"Paradoxical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the evening, he repeated his usual paradoxical declamation against action in publick speaking[608]. 'Action can have no effect upon reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument. If you speak to a dog, you use action; you hold up your hand thus, because ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of a satisfactory interpretation. What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its "creation out of nothing," and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all times. To remove the enormous evil arising from Augustine's ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has dis- covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox — and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm for ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... public from the contemplation of nobler and sterner models. In truth, though a rude state of society is that in which great original works are most frequently produced, it is also that in which they are worst appreciated. This may appear paradoxical; but it is proved by experience, and is consistent with reason. To be without any received canons of taste is good for the few who can create, but bad for the many who can only imitate and judge. Great ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... appreciation of what is good in letters, his combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... planter, "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
... and unpleasant; and that rawness was bad enough when taken in conjunction with beefsteaks, without being extended to one's own hands. He had also a summer passion for ices and creams, which were forbidden luxuries to one in training, - although (paradoxical as it may seem to say so) they trained on Isis! He had also acquired a bad habit of getting up in one day, and going to bed in the next, - keeping late hours, and only rising early when absolutely compelled to do so in order to keep morning chapel - a habit which ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... And why this paradoxical situation? Why do we at the same time prepare for war and work for peace? It is simply because many of our statesmen honestly believe that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. It is true that a certain amount of strength ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... is hoped that 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 explain ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... Crispi, against the University of Rome and the Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists! It was, no doubt, one of those pasquinades which his customers watched him at work upon, thinking, as he did so, how Rome abounded in paradoxical meetings. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... hatred of the brutal despotism of men, as well as in her intense disposition to self-devoting herself, madly even and blindly, to him who should merit such a devotion from her—a woman whose piquant wit was occasionally paradoxical—a superior woman, in brief, who entertained a well-grounded disdain and contempt for certain men either placed very high or greatly adulated, whom she had from time to time met in the drawing-room of her aunt, the Princess Saint-Dizier, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... suspicion strikes one that there is little behind that austere manner—that his reticence does not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... his imitator—the somewhat too delicate refinement of a nature that never yields to impulse—the feminine sensitiveness that is allied to jealousy. Addison, in the judgment of his admirers, comes very near to perfection, and that is an irritating quality in a fellow mortal. It is, if it be not paradoxical to say so, the defect of his essays. There is nothing definite to find fault with in them, but we feel that strength is wanting. The clear and silent stream is a beautiful object, but after awhile it becomes monotonous, and we long for the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... 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 ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... "Paradoxical!" remarked the Captain. "That sounds like your well-bred servant, who tells you that he has nothing to say against the situation, but he wishes to leave you at the end of his month. What's the matter, dear boy? Do you find ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem, we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... diverting, Saint-Prosper finished "posting" the town. It had been late in the afternoon before he had altered the posters and set out on his paradoxical mission; the sun was declining when he returned homeward. Pausing at a cross-road, he selected a tree for one of his remaining announcements. It was already adorned with a dodger, citing the escape of a negro slave and offering ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... affectionateness. I found Rose a very congenial companion, though I never felt sure what he thought, and never aired my enthusiasms in his presence. He had great aplomb, and was troubled by no shyness nor hesitation. There was a touch of frostiness at times between him and Father Payne. Rose was paradoxical and whimsical, and was apt to support fantastic positions with apparent earnestness. But he was an extremely capable and sensible man, and had a knack of dropping his contentiousness the moment it began to give ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lower down we had those spontaneous plant-animals appearing out of nowhere, while right down by the sea, plants and animals were tumbling over one another. Now, if all this is connected in some mysterious way or other with your Faceny, it seems to me he must have a most paradoxical nature. His essence doesn't start creating shapes until it has become thoroughly weakened and watered.... But perhaps both of us are ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... on tiptoe for miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... kind of a man was Stevenson? Whatever may be said about his imitativeness, his good spirits were real. They are at the bottom of his success, the strong note in his work. They account for all that is paradoxical in his effect. He often displays a sentimentalism which has not the ring of reality. And yet we do not reproach him. He has by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest form revealed the scepticism inherent in them. And yet we know that he was not a sceptic; ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... music, it is no exaggeration to say that in our time it is only artists who get real pleasure out of art, because it is only artists who approach art from the side of work and bring to it work's familiar attention and habitual energy. Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound, art has remained alive during the nineteenth century, and will remain alive during the twentieth, only and solely because there has been a large ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... is one of the few writers who have mastered the art of writing sequels that are as vital and as absorbing as the original novels ... sequels wherein the finding of a character mentioned in an earlier story gives us the full delight of meeting an old friend.... This delicate paradoxical evolution ... is art, clean, deft, easy, dexterous art. There are not half a dozen men in literature to-day who could do these things consistently."—New York ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... of the East, the physiology of the hypnotist with the psychology of Ibsen. More! It was an epitome of all the Haymarket plays, a resume of all Mr. Tree's successes. The heroine was a mixture of Ophelia and hysteria, the hero was a combination of Captain Swift, Hamlet, and the Tempter; the paradoxical pessimist was a reminder of Mr. Wilde's comedies, the bishop and scientist were in the manner of Mr. Jones. How clever! Social satire a la Savoy, seance a la salle Egyptienne, sleep-walking a la Bellini, moonlight poetry a la Christabel, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Hamilton objected, raising his head to gaze curiously at this most paradoxical person. "And, now, you are urging me to keep at ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... loom, and sometimes there seems to be behind the loom the figure of the great weaver; at other times the weaving is being carried on by men and women whose weaving sometimes conforms, sometimes does not, to an infinitely complicated but symmetrical plan which, and here is the paradoxical tragedy, they can only see in the web which has been already woven; but they know that whether what they weave will remain, or not depends upon its being in accord with the pattern. And then the picture changes slightly, and it seems as though the pattern begins to reveal the same features as those ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... under my feet was wet and slippery from the salt water dripping off my reel. I could not get any footing. The bend of that rod downward, the ceaseless tug, tug, tug, the fear of sharks, the paradoxical loss of desire now to land the tuna, the change in my feeling of elation and thrill to wonder, disgust, and utter weariness of spirit and body—all these warned me that I was at the end of my tether, and if anything could be done ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... not feel at all nervous about the fate of the play—no English public will damn an attempt of that description, however much it may deserve it; and paradoxical as it may sound, a London audience, composed as it for the most part is of pretty rough, coarse, and hard particles, makes up a most soft-hearted and good-natured whole, and invariably in the instance of a new actor ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... unfailing conviction. He was for his time, and for his country, an 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 que le vrai; le vrai ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Jews were driven out of Egypt at a time of dearth, when the country was full of foreigners, and that Moses, a man of extraordinary prudence seized this opportunity of establishing his religion in the mountains of Judea." It will seem paradoxical to assert, that the 600,000 armed men whom he conducted thither ought to be reduced to 6,000; but I can confirm the assertion by so many proofs drawn from the books themselves, that it will be necessary to correct an error which appears to have arisen from the mistake ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Quarterly 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; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... can be that which we ought to blame, that one may almost deem it an argument in favour of our natural power to attain a greater eminence in virtue than the habits and arts of the existing world will allow us to reach. Perhaps it is not paradoxical to say that we could scarcely believe perfection in others, were not the germ of perfectibility in our own minds! When a man has lived some years among the actual contests of faction without imbibing the prejudice ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fellow-sovereigns, for the strains of the "Marseillaise" are familiar in the palace of the czar at St. Petersburg, at Windsor Castle, in the royal palace of Madrid, in the imperial Hofburg at Vienna, and even at the Vatican, and it is difficult to conceive anything more paradoxical than a royal band of music playing for the delectation of royal and imperial ears a national hymn, the words of which passionately call upon the people to rise up and to put to death all kings and emperors, queens and empresses, denounced ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... identity—whether he had divorced his wife, was divorced himself, or was dead—certainly none of those theories connected themselves with the present bridegroom. As for Sally, her only feeling, over and above her ordinary curiosity about her father, was a sort of paradoxical indignation that his intrusion into her mother's life should have prevented her daughter figuring as a bridesmaid. It would have been so jolly! But Sally was perfectly well aware that widows, strong-nerved from ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... are mistaken in your assumption that Socrates was the author of the maxim to which you allude. It is of more modern origin, and, in fact, the sentence of which you speak, viz: "What a combination of conflicting and paradoxical assertions is life? Of what use are logic and argument when we find the true inwardness of the bologna sausage on the outside?" were written by a philosopher who is still living. I am willing to give Socrates credit for what ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... chaps, leather cuffs, gray shirt, with kerchief knotted loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win from his sardonic gloom one of ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... apparently drunk. It was curious to see the looks of wonder, sorrow and sympathy exchanged between the members of the family as I talked ramblingly and incoherently at the table. But this feint served one purpose; it broke down the barrier between landlord and tenants. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, I think they thought more of me because of my supposed infirmity; for 'pity is akin to love;' and it is hard for the tenderer feelings of the heart to twine about one who is so strong and flawless that he ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... evil; because that is not seemly, and would appear to accuse God of lack of goodness. He believes, therefore, that in these matters telling the truth is not advisable. He would be right if the truth were in the paradoxical opinions that he maintains. For indeed it appears that according to the opinion of this writer God has no goodness, or rather that that which he calls God is nothing but the blind nature of the mass of material things, which acts according to mathematical laws, following an absolute ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... primary contemplation of itself as simply Being necessarily makes its presence universal and eternal, and consequently, paradoxical as it may seem, its independence of Time and Space makes it present throughout all Time and Space. It is the old esoteric maxim that the point expands to infinitude and that infinitude is concentrated in the point. We start, then, with Spirit contemplating itself simply as Being. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... paradoxical, and it came about, when their acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool, his vital humanity discovered strange allurements in her, and her proximity fired ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... 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 been ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... change. It is thus well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things—something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Paradoxical though it may seem, caste spirit is more prevalent and its influence more dominant in India at the present than in the past; yet there is more defiance and violation of caste rules and more frequent and sure evidences of the speedy termination of its reign than at any ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... symbol and the chance of an allegorical interpretation, every cultivated amateur is eager to spy out an adroitly placed anecdote or shaft of pictorial satire; only with great pains is any one induced to regard a picture as an independent creation of form. In so literary a society it seems paradoxical almost to believe in pure painting; and, in despair, we cry out that no country can be expected to excel, at one time, in two arts. We forget Athens and Tuscany; we also forget France. For more than two hundred years France has led the visual art of Europe; and if English painting ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... restraint and reason just then, and Joyce's well-considered words went—much to his mortification—for next to nothing. Bond, who better apprehended the spirit of the hour, let himself loose in a vein of pure fantasy,—he ventured on the whimsical, the sprightly, the paradoxical. The poor fellow sent to interview him might as well have tried to grasp a bundle of sunbeams or a handful of quicksilver. His report turned out a frightful bungle; the wretched Bond, made clumsy, fatuous, pointless, sodden, when he had meant to show himself as witty and brilliant ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... hundred thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity,—the steam-engine for instance,—and you'll die, like Salomon de Caux, at Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity, Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it. It is the same with systems as it is with material things. Utterly impracticable newspapers have consumed millions within the last fifteen years. What makes your lawsuit so hard to win, is that you have ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... yet never has it in reality been so weak, never has it had so many uncompromising assailants, never has it been so filled with doubt and consternation, never has it been so near its downfall, as at this moment. Upon the face of it, this statement looks absurdly paradoxical; but it is true, nevertheless. We are groping in thick darkness; but it is that darkest hour which is said to precede the dawn ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... 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 ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... 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 bulk of the earth, the force of gravity ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... thing in school-work which I wish to press on you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and freely—THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY. I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... a book 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
... It sounds paradoxical to say that those in sorrow should be protected from all contacts, and yet that they must be constantly asked about arrangements and given little time to remain utterly undisturbed. They must think of people they want sent for, and they must decide the details ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... good and good-humoured man, but pestilently prolix and paradoxical and personal [8]. If he would but talk half, and reduce his visits to an hour, he would add to his popularity. As an author he is very good, and his vanity is ouverte, like Erskine's, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the Statesman may be conveniently embraced under six or seven heads:—(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest; (3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which can hardly be assumed without ...
— Statesman • Plato
... but, gifted both with sincerity and good-nature, we found almost as much pleasure in arguing as we did in agreeing. That epicurean is a thinker; his thought, always generously inclined, has assumed, in the solitude where it has developed itself, a peculiar and paradoxical turn. I wish I could give you an idea ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... 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 ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... smoke and dust of the conflict: while the spectator, whose eye ranges over the ground from a more distant and elevated point, though the individual objects may lose somewhat of their vividness, takes in at a glance all the operations of the field. Paradoxical as it may appear, truth rounded on contemporary testimony would seem, after all, as likely to be attained by the writer of a later ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Duigenan 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 by ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... his statement Langham stood still a moment watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own languid, paradoxical self. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the outer office forever reading last month's magazines. The badge of fear brands the novice. Standing hat in hand, nervous, apprehensive, gulpy, with the elevator door clanging behind him, and the sacred inner door closed before him, he offers up a silent and paradoxical "Thank heaven!" at the office girl's languid "Not in," and dives into the friendly shelter of the next elevator going down. When, at that same message, he can smile, as with a certain grim agreeableness he says, "I'll wait," then has he reached the ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and Shakspeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim without having learned it. The paradoxical assertion of Johnson that "Shakspeare had a greater talent for comedy than tragedy, and that in the latter he has frequently displayed an affected tone," is scarcely deserving of lengthy notice. For its refutation, it is unnecessary to appeal to the great tragical compositions of the poet, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... invisible threads with the web of human destiny. 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 the Bible which had not ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to be paradoxical," said Rupert contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... friends, as if he considered them to be his bitterest enemies. He was far more jealous of the reputation obtained by his contemporaries, than delighted with the approbation he personally received. Considered as a philosopher, he was paradoxical; as a moralist, dangerous and licentious; as a parent, unnaturally abandoning his offspring; as a friend, suspicious and ungrateful. As pride was the ruling passion of Rousseau, so was vanity beyond dispute the grand characteristic of Voltaire, ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... paradoxical reactions of price changes on supply. Let us turn, though, once more to these earlier laws, and with a heightened critical sense let us submit them to the test of the whole gamut of our experience, and see if in any of them we can find the smallest ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... the ratification of this proposal by the Unionists. The action at once consolidated the Premier's position. I doubt if in all political history you can uncover a series of events more paradoxical or perplexing or find a solution arrived at with greater skill and strategy. It was a revelation of Smuts with his ripe statesmanship put to the test, and not ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but his critics. If Theophile Gautier was right in 1867, Remy de Gourmont must have been wrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in the world of criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man, which, however ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it is the fact that one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that another whole generation is of the same mind ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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 the recesses ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... 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 like ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... The paradoxical appearance, then, consists in this, that although the drivers of the three last wheels each have the same number of teeth, yet the central one, H, having a motion of circular translation, remains always parallel to itself, and relatively to it the upper one seems to turn in the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... Junior or the beginning of their Senior year, and are usually the strongest men in their classes, though not necessarily the most popular or the best students. Most of the Council's work has had to do with student customs, the regulation of old, and the establishment of new, "traditions," a paradoxical procedure perhaps, but a source of much that is picturesque. Of these traditions, none has been more acceptable than the custom of requiring freshmen to wear the little gray caps, or knitted toques in the winter, with a button ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... ceased to reign, and slaves to groan, and nations to suffer from the lust of gold or power, this beautiful picture of the prophet shall become a reality: "The whole earth," said the seer, "is at rest, and is quiet; they break forth into singing." Till then, paradoxical though it appears, the cause of peace may be pled with most effect by the mouths of cannon. Fitness for war is often the strongest security for peace; and a nation whose wishes and interests both run in the direction of peace, may find no way of warning restless and unprincipled and ambitious ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... somewhat paradoxical familiarity with the ways of a mysterious Providence. This was exceedingly perplexing to the thoughtful child, whose queries as to justice were too often hushed by parent or teacher. In real life, every child expected, even if he did not receive, a tangible reward for doing ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... essential merits of 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 Mr. PAIN's new ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... errantry of men, so vulgarly misunderstood, has become only a reprehensible paradox. The entire shelf of James Branch Cabell's books, dedicated to an unquenchable masculine idealism, has, as well, a paradoxical place in an age of material sentimentality. Compared with the novels of the moment, Domnei is an isolated, a heroic fragment of a vastly deeper and higher structure. And, of its many aspects, it is not impossible that the highest, rising over even its heavenly ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... this moment brought to the door, so that nothing hindered Somerset in driving off to the spot at which he would be soonest likely to learn what truth or otherwise there was in the newspaper report. From the first he doubted it: and yet how should it have got there? Such strange rumours, like paradoxical maxims, generally include a portion of truth. Five days had elapsed since he last ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Further, it is credulous and accepts with unreasoning docility what it is told. Thus, as it is the unconscious that is responsible for the functioning of all our organs but the intermediary of the brain, a result is produced which may seem rather paradoxical to you: that is, if it believes that a certain organ functions well or ill or that we feel such and such an impression, the organ in question does indeed function well or ill, or ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... art unsound.'" On hearing these things, the Grecian sages said, "Surely such paradoxes vanish and disperse of themselves, as being full of contradiction; and yet in the world at this day they cannot be dispersed by sound reason. What can be believed more paradoxical than what is told respecting the last judgement; that the universe will then be destroyed, and that the stars of heaven will then fall down upon the earth, which is less than the stars; and that then the bodies of men, whether they be mouldering ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... then the other—and sometimes both at 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
... Tale of a Town," may any or all of them be called upon to explain so sweeping a statement. But none of such motives could account for its praise by Mr. Beerbohm in the London "Saturday Review." "Max" is often paradoxical, but he is not paradoxical here: "Not long ago this play was published as a book, with a preface by Mr. George Moore, and it was more or less vehemently disparaged by the critics. Knowing that it was to be ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... quill-driving clerks When a ship was 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 ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced Dante. But we must remember not to judge races by single and exceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always a conscious hypocrite—a form of character, however paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between the profession and the practice. He is most ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... tenets of Calvinism, which allow no medium between grace and reprobation, and doom man to eternal punishment for every breach of the moral law, as an equal offence against Infinite truth and justice, proceed (like the paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics), from taking a half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable only to the dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and not excusable from the temptations and frailty of human ignorance and passion. The ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... had 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
... neurological standpoint, let us consider it from the psychological standpoint. How are the ideas being modified during the intervals between impressions? Modern psychology has discovered that much memorizing goes on without our knowing it, paradoxical as that may seem. The processes may be described in terms of the doctrine of association, which is that whenever two things have once been associated together in the mind, there is a tendency thereafter "if the first of them recurs, for the other to come ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... had stood listening with a half-mystical look, a man groping for elusive truths. Now his fine composure seemed to cloud for a moment; but it shone out again, fair and strong. And presently, as he paced, he was heard humming again his strange paradoxical song, which he, a parson, seemed to lean upon, as a wounded man leans on ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... setting in motion the receiving dynamo which worked the pump. Professor Clerk Maxwell thought this discovery the greatest of the century; and the remark has been repeated more than once. But it is a remark which derives its chief importance from the man who made it, and its credentials from the paradoxical surprise it causes. The discovery in question is certainly fraught with very great consequences to the mechanical world; but in itself it is no discovery of importance, and naturally follows from Faraday's far greater and more ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... paradoxical threat no answer was returned. Standing in the shadow at the head of the stairs, the jester only gripped tighter the hilt of the coveted sword, while across his vision flashed the picture of the young girl, left helpless, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... 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 cause ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... of the land and seen with his own eyes something of the atrocious misery which its administration involves. A murderer like Musolino, crowned with an aureole of saintliness, would be an anomaly in England. We should think it rather paradoxical to hear a respectable old farmer recommending his boys to shoot a policeman, whenever they safely can. On the spot, things begin to wear a different aspect. Musolino is no more to be blamed than a child who has been systematically misguided by his parents; and if these people, much as they ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that I put this before you for the purpose of raising a paradoxical difficulty; the fact is, that the great mass of deposits have taken place in sea-bottoms which are gradually sinking, and have been formed under the very conditions I am ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... permanent, and only the condition thereof changes. Now since this mutation affects only determinations, which can have a beginning or an end, we may say, employing an expression which seems somewhat paradoxical: "Only the permanent (substance) is subject to change; the mutable suffers no change, but rather alternation, that is, when certain determinations cease, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... yield; and the same amount of influence would carry the amendment with the voters. But the petitioners for the suffrage are in the minority. There are many obvious reasons for this, and one of them, paradoxical as it may seem, is because so much already has been gained. Woman in general now finds her needs very well supplied. If she wants to work she has all occupations to choose from. If she desires an education the schools and colleges are freely opened to her. If she wishes ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the one thing easy of attainment; the possible the one thing he never could achieve. That was the paradoxical nature of the man. Before his days of hunted-little-devildom were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge of English to carry him, a few years later, through various vicissitudes in England, until, fired by new social ambitions and self-educated ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... cannot or will not be—something higher than a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian. He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation; he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman, Samuel Richardson, "he kept his shop, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... hazard of life to them that pull it up." "In philosophy," he observes, meaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with his orthodoxy in religion—in philosophy, "where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself:" which is true, we may think, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the "paradoxical" that he actually preferred. Happy, at all events, he still remained—undisturbed and happy—in a hundred ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... talkative short story that forms a serious stumbling block to the novice is the dialect story. If you have an idea of trying that style of composition, let me warn you: Don't! Dialect stories never were very artistic, for they are a paradoxical attempt to make good literature of poor rhetoric and worse grammar. They have never been recognized or written by any great master of fiction. They are a sign of a degenerate taste, and their production or perusal is a menace ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... saints, or 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 Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... man by the law are his rights; and the great charter of England declares that the ancient privileges enjoyed by Englishmen, are the undoubted rights of Englishmen. But, as we have seen, the XIV. and XV. Amendments distinguish between privileges and rights; and it must be confessed that it is paradoxical to say, as the XIV. Amendment clearly does, that the "privileges" of a citizen shall not be abridged, while his "right" to vote may be. But a judicial construction of the Constitution is wholly different from a mere exercise in philology. The question is not whether certain ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and their croaking choruses have startled many a poor traveller. One variety, in the case with which the visitor is now engaged, is remarkable. Here are specimens of the tree frogs that can walk with their backs downwards on the most polished surfaces, and can slightly change their colour; the paradoxical frog from Surinam, which is larger as a tadpole than in its condition of maturity; the Brazilian horned toads; the American bull frogs; and the Brazilian pipa, the female of which deposits its eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them about till they ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... wish. His walking-stick was laid upon the table, and silence at once fell upon all. In like manner, before that editor who should trouble himself and his readers with attempting to refute Johnson's arguments, paradoxical as they often were, should be placed Reynolds's portrait of that 'labouring working mind[9].' It might make him reflect that if the mighty reasoner could rise up and meet him face to face, he would be sure, on which ever side the right might be, even if at first his pistol missed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... theocratic governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more liberty in the best sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... paradoxical, lime, it would appear, in some cases exercises an effect upon the soil exactly the reverse of what has just been stated. That lime should act as a binding agent is only natural when we reflect on the way in which it acts when used as mortar. It is quite to be understood, therefore, that its ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... of general knowledge, scientific hoaxes have their uses, just as paradoxical works have. No one, certainly no student of science, can thoroughly understand how little some persons know about science, until he has observed how much will be believed, if only published with the apparent ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... tragedy; the human mind is overwhelmed by the suddenness, no less than the magnitude, of an upheaval of nature resulting in the blotting-out of whole flourishing communities. And yet we venture to say, paradoxical though it sounds, that it is, partly at least, owing to a certain lack of imagination that such an event looms so immense in our thoughts. Most of us do not make the ordinance of death in itself an accusation against the Most High; we are not specially shocked or outraged by the thought ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him perittutatos, and saw the humour of it—and ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... not paradoxical to relate it to plastic imagination, as species to genus? It would be idle to enter upon a discussion of the subject here without attempting a classification; let us merely note the likenesses and differences. Both are above all objective—the first, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... place, you will know a year from now, more than you can realize at this present moment, that this is a commencement. This is not the climax of your life. It is but the beginning, and however paradoxical it may seem, you are not at the top of the ladder, you are at the foot. We are here to applaud you to-day not so much on what you have already accomplished as to give you a send-off for the strenuous tasks that lie before ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... anything about politics here," she said, "though I do at home, of course. I must say, though, Mr. Harrington did not seem so very paradoxical." ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... presence of the immense popularity of Mark Twain, it may seem paradoxical to call Lowell our greatest American humorist. Yet in the refined and artistic qualities of humorous writing and in the genuineness of the native flavor his work is certainly superior to any other humorous writing that is likely to compete with it for ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... no other words can the same associations be attached. We cannot explain them adequately on principles of utility; in attempting to do so we rob them of their true character. We give them a meaning often paradoxical and distorted, and generally weaker than their signification in common language. And as words influence men's thoughts, we fear that the hold of morality may also be weakened, and the sense of duty impaired, if virtue and vice are explained only as the qualities ...
— Philebus • Plato
... hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of Anthylla that your illustrious brother has set before us? Your paradoxical axiom commends you at once as a powerful thinker and as the benevolent giver of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in society, of walking gravely across a salon, ascending the tribune with smiling face, imparting solemnity to trifles and treating serious matters lightly; it was a resume of his attitude in life, a paradoxical distinction. Still handsome, despite his fifty-six years,—a beauty attributable to refined taste and perfect proportion, in which the grace of the dandy was intensified by something of a soldierly character in the figure and the haughty expression of the face,—he appeared to admirable advantage ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... founded by George Fox in England during the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly after the organization of this society, many of the members migrated to New England and the Middle Atlantic Colonies. Others were exiled by Charles II to the West Indies.[167] Paradoxical as it may seem, these earliest Friends, though distinguishing themselves from other Christian sects by their special stress on immediate teaching and guidance of the Holy Spirit, had no scruples against keeping slaves. As a matter of fact, there was a prevalent conviction ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... "Not so paradoxical as you imagine," I replied. "You allow that we designate a disease as mortal when nature is so severely attacked, and her strength so far exhausted, that she cannot possibly recover her former condition under any change that ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... the nature of his public reputation, especially in Edinburgh, where the recollection of his daft student days was as yet stronger than the impression made by his recent performances in literature, he was well aware that his candidature must seem paradoxical, and stood little chance of success. The election took place in the late autumn of the same year, and he was defeated, receiving only ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attendant 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 personality of its author, has sometimes been expressed. As the story has never been printed, I ask ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous thing in this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross diagonally both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth Building, I would say that there seemed to me something rather comically paradoxical in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a structure which was erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial genius whose boast it was to have made his fortune out of articles sold at a rate never ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... an excellent lesson: if you are so tender of blame in the veriest trifles, how impeachable must you be in matters of importance! As to personal habits, begin by denying that you have any; or in the paradoxical language of Rousseau,[71] declare that the only habit you have is the habit of having none: as all personal habits, if they have been of any long standing, must have become involuntary, the unconscious ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth |
