"Antithesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... latter appears to be inspired by genuine enthusiasm and love of art. The forces of confusion that have dogged the pastoral in all ages show themselves where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch's influence over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was later embodied by Spenser in his Hymns. One poem stands out from the rest somewhat after the manner of Petrarch's Daphne. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... who once accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end, even in matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—the male, active and aggressive; the female, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe, but as regards himself, no, he is at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe; they are only material for his jests. He takes another man's idea, tacks on to it its antithesis, and the epigram is made. There is such a thing as crime, there is no such thing as crime; there is no such thing as justice, there are no just men; atheism, Darwinism, the Moscow bells.... But alas, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... punishment which was sure to be meted out to him. And he came to it with the old familiar apprehension that night, if from a different cause. He never dreamed that his father was anything but ill. He must see his brother. He stood in no little awe of that brother, who was his exact antithesis in almost everything. They had not got along particularly well. If his father had been inside the door he would have hesitated with his hand on the knob. If his father had not been ill he would not have attempted to face his brother. But his anxiety, ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... czardas, resembled some vision of a painter, some embarkation for the dreamed-of Cythera, realized by the fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great lord, here in nineteenth century Paris, close to the bridge, across which streamed, like a living antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... turns a telling phrase, and straightway looks for Her, to read it to double his joy by sharing it. Robert Louis was ever discovering new beauties in his wife and she in him. Eliminate the element of surprise and anticipate everything a person can do or say, and love is a mummy. Thus do we get the antithesis—understanding and surprise. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... The antithesis of the one expression to the other did not annoy her; rather she was sensitive to a tender exultance the recurrence of which, later in the day, subdued her: for Breitmann at tea turned a few phrases of a similar character. Fitzgerald was light-hearted and boyish, Breitmann was grave and dignified; ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... common novel is not the thing at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... few notes on the political position of Khorasan," he said, glancing with slight apprehensiveness at the other's face. He was a small, shy man, with few social attainments but an extraordinary amount of learning—the antithesis of the alert Blessington, whom ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... one drawback, and the only one, is the north-west wind; and the worst of it is, that it blows very often from this point. However, I am assured that I have not yet seen either a "howling nor'-wester," nor its exact antithesis, "a sutherly buster." ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... again, she rubbed the cheek that his breath had touched. A girl was singing now—one of those faces that Gyp always admired, reddish-gold hair, blue eyes—the very antithesis of herself—and the song was "The Bens of Jura," that strange outpouring from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Something wrong somewhere, he reasoned. He had ordered a speed-boat. One that would beat Mascola's. A craft with real lines and bird-like grace like the Fuor d'Italia. The oncoming launch, he observed bitterly, was the direct antithesis of his expectations. Surely there could be no speed in that squatty packet with her sagging bow and queer looking box-affair for ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... a painter of landscapes. He painted the scenes that were dear to his heart, and in his still blue skies he hung the soft mists of fable, of legend, and of the pageant of a passing race. Hawthorne was his antithesis—a painter of portraits of the souls of men and women. That's the highest achievement known to any branch of art." Leighton paused. "Do you know why those two men ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... no more than the confidence of a good man, who, when he was dying, believed that he would be accepted of a loving Father, and would be at rest from his sufferings? To me they seem to say infinitely more than that. 'He shall also glorify Him in Himself.' Mark that 'in Himself.' That is the obvious antithesis to what has been spoken about in the previous clause, a glorifying which consisted in a manifestation to the external universe, whereas this is a glorifying within the depths of the divine nature. And the best commentary upon it is our Lord's own words: 'Father! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... word in them that is not perfectly simple English, or if of Latin origin, naturalised long before Milton's time, while the syntax is also quite vernacular. Again it is commonly thought that the habits of antithesis and parallelism, of omission of articles, of reversing the position of adjectives and adverbs, are specially Miltonic. Certainly Milton often indulges in them; yet in the same way the most random dipping will find passages ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Virginia men went for profit; principle drove them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the Mayflower in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right to compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. Schism, however, appeals ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... class Roman Catholics cared very little about seats in Parliament; so the founders of the society cleverly added abolition of tithes and taxes, and reduction of rents, to their original programme; this drew in numbers of Roman Catholics, whose principles were really the very antithesis of Jacobinism. ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... the light of day and Ahriman the darkness of night; the former awakens men to their duties and the latter lulls them to sleep. These features of the good and evil spirits seem to point to the conclusion that the original antithesis which is portrayed in the conflict between the principles of good and evil is that of night and day or darkness and light. The light of day and all that belongs to it is good, and the darkness of night and that which belongs to it evil. As already seen, Ahura Mazda is considered ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He was neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way to hunt for them. He is a better writer ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Great Serpent, or Grand Zombi, who is the voudou god. These saints, however, are given voudou names, St. Michael, for example, being Blanc Dani, and St. Peter, Papa Liba. This situation is the antithesis of that to be found in Brittany, where Druidical beliefs, handed down for generations among the peasants, may now be faintly traced running like on odd alien threads through the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Point, or Turn, look upon it as the particular Happiness to which Cowley, Ovid and others owe their Reputation, and therefore imitate them only in such Instances; what is Just, Proper and Natural does not seem to be the Question with them, but by what means a quaint Antithesis may be brought about, how one Word may be made to look two Ways, and what will be the Consequence ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... chance of any rational improvement in the representation of the people," he cried, "and has betrayed a good reform to the hopes of a shabby insurrection." Proceeding in his own condensed, crystalline antithesis, he thus enlarged on his own opinions: "There are two characters equally enemies to the reform of Parliament, and equally enemies to the government—the leveller of the constitution, and the friend of its abuses; ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... intelligence in general, sometimes to the poetic faculty, and sometimes to the erratic fancy, which the true poet restrains by sense. Pope would have been still more puzzled if asked to define precisely what he meant by the antithesis between nature and art. They are somehow opposed, yet art turns out to be only "nature methodized." We have indeed a clue for our guidance; to study nature, we are told, is the same thing as to study Homer, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... antithesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... in Florence about 1406, and dying there in 1469, was the exact antithesis of Fra Angelico, both in his private life and in the method of his painting. He was just as earthly in both respects as Fra Angelico was heavenly. As a child he was put with the Carmelites, and as he showed an inclination for drawing rather than for study, he was ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... retaliation. When our author censures Timaeus for saying that Alexander took less time to annex Asia than Isocrates spent in writing an oration, to bid the Greeks attack Persia, we know what he would have thought of Macaulay's antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... was a complete contrast to me. Tall, lean, black-bearded and deep-voiced, careless of public opinion and prodigal in ideas, he was just my antithesis. He was possessed of immense energy. His tousled black hair, moustaches and beard seemed to bristle with it; it shone in his pale blue eyes. He was full of sudden violence, flinging test-tubes across the laboratory, shouting strange songs, striding ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... spoke to me of Petrarch, mentioning Rousseau with aversion. He disliked his very eloquence, as he said it owed all its merits to antithesis and paradox. Haller was a learned man of the first class, but his knowledge was not employed for the purpose of ostentation, nor in private life, nor when he was in the company of people who did not care for science. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the Exposition celebrated were not such as to find general sympathy in monarchical Europe, so that the "crowned heads" were conspicuous by their absence. It was not, of course, by way of theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time. But the contrast was none the less striking and effective. It was felt that, after all, that which the great exposition exemplified at its best—the triumph of genius ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... antithesis of the Greek Voltaire, "Painting is dumb poetry, and poetry is speaking painting," can never have been found in any didactic work; it was an idea, amongst others, of Simonides, and the truth it contains is so evident that we feel compelled to overlook the indistinctness ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... of antithesis. The habit of voluntarily performing opposite movements under opposite impulses has become firmly established in us by the practice of our whole lives. Hence, if certain actions have been regularly performed, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... my father and mother; but for all that I will not turn back, until I give the Trojans their fill of war." The difference is that in the English case the strain is greater, the irony deeper, the antithesis between the spirit and the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... antithesis is between affirmation and negation, the latter usually has the rising inflection, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... German poor is therefore in inverse proportion to the wisdom of the poor Germans. Thus "Prussian's" attempt to manipulate his thought in the form of antithesis on the occasion of the Silesian labour unrest had led to the greatest antithesis against the truth. What a thoughtful mind should do in connection with a first outbreak, such as the Silesian workers' revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... thinking possible without arbitrary signs? or how far is the word arbitrary a misnomer? are not words, etc., parts and germinations of the plant, and what is the law of their growth?" In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, Words into Things, and living things too. All the nonsense of vibrations, etc., you would, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... was hard cider. Every log cabin must have its barrel of this acrid fluid, as the antithesis of the alleged beverage of President Van Buren at the White House. He, it was asserted, drank champagne, and on this point I remember that a verse was sung at log-cabin meetings which, after describing, in a prophetic ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... beauty. Besides, it has been pointed out to me that even the Hebrew poems, like the Egyptian, follow certain rules, which however I might certainly call rhetorical rather than poetical. The first member in a series of ideas stands in antithesis to the next, which either re-states the former one in a new form or sets it in a clearer light by suggesting some contrast. Thus they avail themselves of the art of the orator—or indeed of the painter—who brings a light color into juxtaposition with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... should have borne in mind that all the great evangelicals have meant much more than this by those words; that on the whole, instead of considering—as he seems to do, and we do—the moral and the spiritual as identical, they have put them in antithesis to each other, and looked down upon "mere morality" just because it did not seem to them to involve that supernatural, transcendental, "mystic" element which they considered that they found in Scripture. From Luther to Owen and Baxter, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... this is how Macaulay speaks of him,—Macaulay who was not over-lenient toward Lord Byron, whom he never personally knew, and who is seldom just as well from party spirit as from his desire of shining in antithesis and high-sounding phrases:— ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... chunky in build, with sandy hair and eyebrows; with weak, filmy blue eyes over which the lids blinked constantly. The other, black-haired with streaks of gray, powerful in his build, and with a walrus-like mustache drooping over hard lips, was the sort of antithesis naturally to be found in the company of the smaller, sandy complexioned man. Who they were, what they were, Fairchild did not know, except from the general attributes which told that they too followed the great gamble of mining. But one thing was certain; they watched ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the text, "It repented Jehovah that he had made man on the earth," I believe to be meant to bring out the antithesis, that God has in mind not the earthly man, who is subject to sin and death, but the heavenly man, who is lord over them. He expresses his love for the latter, while he hates the ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... get an appropriate rhyme to flat." A wag who was present suggested fat, pointing out that the dog's increased bulk by the snow falling on his back fully justified the meaning, and, what is of equal importance in Chinese poetry, the antithesis. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... The use of figurative language is also an aid to clearness and to force. Simile, metaphor, personification, antithesis, balance, climax, rhetorical question, and repetition are all effective aids in the presentation of argument. The speeches of great orators are replete with expressions of this sort. Burke, in his Speech on Conciliation, says, "Despotism itself ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... occident, to height and depth, and whose mind flashes across the space from the dawn to the sunset, and from nadir to zenith. Space is his playground, and his companions are the stars. Such a man feels and knows more life in an hour than his antithesis could feel and know in a century. To his spirit there are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength to make excursions to the far limits of space and time. Life comes to him from a thousand sources and ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... In the condensed antithesis with which our Lord concludes his demand for the new birth, we have both the philosophy and the justification of his {103} doctrine: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... the second might, in strictness, be almost instantaneous, like that of an escaping spring; but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. From this point of view mind and matter appear not as two things opposed to each other, as static terms in fixed antithesis, but rather as two inverse directions of movement; and, in certain respects, we must therefore speak not so much of matter or mind as of spiritualisation and materialisation, the latter resulting automatically from a simple interruption ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... and you have his antithesis in Cezanne—Cezanne whose stark figures of bathers, male and female, evoke a shuddering sense of the bestial. Not that there is offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans. His landscapes are ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... The cutting antithesis of "What beast" in retort to her husband's assertion, "I dare do all that may become a man," was tamely rendered by the lady, in obedience to Mr. Collier's folio, "What boast was it, then,"—a change that any one possessed of poetical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... with the Eternal Law is Wisdom, Love and Peace. But this divine state is, and must ever be, incomprehensible to the merely personal. Personality, separateness, selfishness are one and the same, and are the antithesis of wisdom and divinity. By the unqualified surrender of the personality, separateness and selfishness cease, and man enters into the possession of his divine ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... of the compass, and when we came back to the ocean currents he showed a thorough grasp of the subject. Altogether he rather improves upon acquaintance, and is a man of decided culture and refinement. His voice harmonises with his conversation, and both are the very antithesis of his face ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... antithesis of his sister. A good fellow with everybody, and liked accordingly; none too particular in his choice of comrades; a spendthrift, and unable to apply himself for long at any one occupation, 'twas a fortunate circumstance that Cousin James took in his orphan sister, otherwise she would have ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... conceive that there is no more allusion to chaos in the one than in the other. The earth-disk lay in its watery envelope, like the yolk of an egg in the glaire, and the spirit, or breath, of Elohim stirred the mass. Light was created as a thing by itself; and its antithesis "darkness" as another thing. It was supposed to be the nature of these two to alternate, and a pair of alternations constituted a "day" in the sense of an ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... went to the bottom of the sea, it would be "all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." If I had not put that snapper on the end of my whip-lash, I might have got off without the ill temper which my antithesis provoked. Thirty years set that all right, and the same thirty years have so changed the theological atmosphere that such abusive words as "heretic" and "infidel," applied to persons who differ from the old standards of faith, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for, tho flowery, it has truth to back it, and faithfully illustrates the mode in which a town near the conflux of two rivers is constructed. The irregularity of the houses—in fact everything, tends to make Bingen a kind of antithesis, both with respect to buildings and the scenery which surrounds them. The town, bounded on the left by Nahe, and by the Rhine on the right, develops itself in a triangular form near a Gothic church, which is backed by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... been the recent history of the other great branch of the Christian Church—a history developed where it might have been least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly present a more striking antithesis between Religion ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... disloyalty. Truesdale, on receipt of the intelligence, vented a jarring laugh. He saw little reason why Paston should have succeeded at Geneva when he himself had failed at Madison (he was conscious, here, of forcing the terms in order to compass a striking antithesis); and that it should have been his own sister whose hand Paston had won seemed to him a triumph ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... was as exactly the antithesis of the Guardian as it was possible to conceive. Where the Guardian was conservative, the Salamander was ultra-radical; where the Guardian wrote a million and three quarters yearly in premiums, the Salamander, though its surplus was rather less than that of the other ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... controversy, and that the sole mandate for the Republic, as well as the supreme reason why it had to be upheld if the country was not to dissolve, has always lain in the fact that it postulates something which is the very antithesis of the system it has replaced and which should be wholly successful in a single generation, if courage is shown and the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... was only a bit of antithesis for effect. My last account is the true one, as you will see. I shall come ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... this retired Adonis had nothing manly about him; he seemed to be employing this toilet varnish to hide the ruins occasioned by the military service of gallantry only. But we must hasten to add that his voice produced what might be called an antithesis to his blond delicacy. Unless you adopted the opinion of certain observers of the human heart, and thought that the chevalier had the voice of his nose, his organ of speech would have amazed you by its full and redundant sound. Without possessing the volume of classical bass voices, the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... unaccomplished. Good and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already ... accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. ... In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... very much of an harmonious and triumphant universe. Few of the world's creative spirits have ever denied that inner chasm or minimized its tragic consequences to mankind. Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine and Luther are wrung with the consciousness of it. Indeed, the antithesis between flesh and spirit is too familiar in religious literature to need any recounting. It is more vividly brought home to us from the nonprofessional, the disinterested and involuntary testimony of secular writing. Was there ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... The very antithesis to the person just mentioned, was another passenger then on board. She, for even in sex they were different—she was a short, squat, red-faced, vulgar-looking woman, of about fifty, possessed of a most garrulous ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... are brought up to ignore sex; the young folk can go out for a whole day together, walking or snow-shoeing, skating or sledging, and a chaperon is unheard of; yet in all social gatherings, as an antithesis to this, we find an unexpected restraint. At a party the men all congregate in one room, or at one end of the table, leaving the women desolate, while the young of both sexes look askance at one another, and, in the presence of their elders, never exchange ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 5. Occidental manhood springs from self-respect Oriental manhood finds its greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. [Footnote: In this sentence we have a figure of speech called Antithesis, in which things unlike in some particular are set over against each other. Each part shines with its own light and with the light reflected from the other part. Antithesis gives great force to the thought expressed by it. Sentences containing it furnish us ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... antithesis of his sister—tall and somewhat ascetic-looking, with a face to which one was almost tempted to apply the word beautiful, it was so well-proportioned and cut with the sure fineness of a cameo. His dark hair was ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the door of the Executive Committee's office. Ledru-Rollin, very red, was half seated on the table. M. Gamier-Pages, very pale, and half reclining in an armchair, formed an antithesis to him. The contrast was complete: Garnier-Pages thin and bushy-haired, Ledru-Rollin stout and close-cropped. Two or three colonels, among them Representative Charras, were conversing in a corner. I only recall Arago ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often disappoints ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and matter is the objective aspect of feeling. Feeling is not the cause of motion, as idealism would suggest; and motion does not cause or turn into feeling, as materialism teaches. The two are absolutely identical; there is no dualism or antithesis. In the same way, cause and effect are but two aspects of one phenomenon; there is no separation between them, but one and the same thing before and after. He applies this idea to the conception of natural law, and declares it to be only the persistence of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sharp antithesis is quoted at second hand from Charles Kingsley. The stories of little children frightened into screaming, and then dragged (at four years of age, says Jonathan Edwards) through the agitating vicissitudes ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... twice Viceroy of Ireland,' the old Dutchman answered, 'And my father was a shepherd!' It was not pride rebuking pride; it was the ever-present fact which would not have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis. He too was a shepherd, and is—a peasant. It may be that he knows what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but it is sure that he realizes that to educate would be to emancipate, to broaden their ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... translation of Homer is so ludicrous. Wordsworth broke down in his theory, that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating "poetic diction." We think the proper antithesis is not between prosaic and poetic words, nor between the speech of actual life and a conventionalized diction, but between the language of real life (which is something different from the actual, or matter-of-fact) and that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... from all that tyranny, when one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy—these are the joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... or a fool, because the form of the question seems to preclude the proper answer, which may be "both." Believers in the Balance of Power are visionaries if they see in it a guarantee of peace, and blind if they fail to perceive that it naturally and almost inevitably leads to war. The fundamental antithesis is between the Balance of Power and ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... what to expect. Mr. Greeley had not been tried, and though the best known man in his own field of journalism, he was the least known and most doubted in the field of Governmental administration. No other candidate could have presented such an antithesis of strength and of weakness. He was the ablest polemic this country has ever produced. His command of strong, idiomatic, controversial English was unrivaled. His faculty of lucid statement and compact reasoning has never been surpassed. Without the graces ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... wholly incorrect," returned the girl gently. "He does not exist, excepting in human, mortal thought. He is a product of only such thought. He and his material universe are seen and dealt with only in such thought. And such thought is the direct antithesis of God's thought. And it is therefore unreal. It is the supposition, the lie, the mist that went up and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... language, he instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil, the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twin mysteries of sin and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the story ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... who goes into the solitudes not of the physical but of the spiritual realm, there to blaze new trails, and, perhaps like Captain Scott, to die alone. A striking example of heroism of this kind, presented in exact antithesis to the ordinary heroism of the soldier, may be found in John Galsworthy's play, The Mob. At first accepted only as a brilliant piece of imagination, the drama becomes charged with real significance when we ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... to Hegel, "no motionless, eternally self-identical and unchangeable being, but a living, eternal process of absolute self-existence. This process consists in the eternal self-distinction, or antithesis, and equally self-reconciliation or synthesis of those opposites which enter, as necessary elements, into the constitution of the Divine Being. This self-evolution, whereby the absolute enters into antithesis, and returns to itself again, is the eternal self-actualization of its being, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... a relief to turn from such grossness to its antithesis in the shape of two American ladies who sat near us. They were well-preserved, well-bred spinsters under forty. Everything about them was dainty and exquisitely neat. I likened them in my mind to bowls of dried ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... most systematic way to produce a series of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or land, exactly as the merchant goes to his office, the mechanic to his shop. He wrote with a watch before him, two hundred and fifty words to fifteen ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... in company with Stael, the "Epicene," [1] whose politics are sadly changed. She is for the Lord of Israel and the Lord of Liverpool—a vile antithesis of a Methodist and a Tory—talks of nothing but devotion and the ministry, and, I presume, expects that God and the government will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Beatrice's name is Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland. I used to sit at my window and hear people call "Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty times in a forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how often they called Towler, every one came before she did. I suppose they spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... of the theme is noticeable for its flexibility; since the first phrase is expanded to five measures and the second phrase (antithesis), with a descending motive, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the great one in the public eye, he who paid me—put in this and that sonorous phrase, full of echoing emptiness, launched an antithesis which had done good service a time or two on the hustings or in the House of Commons, and—signed the article. Well, I do not object. That was what I was there for, and after all I made myself necessary to the Universal Review. It would never have appeared in time ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... equanimity, the name of "Pork-chop." We had quite a number of professional gamblers, who, I am bound to say, usually made good soldiers. One, who was almost abnormally quiet and gentle, was called "Hell Roarer"; while another, who in point of language and deportment was his exact antithesis, was christened ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them: and you achieve the "Simple Vision" of the poet and the mystic—that synthetic and undistorted apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision of practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... not long past when the copulative in that title might have suggested to some minds an antithesis,—as acid and alkali, or heat and cold. That religion could have affiliation with anything so worldly as poetry would have seemed to some pious people a questionable proposition. There were the Psalms, in the Old Testament, to be sure; ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... held views which were almost the direct antithesis of these. To them "the watery deep is disorder, and the cosmos, the order of the world, is due to the victory of a god of light and spring over the monster of winter and water; man is ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... from the opposite sides relating to the same events, conspicuously opposite views held by the same man at different periods, or by different men who were noticeably similar in some other respects, or antithesis as to the character or difference in the nationality [if the two nations are frequent foes] of different men in whose careers, date of birth, or what not, there was something distinctly parallel—Egbert, first King of England, died 837. William IV., last King of England, ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... lost its glamour, but had become a thing to flee from. Even the rude motley of Hazleton was a welcome change. Here at least—on a minor scale, to be sure—was that which she craved, and to which she had been accustomed—life, stir, human activity, the very antithesis of the lonely mountain fastnesses. She bestowed a glad pressure on her husband's arm as they walked up the street, Bill carrying the sack of gold perched carelessly ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... employed the favorite method of the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in order to demonstrate that Germany ought to be the Mistress of the World; that Belgium was guilty of her own ruin because she had defended herself; that true happiness consisted in having all humanity ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... present a continual antithesis, and seem to value themselves upon being unlike each other; yet each have their peculiar merits, which should entitle them to each other's esteem. The French intellect is quick and active. It flashes its way into a subject with the rapidity of lightning; seizes upon remote conclusions with ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... as to meet the suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word ingentem, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided,—Aesop the slave and the Athenians,—must be read as an appoggiatura, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the Aesthetic of the sympathetic set itself the problem of the place to be assigned to the ugly in art. This problem is without meaning for us, who do not recognize any ugliness save the anti-aesthetic or inexpressive, which can never form part of the aesthetic fact, being, on the contrary, its antithesis. But the question for the doctrine which we are here criticizing was to reconcile in some way the false and defective idea of art from which it started, reduced to the representation of the agreeable, with effective ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... familiar to all young college graduates: but I owed these details to certain economists, who, apropos of my critique of property, have heaped dilemmas on dilemmas to prove that, if I was not a proprietor, I necessarily must be a communist; all because they did not understand THESIS, ANTITHESIS, and SYNTHESIS. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Lady Merceron and her brother in law took counsel, he strolled through the moonlit shrubberies with Mrs. Marland, and Mrs. Marland was very sympathetically interested in him and his pursuits. She was a little eager woman, the very antithesis in body and mind to Millie Bushell; she had plenty of brains but very little sense, a good deal of charm but no beauty, and, without any counterbalancing defect at all, a hearty liking for handsome young men. She had also a ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Poor Cyrus! His young affections were sadly misplaced. But after all, though Cecily never relented towards him, he did not condemn himself to darkness alone till life was flown. Quite early in life he wedded a stout, rosy, buxom lass, the very antithesis of his first love; he prospered in his undertakings, raised a large and respectable family, and was eventually appointed a Justice of the Peace. Which was all very ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... immaterial is otherwise to say that it is trivial. Here, then, is the first step: to contradict the idea of material is effectually to express the idea of trivial. Let us now see if we can find any other contradiction to the idea of material, for one antithesis to that idea will express as well as any other antithesis the counterpole of the trivial. Now, clearly the substance of a thing, the material out of which it is made, is oftentimes of great importance by ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele. Handsome, poor, enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and might be depended on till the end of the chapter. And the end of it was, that in so far as she had ever felt real ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are these: "The Papists in prayer kneel to an idol, and in the sacrament they kneel to the sign: we kneel in our prayer to God, and by the sacrament to the thing signified." The analogy of the antithesis required him to say, that we kneel "in the sacrament" to the thing signified; but changing his phrase, he saith, that we kneel "by the sacrament" to the thing signified. Now, if we kneel "by the sacrament to Christ," then we adore the sacrament as objectum ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... stands in the score as the antithesis of the "Counter-Charm" mentioned in the analysis of the prelude. It illustrates an ingenious constructive device. Desiring to send Gretel on an errand a moment later, the Witch ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... Greek architecture as in his own. The material—worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses of contemporary brick—produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome— is the very antithesis of the 'upright-and-horizontal' style which confronts him in ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... physical, as much as from the superphysical aspect the nerve-system represents the 'dry' part, and the metabolic system the 'moist' part of man's being. The same is true of the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world at both poles. Here we have the antithesis between the 'dry' onlooker-relationship of the intellect to the world, conceived as a mere picture whose essence remains outside the boundaries of the soul, and the 'moist' intermingling of the will-force with the actual forces ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Times, and have been the Wonder of Posterity." But when he doubts whether learning would have helped or "spoiled" them, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he is still poised on the horns of the typical neoclassical antithesis: that supposed enmity between reason, which was generally thought to create the form of the poem, and the emotions and imagination, which were considered largely responsible for ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now, the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and provide for one wife and three children, leaving on ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... introduced a Euphuist into his novel the Monastery, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. "Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... is a subject which naturally engages the attention of the novelist-critic. Romantic fiction, he thinks may have sufficient justification if it acts as an opiate for tired spirits. A significant antithesis between his point of view in this matter and the more common attitude taken by critics in his time is illustrated by two reviews of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, to which we may refer, though the book was later than those included in the Novelists' Library. Scott wrote in Blackwood's: "We ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... buoyant man, with a perpetual flow of healthy interests. Nothing that he said had the slightest distinction, and his power of expression was quite unequal to the evident vividness of his impressions. He had a taste for antithesis, but no grasp of synonyms. Every idea in Mr. Sandys' mind fell into halves, but the second clause was produced, not to express any new thought, but rather to echo the previous clause. He began at once on University topics. ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... creed, I shall maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion, as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the inspirer of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and patient investigation of truth by science, which seems the very antithesis of the mystic's swift certainty, may be fostered and nourished by that very spirit of reverence in which ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... in brief and intelligible terms these two spirits, the Hebraic and the Hellenic? One might use many figures of speech. Matthew Arnold's antithesis of Hellenic thinking to Hebraic doing needs much qualification. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that the Hebraic spirit is heat, the Hellenic spirit is light. Hebraism means moral fervour; Hellenism ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the other by extension without thought. These two are so alien and so incongruous, that neither can influence the other, or determine the other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation of Deity. (The doctrine of Occasional Causes.) This is Dualism,— that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter, which Des Cartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into philosophic significance, and which ever since has been the prevailing ontology of the Western world. So deeply has the thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him;'—'He gave him to be treated like a sinner, killed and cast out of his own vineyard by his husbandmen, that we might in him be made righteous like God.' As the antithesis stands it is rhetorically correct. But if the former half means, 'he made him to be treated as if he were a sinner,' then the latter half should, in logical precision, mean, 'that we might be treated ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the Portraits might form the subject of a separate study. Abjuring antithesis and epigram on the one hand, pomp and declamation on the other, it has yet none of the limpidity, the rapid flow, the incisive directness, of classical French prose. On the contrary, it is full of shadings and undulations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the philosophical term for the Primordial Male, of which Prakriti is the female antithesis. The god is combining Goethe and Swinburne: the "eternal feminine" and ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... for this; nevertheless, several tragedies may be connected together in one great cycle by means of a common destiny running through the actions of all. Hence the restriction to the number three admits of a satisfactory explanation. It is the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. The advantage of this conjunction was that, by the consideration of the connected fables, a more complete gratification was furnished than could possibly be obtained from a single action. The subjects of the three tragedies might be ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... once more with reason and persuasion. The people at large are in a frame to be reasoned with and persuaded; for if we can do anything within the bounds of reason to retain the South in the Union, it will be done. We will say of concession as the antithesis of secession, as was said of two other things: 'Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute.' I think that both sections need forgiveness of God, and of ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... almost among the last which any one would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his writing. For 'to prose', as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a 'proser' the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would have 'prosed' and been a 'proser', in the ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... little, and nourish the heart more, you would be less of a philosopher, and more of a—" The Parson had the word "Christian" at the tip of his tongue: he suppressed a word that, so spoken, would have been exceedingly irritating, and substituted, with inelegant antithesis, "and more of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... absurd; it does not involve a contradiction in terms. Moreover, it appears to have some relation to the admitted fact that the rule of a democracy may press very heavily upon some or all of its constituent members. Nevertheless, it is equally fallacious. It rests upon a false antithesis between the individual and the community to which he belongs. No such antithesis exists. "The individual," rightly says Mr. W. S. McKechnie, "apart from all relations to the community is a negation."[49] In similar strain, Mr. E. Barker contends that "a full ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... town, they had thus lived on from the age of fourteen, full of enthusiasm, devoured by a passion for literature and art. The magnificent scenarios devised by Victor Hugo, the gigantic phantasies which fought therein amidst a ceaseless cross-fire of antithesis, had at first transported them into the fulness of epic glory; gesticulating, watching the sun decline behind some ruins, seeing life pass by amidst all the superb but false glitter of a fifth act. Then Musset had come to unman them ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... criticism which need not be transcribed. Going on to the seventh stanza he says, "In the third line of it, she loses her antithesis. She must spoil her man, as well as make a poet out of him—spoil him as the reed is spoilt. Should we ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... a Browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own—that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... hidden enemies, even of his life. The tone is querulous, even peevish at times, and always the egotism and the pride persist, while he seems driven by the whip of desire for intellectual adventure into places where he shrinks from defending himself, or is unable to do so. The antithesis is complete and one is driven to believe that the terrible mutilation to which he had been subjected had broken down his personality and left him in all things less than man. His narrative is full of accusations against all manner of people, but ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... in seeing that Plato's divisions of knowledge are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis of sensible and intellectual which pervades the whole pre-Socratic philosophy; in which is implied also the opposition of the permanent and transient, of the universal and particular. But the age of philosophy in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... point of view of this issue the conditions which we have to deal with in this country are the absolute antithesis of those ruling in any of the countries and States which ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... life. Like Hegel, he saw in history the development of an Idea. He conceived the changes in the world as forming a logical development, in which one phase passes by revolution into another, which is its antithesis—a conception which gave to his views a certain hard abstractness, and a belief in revolution rather than evolution. But of Hegel's more definite doctrines Marx retained nothing after his youth. He was recognized as a brilliant student, and might ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... I thought you had passed the sophomoric stage, and it is a shameful waste of dialectic ammunition to throw your antithesis at me. According to your doctrine, America ought to buy up and import all the deformed unfortunates who are annually exposed in China, in order that our people should properly appreciate the superiority of sound limbs, and the value ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... freemasonry of his French diocese, which had caused his exile to Rome, the venerable man looked at Fanny's marriage from a supernatural standpoint. Many priests are thus capable of a naivete which, on careful analysis, is often in the right. But at the moment the antithesis between the authentic reality and that which they believe, constitutes an irony almost absurd. When he had baptized Fanny, the old Bishop of Clermont was possessed by a joy so deep that he said to her, to express to her the more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... denied that the academic expression "Literature" is an ill-favoured word. It involuntarily calls up the Antithesis of Life, of Personal Experience, of the Simple Expression of Thought and Feeling. With what scorn does Verlaine ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... over to joy and refreshment, and still another, the antithesis of the last, is the Intelligence office, where anxious ones inquire for and are told the latest news of this ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... United States upon its entrance into the war was the antithesis of this. For over a year, depression had been superseded by increased industry, high wages, and greater demand for labor. The country as measured by the ordinary financial signs, by its commerce, by its ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... and revered traditions and fables regarded for ages as divine truth. The critical spirit of the age, the inquiring condition of human thought, which instead of being discouraging is distinctly a mark of human growth, stands in bold antithesis to the dark ages, when speculation and progress were outlawed in many fields of research, and spirituality suffered an eclipse behind the pomp, form, and show of theology, when to a great degree mental stagnation prevailed. Yet this critical ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Denver did not belong to the florid, white-haired, hearty school of sea-dogs which is more common in works of fiction than in the Navy List. On the contrary, he was the representative of a much more common type which is the antithesis of the conventional sailor. He was a thin, hard-featured man, with an ascetic, acquiline cast of face, grizzled and hollow-cheeked, clean-shaven with the exception of the tiniest curved promontory of ash-colored whisker. An observer, accustomed to classify men, might have ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it is only surrounded, without separating us, would seem to me nothing but a charming antithesis to the sublime frivolity of our marriage. Why should we not take the harshest whim of chance for an excellent jest and a most frolicsome caprice, since we, like our love, are immortal? I can no longer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... enacting rules in literature and art, which make all the perfection and grace of the past so many impassable barriers to progress in future. Because the ancients kept to unity of idea in their groups, and attained to most beautiful results by doing so, shall no modern make an antithesis in marble? And why has not a man a right to dramatize in marble as well as on canvas, if he can produce a powerful and effective result by so doing? And even if by being melodramatic, as the terrible word is, he can shadow ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... [282] Instead of et, the author might have used neve (neu), since from the preceding clause we have to supply ne to et. This is not a very common mode of speaking; but it occurs most frequently when, after a negative clause, et introduces a kind of antithesis, and thus acquires the power of sed. [283] Et non corrects the untrue supposition, that there were no rebels except at Rome. In such a case we can neither use non without et, nor neque. See Zumpt, S 334. [284] 'If Caesar alone is unconcerned, it is more requisite ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... he dared; for, of course, he would have to join issue with Good Templars, Sons of Temperance, and all the fanatical anti-alcoholists. These zealous reformers are so blindly infatuated with their hatred for alcohol, that tea seems to them its natural antithesis, and they vaunt it as if it were a celestial boon. And such people are a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Fear. The Chinese, for instance, who take Death as such a light and trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from the thraldom of the ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... the sunshine barely freckled the cool, mossy knolls where the animals sought refuge from the summer heat of the open and smoothly-shaven lawn. Here and there, on the soft, green sward, was presented that vegetable antithesis, a circlet of martinet poplars standing vis-a-vis to a clump of willows whose long hair threw quivering, fringy shadows when the slanting rays of dying sunlight burnished the white and purple petals nestling among the clover tufts. Rustic seats of bark, cane and metal ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... be developed if each child works independently?" We must therefore conclude that this system of regimentation in which the children do everything at the same moment, even to visiting the lavatory, is supposed to develop the social sentiment. The society of the child is therefore the antithesis of adult society, where sociability implies a free and well-bred interchange of courtesies and mutual aid, although each individual attends to his own business; in the society of the child it implies identity of physical attitudes and uniformity of collective actions, together with a total disregard ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the evolution of the stars, to the use of the test tube and the balance by the chemist, of the galvanometer by the physicist. All these are unnatural instruments used to torture Nature's secrets from her. I venture to think that the real antithesis is not between unnatural and natural treatment of Nature, but rather between controlled or verifiable data on the one hand, and ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... York's part in the convention proved perfunctory. Beyond the sound of its music and the tread of its marchers neither applause nor good will encouraged its candidate. Reformers regarded Conkling as the antithesis of Bristow, supporters of Morton jealously scowled at his rivalry, and the friends of Blaine resented his attitude toward their favourite. Only Hayes's little band of expectant backers, hoping eventually to capture the New York delegation, gracefully accorded him generous recognition.[1490] Conkling's ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... present day, whose elegant taste and whose profound acquaintance with the writers of this and the following reign entitle him to be heard with deference, has favored us with his opinion of Euphues in these words. "This production is a tissue of antithesis and alliteration, and therefore justly entitled to the appellation of affected; but we cannot with Berkenhout consider it as a most contemptible piece of nonsense[90]. The moral is uniformly good; ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... unusual epithet "civil," here applied to night, at once assured me of the accuracy of the proposed reading, it having evidently suggested itself as the antithesis of "rude" just before applied to day; the civil, accommodating, concealing night being thus contrasted with the unaccommodating, revealing day. It is to be remarked, moreover, that as this epithet civil is, through its ordinary signification, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We are so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural systems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearer life, nearer the winged ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... approached one another, when Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their dissidence was increasing and likely ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... always regarded it as a matter of course that the man she would fall in love with would be one in thorough sympathy with her ideas and who would help her realize her dream. And here she had fallen in love with that dreamed-of man's exact antithesis! ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... They (phenomena) are not phantoms or illusions, nor are they masks of a back-lying reality which is trying to peer through them." "The antithesis," he continues,[FN205] "of phenomena and noumena rests on the fancy that there is something that rests behind phenomena which we ought to perceive but cannot, because the masking phenomena thrusts itself between the reality and us." Just so far we agree with Bowne, but ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... his economy of the shield is masterly. It is occupied at every angle, but nowhere crowded. The spaces which are left vacant are deliberately contrived to enhance the effect of the figure. It is the antithesis of the Marzocco.[87] The sculptor must have seen lions, but the Marzocco is not treated in a heraldic spirit, although it holds the heraldic emblem of Florence, the fleur de lys florencee. Physically it is unsuccessful, for it has no spring, there is very little muscle in the thick ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... village or town. Their only dogma is the unity and immeasurable sanctity of life. In practice they are Christian, yet wholly free from the asceticism of modern Christianity. Their attitude in art is as remote as possible from, it is indeed the very antithesis to, the aesthetic exclusiveness of the close of last century. Like St. Peter, the Unanimists have seen a sheet let down and heard a voice from heaven saying: "Call thou nothing ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... to say, but Nellie was from the West, where courage and freshness of vision are regarded as the antithesis of tact and diplomacy. Tact calls for tact. The diplomatist is powerless if you begin shooting at him. Nellie did not work this out for herself; she merely wanted to put him in a corner where he would have to stand and get it ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... inspiration and a permeating unity. Most of us find a large play for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or the struggles of politics. The life of the mind was opened to the Middle Ages by the hands of the Church. We may almost say that there was an exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But it is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is curiously knit together by the economic ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... one of our old divines, with the quaintness characteristic of his day, 'resemble the two sons of the patriarch; Reason is the firstborn, but Faith inherits the blessing. The image is ingenious, and the antithesis striking; but nevertheless the sentiment is far from just. It is hardly right to represent Faith as younger than reason: the fact undoubtedly being, that human creatures trust and believe, long before they reason or know. But the truth is, that both reason ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... is one of the most important of the features which give value and interest to the work, that in frequent instances the material has been presented precisely as it came to hand; a felicitous or humorous turn of a sentence, a pointed antithesis, a happy grouping of historic incidents, or a vigorous clinching of manifold thoughts in a single expression, has been happily preserved where by others it might have been ejected, or marred in the changing, for the sake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... weight that in the history of thought it must be assigned a place above all others, is that of Kant in his "Kritik." Here we find two opposing propositions—the thesis that the universe occupies only a finite space and is of finite duration; the antithesis that it is infinite both as regards extent in space and duration in time. Both of these opposing propositions are shown to admit of demonstration with equal force, not directly, but by the methods of reductio ad absurdum. The difficulty, discussed by Kant, was more tersely expressed ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... further inroads into nature, and never in any other way. Dr. Bushnell, with the unerring instinct of a discoverer, struck this path and kept it to the end. At the bottom of all his work lies a profound sense of nature, of its meaning and force in the realm of the spirit. He did not deny a certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural, but he so defined the latter that the two could be embraced in the one category of nature when viewed as the ascertained order of God in creation. The supernatural is simply the realm of freedom, and it is as natural as the physical realm of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... knew in the days before they 'assumed the purple.' I am reading Gibbon, and see nothing but this d—-d colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (vide Coleridge and Eastlake's Goethe)—even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (vide Coleridge, etc.) Is this ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... soldiers in ordinary regiments; no professional soldier ever had. But he had a deep distrust of a purely Irish military organization under Irish control. At the back of Lord Kitchener's mind was the determination "I will not arm enemies." This was the very negation and the antithesis of the second view, which ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck the blow afar from its body." This is mentioned quite as an every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped upon Demosthenes. /3/ As late as the second century after Christ the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum. /4/ Plutarch attributes the institution ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... repulsion of certain bodies by the poles of a magnet, is to be ranged as a polar force, beside that of magnetism; or as an unpolar force, beside that of gravitation. When a cylinder of soft iron is placed within a wire helix, and surrounded by an electric current, the antithesis of its two ends, or, in other words, its polar excitation, is at once manifested by its action upon a magnetic needle; and it may be asked why a cylinder of bismuth may not be substituted for the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... itself. Our author is evidently a great admirer of Victor Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally with colons, he never becomes absurd, which the other is constantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
