the War Zone. That, again, would be depressing to the country's morale. It is rather paradoxical, but there are those who can ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... at the meetings of the club has from time to time excited interest because of its connection with a fundamental principle of evolutionary astronomy. This principle, which looks paradoxical enough, is that up to a certain stage, as a star loses heat by radiation into space, its temperature becomes higher. It is now known as Lane's Law. Some curiosity as to its origin, as well as the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany, where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay, is himself again. He vaults into ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... his sons had been slain before him. (84) If prophecies are to be interpreted by their issue, we must make a change of name, and read Jechoniah for Zedekiah, and vice versa (85) This, however, would be too paradoxical a proceeding; so I prefer to leave the matter unexplained, especially as the error, if error there be, must be set down to the historian, and not to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... however brief, could fail to notice the literary side of his character, and his extraordinary achievements in this direction. It is almost paradoxical, though absolutely true, that two Manchu Emperors, sprung from a race which but a few decades before had little thought for anything beyond war and the chase, and which had not even a written language of ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... of these paradoxical axioms on education, the master nodded, and, as I had been instructed, I proceeded to talk of the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... occupation of Touat. And this Morhange must be a man serving the interests of the Army Commission. All these people, secretaries, members of Parliament, governors, keep a close watch on each other. Some one will write an amusing paradoxical history some day, of the French Colonial Expansion, which is made without the knowledge of the powers in office, when it is not ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often forced to rise before the sun in the morning—besides, the country looks dismal—nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight appear—yet we have verified it by experience—having for many years found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long, warm days of summer are an agreeable and infallible corrective of the inconveniences ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... business!" Hamilton objected, raising his head to gaze curiously at this most paradoxical person. "And, now, you are urging me to keep at it. I ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... or the desire for better things with which it was unfortunately connected. A strong moral sentiment has a great value, even when forced into an unnatural alliance. Nay, even when it is, so to speak, inverted, it often receives a kind of paradoxical value from its efficacy against some opposite form of error. It is only a complete absence of the moral faculty which is irredeemably bad. The poet in whom it does not exist is condemned to the lower sphere, and can only deal with the deepest feelings on penalty of shocking us by ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... once—should attack him as a champion of the other. It became a commonplace of his experience to be inveighed against by reformers as a reactionary and to be assailed by conservatives as a radical. But this paradoxical experience did not disturb him at all. He was concerned only to have the testimony of his own mind and conscience that ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... figure; eye-movement very perceptible." The dominance of the interrupted lines in ideation is evidently connected with the more varied and energetic activity which they excited in the contemplating mind. Apparently the attention cannot be held unless (paradoxical as it may sound) it is kept moving about its object. Hence, a certain degree of complexity in an object is necessary to sustain our interest in it, if we exclude, as we must of course in these experiments, extraneous grounds of interest. Doubtless there are limits ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... him. Endowed with the capacity of mystifying and dazzling those around him, exceedingly keen-sighted, adaptable but in reality empty, he knew how to set people thinking and to fascinate others by his lively, unprejudiced and often paradoxical, but entertaining conversation. He was now colder, now more confidential; he knew how to assume cordiality, and to flatter by appearing ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the usual signal given by the good old man when he felt the length of the conversation fatiguing, or felt his favorite ideas paradoxical, though they sometimes were pressed on by arguments the tenor of which he found ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as: ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... case of sight, it seems as if the sense-datum itself were instinctively believed to be the independent object, whereas argument shows that the object cannot be identical with the sense-datum. This discovery, however—which is not at all paradoxical in the case of taste and smell and sound, and only slightly so in the case of touch—leaves undiminished our instinctive belief that there are objects corresponding to our sense-data. Since this ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... may seem paradoxical when we remember the savage persecutions of the Christians by the imperial government. Of these persecutions there were several causes. The empire, like all empires of the same type, rested partly on religious support. Augustus encouraged his court poets to advocate ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... these doctrines, they could proceed, without danger to life and property, to hold conventions, pass secession ordinances, resign and refuse Federal offices, repudiate Northern debts, and effectively stop all Federal mails at the State line. But reading another passage in this paradoxical message of President Buchanan, they found these other propositions and purposes, involving a flat contradiction, and which with sufficient reason excited the apprehensions of Mr. Magrath and his fellow-conspirators. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... brightness and lightness, and most of them have that peculiar kind of ingenuity which is one of Mr. PAIN's strong points. Suddenly they land you at a point which is nowhere near to that to which you thought you were travelling. The characters, even when they are engaged in paradoxical and preposterous actions, are real men and women, such as you could meet almost anywhere in a day's walk, and they are set off with Mr. PAIN's fancy so as to become additionally lifelike. Many things have struck me in the reading of this book. One is that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... have no standard by which to measure their rights or to avoid danger to their ships and cargoes. The paradoxical situation thus created should be changed and the declaring powers ought to assert whether they rely upon the rules governing a blockade or the rules applicable ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... our inventor arrives at the seemingly paradoxical conclusion, that the air is destined to be the high-road par excellence, and to serve as the medium of transportation for the heaviest loads, is certainly very ingenious; of its conclusiveness, we must leave our readers ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... such as to produce a partial paralysis of the hands and arms to the elbow. Again and again I tried it in every case of extraction and many other experiments, doubting my own senses for a long time at a result so anomalous and paradoxical. I was reminded just here of a phenomenon which gave me additional proof—that of blowing a dull fire to revive it. For a minute or so one blows and blows in rapid succession until, rising from ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... labour leader, and I walked away. I was resentful; my mood, in brief, was that of a man who has done something foolish and is inclined to talk to himself aloud: but the mood was complicated, made the more irritating by the paradoxical fact that that last look he had given me seemed to have borne ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... whom hundreds of then living people had known, who had gone about Florence for twenty-four years and married a prominent citizen, and whom Dante had loved with the romantic passion of the Middle Ages, only the misplaced ingenuity of paradoxical critics can doubt.[35] Yet at her entry she is escorted by a procession, the members of which represent the books of the Bible, the seven virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; while the car on which she is borne (which itself denotes ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... favour of a state of nature are plausible, but unsound. I say unsound; for to assert that a state of nature is preferable to civilization in all its possible perfection, is, in other words, to arraign supreme wisdom; and the paradoxical exclamation, that God has made all things right, and that evil has been introduced by the creature whom he formed, knowing what he formed, is ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... properly understood, can restore to them. That is its proper task. History draws the outline with a graver, archaeology must fill it in with colour. Understood in this way, history makes the past present. The innovating archaeologist, by an apparently paradoxical inspiration, has asked of death the secret of life; he has studied the tomb, which has yielded up to him not only the mysteries of destruction, but the customs and the national life of all the nations of antiquity. The sepulchre has faithfully preserved what the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... belief in England in the seventeenth century. The reason starts at it, but all religion is paradoxical to reason. God hates sin, yet sin exists. He is omnipotent, yet evil is not overcome. The will of man is free, or there can be no guilt, yet the action of the will, so far as experience can throw light on its operation, is as much determined by antecedent ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in spite of the fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush the little man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr. Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason why The Servant in the House struck so many critics as being strange and new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... across its brilliant bloom; an amaryllis bred up from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter; several kinds of fruit trees which withstand frost in bud and in flower; a chestnut tree which bears nuts in eighteen months from the time of seed-planting; a white blackberry (paradoxical as it may appear), a rare and beautiful fruit and as palatable as it is beautiful; the primusberry, a union of the raspberry and the blackberry; another wonderful and delicious berry produced from the California dewberry and the Cuthbert-raspberry; pieplants ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo, and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he thought quite as much of another reason—his promise to Gwendolen. The sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... to form a correct opinion upon a situation so paradoxical as Neal's was. To be reduced to skin and bone by the downright friendship of the world, was, as the sagacious reader will admit, next to a miracle. We appeal to the conscience of any man who finds himself without an ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... hearts that need to rest upon an absolute love; we are made with understandings that need to grasp a pure, a perfect, and, as I believe, paradoxical though it may sound, a personal Truth. We are made with wills that crave for an absolute authoritative command, and we are made with a moral nature that needs a perfect holiness. And we need all that love, truth, authority, purity, to be gathered into one, for our misery is that, when we set out ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Papist. But, alas, the momentum of his uncontrolled zeal carried him a step too far—over the precipice. He declared that good works are detrimental and injurious to salvation, bona opera perniciosa (noxia) esse ad salutem. He defended his paradoxical statement in a publication of 1559 against Menius, with whose subscription to the Eisenach propositions, referred to above, he was not satisfied; chiefly because Menius said there that he had taught and defended them also in the past. The flagrant blunder ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... adopted by Plato in the Protagoras and other dialogues is repeated until we grow weary of it. The legislator is always addressing the speakers or the youth of the state, and the speakers are constantly making addresses to the legislator. A tendency to a paradoxical manner of statement is also observable. 'We must have drinking,' 'we must have a virtuous tyrant'—this is too much for the duller wits of the Lacedaemonian and Cretan, who at first start back in surprise. More than in any other writing of Plato the tone is hortatory; the laws are sermons as well ...
— Laws • Plato
... he was but six and twenty, Raleigh took part in one such abortive venture, along with his half-brother the enthusiast and dreamer Humphrey Gilbert: the same man whose paradoxical barbarity in Ireland [Footnote: See p. 311, ante.] we have already noticed: a barbarity very difficult at first sight to reconcile with the high chivalrous spirit, the odd sentimentality, and the fundamental piety which, besides ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... tendency is to trust writers more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... his eyes she fell back with a sigh of disappointment, but he answered the challenge presently in what she had once described as his "paradoxical humour." ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure. No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations. Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence which pervades all classes have kept her eternally young. She is as far from decadence as the crudest community ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact that the American knows more of English history and English politics than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United States. This by no means implies that the American knows more ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... comparatively few people ever recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case (alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial surroundings ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... as "fixed stars.'' In the beginnings of astronomy it was not known that the "fixed stars'' had any motion independent of their apparent annual revolution with the whole sky about the earth as a seeming center. Now, however, we know that the term "fixed stars'' is paradoxical, for there is not a single really fixed object in the whole celestial sphere. The apparent fixity in the positions of the stars is due to their immense distance, combined with the shortness of the time during which we are able to observe them. It is ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... war—"I don't say that the two cases are parallel. I don't ask England to hate Russia as she was bound to hate Spain, as God's enemy; but I do think that a little Tudor pluck and Tudor democracy (paradoxical as the word may seem, and inconsistently as it was carried out then) is just what ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... unconsciously perhaps, made a far more important moral judgment. You have assigned it to a class of objects so powerful and direct as means to spiritual exaltation that all minor merits are inconsiderable. Paradoxical as it may seem, the only relevant qualities in a work of art, judged as art, are artistic qualities: judged as a means to good, no other qualities are worth considering; for there are no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... acumen and audacity has said, "Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he is."1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear is susceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For death is, in its naked significance, the state of not being. Of course, then, it has no existence save in the conceptions of the living. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but, above all, the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... to run in this way, seems to be governed by a great paradoxical law which says, that whenever a man self-centred, thinking of, living for and in himself, is very desirous for place, for preferment, for honor, the very fact of his being thus is of itself a sufficient indicator that he is too ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... polish his prose, practising his style in all kinds of composition. What that style is like, I need not describe—particularly not to you, who always have his books in your hands. He especially delighted in composing declamations, and in these liked paradoxical themes, for the reason that this offers keener practice to the wits. This caused him, while still a youth, to compose a dialogue in which he defended Plato's Communism, even to the community of wives. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... engagements and Sanads with the Khan of Kelat and the other chiefs, and the country—again I have to use a paradoxical expression—may be regarded as a sort of "dependent independent" state. I can find no better way of describing it. We have bought up all the rights held by the chiefs that were worth buying for our purposes, and while, theoretically, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... replied; 'but I think that there is something paradoxical about it. I must be going now, as I have only five minutes to get to Westminster; but I will think it over, and answer it when we renew our conversation, which I propose to do very shortly,' and he was gone before I could get in ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... not also be climbed or tunnelled, if the woman could not also get married, bear children and have (or not have!) a vote, we should say that the mountain and the woman were not real things. Hence we come to the conclusion, paradoxical only as long as we fail to define what we are talking about, that what we contemplate as beautiful is an Aspect of a Thing, but never a Thing itself. In other words: Beautiful is an adjective applicable to Aspects not to Things, or to Things only, inasmuch ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that she had been all wrong ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... paradoxical as it may seem to link together Don Quixote and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders still stands before us ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... well-meaning liberals, that his exaggerated tone of aggressive defence in the Prussian Landtag, the furious onslaught of his harangues, were intended to silence the tongues at court which denounced him as a demagogue and a radical. Paradoxical as it may sound, one may safely assert that nothing more effectually helped King William in his later foreign policy, than the opinion pervading all Europe in 1864 and 1866, that, having lost all hold upon the minds of his people, weakened and crippled in every sense of the word ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... allowed to hold up to ridicule and reprobation the King and the deputies, have found no lack of subjects for the pencil in the ridicules and rascalities of common life. We have said that public decency is greater amongst the French than amongst us, which, to some of our readers, may appear paradoxical; but we shall not attempt to argue that, in private roguery, our neighbors are not our equals. The proces of Gisquet, which has appeared lately in the papers, shows how deep the demoralization must be, and how a Government, based itself on dishonesty ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... should be performed, and no deviation, however slight, should be attempted from the directions laid down. By rigid adherence to them, far more than average proficiency in shooting is attainable without the expenditure of a single ball-cartridge. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is nevertheless strictly true. It is only, however, to be accomplished by a course of aiming and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... shark's teeth, fight with the police, commit outrages, upset order, confident in their triumph because of the protection of their celestial pintakasi. Such is the product not of the schools without god but of god without schools, impossible and paradoxical, whose power manifests itself in capricious methods and in the exercise of prestidigitation. Those individuals are in truth the natural products of that superstition preached, diffused, and presented to the ignorance of people who have come to the point of fearing ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... according to its degree and special circumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, represents the utmost that human consciousness can do of itself towards the achievement of union with Reality. To some it brings joy and peace, to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of the lowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at last can measure itself by the august standards of the Infinite. Though the trained and diligent will of the contemplative can, if control of the attention be really established, recapture this state of awareness, retreat into the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... was quite startling. I was at once invited to "gatherings" which rejoiced in the paradoxical title of "Mum Sociables," where a penalty of five cents was imposed on each person for speaking (the revenue to go toward buying a new hearse, a cheerful object of benevolence), and the occasions were most enjoyable. There was also a "crazy party" ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... offered fabulous rewards for the capture of any one of us alive, and at the same time had threatened to inflict the direst punishment upon whomever should harm us. The Sagoths could not understand these seemingly paradoxical instructions, though their purpose was quite evident to me. The Mahars wanted the Great Secret, and they knew that we alone could deliver it ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... doubtless know Lord Bacon's famous apothegm, Nature is only conquered by obeying her; and will understand me when I say, that you cannot understand, much less use for scientific purposes, the meanest pebble, unless you first obey that pebble. Paradoxical; ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... the country abets it, the herd can be driven into a corral; sometimes with extra fine mounts they can be run down, but by far the commonest way, paradoxical as it may seem, is ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that are a trifle paradoxical. For instances, there are the Black Mountains, the grayish red color of which belies their name. Then there is Funeral Range, which, far from being sombre in aspect, is most brilliantly colored. To the southward is Paradise Valley, ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... curious and a paradoxical thing that no man of masculine character can read the novels written by women to-day, unless he has to; that is, unless he is a book-reviewer, publisher's reader, magazine editor, proofreader, or some such ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... that deals with a great number of subjects universal in their scope. The writing is at times too paradoxical, leading to obscurity of thought. There are splendid passages in this book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if at times a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... things. Your words make it spring up into a whole palace of beauty; but it is in the air,—it is in the air! You know what I mean: it must always be giving with me; she will never care. She never could, having loved once. And it is curious, Helen, but in a certain paradoxical way I'm content she shouldn't. She would not be the woman she is, if she ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... the rich variety of natural detail is permissible. And this is how it happens that painters who have gloried in rich details have always painted small pictures, and painters who have preferred larger truths pictures of bigger dimensions. It sounds rather paradoxical to say the smaller the picture the more detail it should contain, and the larger the less, but it is nevertheless true. For although a large picture has not of necessity got to be part of an architectural scheme, it has to be looked at from a distance at which small detail could not ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... indefinite and abstract for me," said Bearwarden. "I like something tangible and concrete. The utilitarianism of the twentieth century, by which I live, paradoxical though it may seem, would be out of place in space, unless we can colonize the other planets, and improve their ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... scenery. Throughout, he could trace something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth—the imperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the middle age, was ready, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... without directing my thoughts to you in the few moments of quiet that are left. . . . Everything here combines to maintain peace in the heart: the beauty of the woods in which we live, the absence of intellectual complications. . . . It is paradoxical, as you say, but the finest moments of my moral life are those that have just gone ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... It may seem paradoxical to say of a very successful novel-writer that he has mistaken his vocation, yet such, we think, is Mr. Reade's case. For the novelist, as for the dramatist, an essential combination is that of a strong individuality with an equal endowment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... he had been to the exotic charms of the East. The influence upon his intellectual development was decisive and final. His indebtedness to Poe, or it might better be said, his identification with Poe, is visible not only in his paradoxical manias, but in his poetry, and in his theories of art and poetry set forth in his various essays and fugitive prose expressions, and notably in his introduction to his translations of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... he really knows but very little about his case. He lost his health, and took up the study of medicine to find out what ailed him. It may seem paradoxical, but I think that he is suffering for want of work; his brain is suffering for want of some healthy action. If he would use his brain about something for only half an hour a day, he would ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... in the art of war has a life-saving and peace-promoting influence. The effects of the invention of gunpowder are a familiar proof of this remark; and the same principle applies to the discoveries of modern times. By perfecting ourselves in military science, paradoxical as it may seem, we are therefore assisting in the diffusion of peace, and hastening on the approach of that period when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... cards thrust into your hands, "Hotel des Bains, Monsieur." "Hotel Waterloo, Monsieur." "Hotel Bellevue." "Hotel Bedford, Monsieur." "Hotel d'Angleterre," ad infinitum—and then there was the pouring out of the Noah's Ark, with their countenances wearing a most paradoxical appearance, for they evidently showed that they had had, quite enough of water, and, at the same time, that they required a great deal more. I looked at my children, as they were hoisted up from the ladies' cabin, one after another; and upon examination ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... necessary, and is self abandoned to a power tyrannical because defined by no rule, and paradoxical because permitting evil, while itself assumed to be unlimited, all-powerful, and perfectly good. A little knowledge, presuming the identification of the Supreme Cause with the inevitable certainty of perfect reason, but omitting the analysis or interpretation of it, leaves the mind chain-bound ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... trouble, asked for the most necessary service as though it were a courtesy, and never forgot an interest in Aunt Tipping's affairs. On bright days he revealed a vein of quite boyish gaiety; and in his talk with Henry he flashed out a strange paradoxical humour, too often morbid in its themes, which, as usually the case with such humour, was really sadness coming to the surface in ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne |
