"Contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between acetylene and copper (or its compounds), and also the character of the product, or products, obtained have been studied by numerous investigators; but their results have been inconclusive and sometimes rather contradictory, so that it can hardly be said that the conditions which determine or preclude the formation of an explosive compound and the composition of the explosive compound are yet known with certainty. Copper is a metal which yields two series ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... know that I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... to think of the Tannhauser, after hearing these five contradictory opinions? For my own part I rather thought the cigars were a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... dignity of this rigourous simplicity, there were about Hilma small contradictory suggestions of feminine daintiness, charming beyond words. Even Annixter could not help noticing that her feet were narrow and slender, and that the little steel buckles of her low shoes were polished bright, and that her fingertips and nails were ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... hearing of the death and of the ruin of M. de Nailles, was divided by two contradictory feelings. She clearly saw the hand of Providence in what had happened: her son was in the squadron on its way to attack Formosa; he was in peril from the climate, in peril from Chinese bullets, and assuredly those ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... them. The more the Government civilizes them and developes the country, the less plentiful the game becomes, and the less profit the Company can make. Therefore it is that I say, the interests of the Company and those of the Government are contradictory. The former wants no civilization, plenty of game, and Indians that will hunt all the year around. The latter require agriculture, the soil to be taken from the wild state, the rays of faith and instruction to penetrate ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... attestation of His love, as I need not remind you. I suppose there is nothing more striking in the whole wonderful and unique picture of Jesus Christ drawn in the Gospels than the way in which two things, which we so often fancy to be contradictory, blend in the most beautiful harmony in Him—viz. infinite tenderness and absolute condemnation of transgression. To me the fact that these two characteristics are displayed in perfect harmony in the life of Jesus Christ as written in these Gospels, is no small argument for believing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that evil should exist, and should not exist, are contradictory opposites. But God does not will that evil should not exist; otherwise, since various evils do exist, God's will would not always be fulfilled. Therefore God ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... within the faculty rather than by wise and disinterested educators studying the merits of the case. But in large part these differences are the expression of different purposes and practical needs in planning a college curriculum, and are neither quite indefensible nor necessarily contradictory in pedagogic theory. In the small college with a nearly uniform curriculum and with limited means, a general course is perhaps best planned for the senior year, or in the junior year if there is an opportunity given to the student to do some more advanced work the year following. At the other ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... who is a true woman is a fit peer for a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable of much controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any way tenable) is concerned; but then the plain fact is that my Uncle Roland was as eccentric and contradictory a gentleman—as—as—why, as you and I are, if we once venture to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mouth for a few months, thy eyes would get sound again!' The 'complainant' did not even return thanks for this medical counsel, but sipped his toddy in silence, and soon after left the room, 'uttering never a word.' . . . THERE have been various surmises, and sundry contradictory statements, in relation to the work superscribed 'Count D'Orsay on Etiquette,' which we noticed at some length in our December issue. Mr. WILLIS, of the 'New Mirror' weekly journal, seems to question its having been written ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... judge at the Chamber of Commerce experienced that day the satisfaction that must come of having done a malignant good action. Beneficence has so many aspects in Paris that this contradictory expression really represents one of them. The Livonian being fairly entangled in the toils of commercial procedure, the point was to obtain payment; for the illustrious tradesman looked on Wenceslas as a swindler. Feeling, sincerity, poetry, were in his eyes mere ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... they may lead to if carried to excess, both these doctrines render, as a whole, most important service. It is no bad thing that these contradictory tendencies should subsist, for this variety in the conception of phenomena gives to actual science a character of intense life and of veritable youth, capable of impassioned efforts towards the truth. Spectators who see such moving and varied pictures passing before them, experience the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... villages around the base of the East Mesa, other migratory bands of Hopituh had begun to arrive on the Middle Mesa. As already said, it is admitted that the Snake were the first occupants of this region, but beyond that fact the traditions are contradictory and confused. It is probable, however, that not long after the arrival of the Horn, the Squash people came from the south and built a village on the Middle Mesa, the ruin of which is called Chukubi. It is on the edge ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... religion that is wholly natural. In so far as it professes to be revealed, it of course professes to be infallible; but if the revealed part be in the first place hard to distinguish, and in the second place hard to understand—if it may mean many things, and many of those things contradictory—it might just as well have been never made at all. To make it in any sense an infallible revelation, or in other words a revelation at all, to us, we need a power to interpret the testament that shall have equal authority with that ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Justinian determined to unite in one body all the rules of law, whatever may have been their origin, and in the year 528, appointed ten jurisconsults, among whom was the celebrated Tribonian, to select and arrange the imperial constitutions, leaving out what was obsolete or useless or contradictory, and to make such alterations as the circumstances required. This was called the Code, divided into twelve books, and comprising the constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. This was published in fourteen months ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of Adam who was the son of God, as the Eternal 'Word' who 'was with God,' and entered into history and time when He 'became flesh.' We must take all these points of view together if we would understand any of them, for they are not contradictory, but complementary. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you take the whole man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if there be one paper that has a bearing in the case amissing out of your green bag, (which has happened only too often,) the evidence will be imperfect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Buddha lived and died a Hindu, and the members of that sect still claim that he was the greatest, the wisest and the best of all Brahmins. No two religions are so contradictory and incompatible as that taught by Buddha and the modern teachings of the Brahmins. The underlying principles of Buddha's faith are love, charity, self-sacrifice, unselfishness, universal brotherhood and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... his position solely to the fact that he belonged to the lower class, and was not, like Biron and the other commanders-in-chief, of good family. Remaining always at a distance from the scene of operations, he confused the generals of divisions by contradictory orders, which vied with each other in ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... very remarkable that Walter Scott, a Tory to the soul, should, by his apparently contradictory yet still most consistent love of the outre, have had a keen amateur sympathy for outlaws. It is much more remarkable, however, that, still retaining his faith in king and nobles, Church and State, he should have pushed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to make so loud a report," said I, smiling; "but I protest against your doctrine. Why, according to that, an author is accountable for all the opinions of his dramatis personae, however absurd and contradictory they ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... of the East nor of the West but rather international in its universality, yet India is specially fitted to make great contributions. {FN8-5} The burning Indian imagination, which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is held in check by the habit of concentration. This restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... night in my vision, Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Newfoundland, which newly acquired territory was thenceforth designated Norumbega or New France. All such original annexations, whether pretended or real, were in the circumstances extremely ill-defined; and maps of the time were frequently vague, confusing, and contradictory. Cartier, on his way to sow the seeds of a French Empire in North America, sailed past the coast (1534), and on his second voyage (1535) foregathered with Roberval in the roadstead of St. John's. Still earlier, in 1527, a voyage was made to the island by John Rut, with ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... Finnish airfield. It is now known definitely that an ostensibly ill member of their group who was put aboard their plane in a stretcher was in reality a young American officer. Among other things, this explains the eighteen contradictory Five Year Plans announced by Peiping this week. CIA says they are going the way of the ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... parted. He sighed—the cheerful man sighed, as he opened the door for me. Women are contradictory creatures. That sigh affected me more than all his arguments. I felt myself blush for my own head-strong resistance to him as I took my leave and turned away into ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... conditions the barometer generally stayed quite low. It fell as far as 73.5 centimeters. Our compass indications no longer offered any guarantees. The deranged needles would mark contradictory directions as we approached the southern magnetic pole, which doesn't coincide with the South Pole proper. In fact, according to the astronomer Hansteen, this magnetic pole is located fairly close to latitude 70 degrees and ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... estimate the "balance of criminality." Right is not all on one side—it never is. But the broad issue is clear and plain. And only those concerned with the name rather than the thing, with nominal and verbal consistency rather than realities, will see anything paradoxical or contradictory in Pacifist approval of Christian resistance to the use of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... the recreation hour at "Miss Elkins' Finishing School," which was Polly's present abode, there had been a sudden discussion of plans for the future. And Polly, partly because she was in a contradictory mood and partly because she really wished it to be known, had boldly announced herself as poor as a church mouse with no chance of not starving to death in the future unless she could learn ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... this sounds impossible and contradictory. But it is the facts that contradict themselves. It seems clear that the deceased did not commit suicide. It seems equally clear that the deceased was not murdered. There is nothing for it, therefore, gentlemen, but to return a verdict tantamount to ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... falling into another like fault: that the Duke of Albemarle seems to be able to answer them; but he thinks that the Duke of Albemarle and the Prince are contented to let their Narratives sleep, they being not only contradictory in some things (as he observed about the business of the Duke of Albemarle's being to follow the Prince upon dividing the fleete, in case the enemy come out), but neither of them to be maintained in others. That the business the other night of my Lord Anglesey at the Council was happily ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... you would not act as his counsel?" I asked, for the late pilot's statements seemed to be contradictory. ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... victim as the draught of health; but yet he may be reached by circumstances—he may be proved to have bought, or to have made the poison; to have rinsed the bottle at a suspicious moment; to have given false and contradictory accounts; and to have a deep interest in the attainment of the object. What security should we have for our habitations against the midnight burglar, who breaks into your house and steals your property, without disturbing your rest or that of ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... inequalities to him, and there was no rod so smooth that he could not find a knot in it, and shew how it might be got rid of. The other of the two was prompt in reply, and never for the sake of subterfuge avoided a question that was proposed; but he would choose the contradictory side, or by multiplicity of words would show that a simple answer could not be given. In all questions, therefore, he was subtle and profuse, whilst the other in his answer was perspicuous, brief, and to the point If two such characters could ever have ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... abuse carries with it its own remedy or palliation. Thus the excess of crude and hasty criticism, which has of late prevailed throughout the literary world, and threatened to overrun our country, begins to produce its own antidote. Where there is a multiplicity of contradictory paths, a man must make his choice; in so doing, he has to exercise his judgment, and that is one great step to mental independence. He begins to doubt all, where all differ, and but one can be in the right. He is driven to trust to his own discernment, and his natural ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... not swear; into that which is completely abolished, such as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, being tainted with unrighteousness, and having the same work of unrighteousness, and these are taken away by the Saviour because contradictory (for those things which are contradictory are mutually destructive), "For I say unto you that ye in no wise resist evil, but if any one smite thee turn to him the other cheek also;" and into that part which is changed and converted from that which is bodily into that which ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Reform: it will not have revolution: it will destroy political abuses: it will not suffer the rights of property to be assailed: it will preserve, in spite of themselves, those who are assailing it, from the right and from the left, with contradictory accusations: it will be a daysman between them: it will lay its hand upon them both: it will not suffer them to tear each other in pieces. While that great party continues unbroken, as it now is unbroken, I shall not relinquish the hope that this great contest may be conducted, by lawful means, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Henrietta's statements and arguments either way. They were self-contradictory. Still, whose ever the fault, that the young man Wace should be unhappy on her account, should think she—Damaris—had behaved heartlessly to him, was quite dreadful. Humiliating too—false conscience again gnawing. Had she really contracted a debt towards ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... as clearly and lucidly presented by Frederick Engels, in his support of Morgan's excellent and fundamental work,—a mass of light is shed upon hitherto unintelligible, partly seemingly contradictory phenomena in the life of the races and tribes of both high and low degree of culture. Only now do we gain an insight into the structure that human society raised in the course of time. According thereto, our former views of marriage, the family, the community, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... thing whatever as annihilated;—but if the annihilation of anything by the mind is an operation whose mechanism implies that it works on a part of the whole, and not on the whole itself, then the extension of such an operation to the totality of things becomes self-contradictory and absurd, and the idea of an annihilation of everything presents the same character as that of a square circle: it is not an idea, it is only a word. So let us examine more closely the mechanism ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... form of government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in a literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to discover how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free. Liberty commensurate and identical with Order,—this is the only reality of government and politics. How shall this absolute liberty, synonymous with order, be brought about? ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... our purpose, that these propositions be capable of proof, or even that, by arguments drawn from the light of nature, they can be made out to be probable; it is enough that we are able to say concerning them, that they are not so violently improbable, so contradictory to what we already believe of the divine power and character, that either the propositions themselves, or facts strictly connected with the propositions (and therefore no further improbable than they are improbable), ought ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... I was surprised to find it contain a singular mixture of contradictory principles, and in the same breath, the sentiments of a philosopher and of a colonist; of an advocate for the Negroes, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... their speaking out. But Dr. Mayhew did not conceal or disguise his sentiments on this point any more than on others, such as the peculiar tenets of Calvinism. He explicitly and boldly declared the doctrine irrational, unscriptural, and directly contradictory."[20] He taught the strict unity of God as early as 1753, "in the most unequivocal and plain manner, in his sermons of that year."[21] What most excited comment and objection was that, in a foot-note to the volume of his sermons published in 1755, Mayhew said that a Catholic Council had elevated ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the bare facts of the affair—the facts which came to light. Contradictory opinions as to whether there had been a blunder were freely expressed. On the conflicting theories advanced I refrain from commenting. It did not, for the moment, concern the people at large upon whose shoulders the blame rested. Twenty-four dead! and Scott-Turner one of them. Seventeen ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... day which was to precede the combat of the Caesar with the Count of Paris, there were current through the city of Constantinople the most contradictory, and at the same time the most terrific reports. Privy conspiracy, it was alleged, was on the very eve of breaking out; open war, it was reported by others, was about to shake her banners over the devoted city; the precise cause was not agreed upon, any more than the nature of the enemy. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... mass of my profession. A dream is the reproduction, in the sleeping state of the brain, of images and impressions produced on it in the waking state; and this reproduction is more or less involved, imperfect, or contradictory, as the action of certain faculties in the dreamer is controlled more or less completely by the influence of sleep. Without inquiring further into this latter part of the subject—a very curious and interesting part of it—let us take the theory, roughly and generally, as I have just stated ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... requires a Head; and when an attempt was made to apply the heterogeneous qualities and contradictory powers of the gods to the regulation of society—when it was necessary to find in an Olympus filled with quarrels and scandals, a steady Power capable of directing the destinies of a great people toward a single aim—men were again forced to recompose the fractioned Unity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gossip often gave rise to fatal blunders, like those relating to the birth of Agathe and that of Max. It is not easy for the community of a country town to disentangle the truth from the mass of conjecture and contradictory reports to which a single fact gives rise. The provinces insist—as in former days the politicians of the little Provence at the Tuileries insisted—on full explanations, and they usually end by knowing everything. But each person clings to the version of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... see one of those complex and contradictory natures which are the despair of the biographer. If the writer be an admirer of Bacon, he finds too much that he must excuse or pass over in silence; and if he takes his stand on the law to condemn the avarice and dishonesty of his subject, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... then, is to us for the most part an open book. Nevertheless, there are many obscure passages in it, and there remain many questions not to be answered with certainty, the first of which is as to the date of his birth. His own statements on this subject are contradictory, and the original records are lost. But it seems probable that he was born on the thirteenth of December, 1797, the eldest child of Jewish parents recently domiciled at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was incomprehensible. Either side was championed here by millions living among us who were of European birth. Their contradictory accusations threw our thought into disarray, and in the first chaotic days we could see no clear issue that affected our national policy. There was not direct assault on our rights. It seemed at first to most of us a purely European dispute, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... on the other side. The mountain must be shamming now, for although it looks so far off, it yet shows a most contradictory clearness—not only ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... that though I had hitherto talked of a friend, I myself was the happy man. My first name was Francis as well as his; and I had found Clara so gentle, so confiding, so flatteringly cordial in her intercourse with me, that, once within my power, and prevented from receding by shame, and a thousand contradictory feelings, I had, with the vanity of an amoureux de seize ans, the confidence to believe I could reconcile the fair ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Rosville she was reading "Paradise Lost," and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book. She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness. Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well. She remembered people's ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered dates and suggested agreeable occupations—gave ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... had lost that look of mysterious, indefinable reproach. It was as if the beauty of the land, seeking after the heart that should love it, was appeased and reconciled. He could hear the lyric soul of things most clearly and unmistakably, and it was singing a new song. A strange, double-burdened contradictory song. There was sorrow in it, such sorrow as her children drink from the breast of the tragic earth; and through it all and over it the laughter as of some ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... close in behind. Sympathy in the grandstand was beginning to turn; everybody appreciates pluck. The spectators, however, knew him to be a novice, and many supposed that he had lost his head; so when he passed the grandstand on the first lap, any amount of contradictory advice ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... oracle in Ion, or, to quote another instance, his explanation of the phantom in Helen, be right or wrong, no one can deny that what he wrote is alive with interest. On this point, the testimony of his pupils, albeit in some respects contradictory, is conclusive. One of them (Mr. Marsh) says: "I was usually convinced by everything," whilst another (Mr. J.R.M. Butler) says: "I don't think we believed very much what he said; he always said he was as likely to be wrong as right. But he made all classics so ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... not contradictory of equal probability & with equal evidence, if we believe one we must believe ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... strikingly amiable as Smollett's masterpiece only because it is not so striking in any of its excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions. If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no longer ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... had neither injured nor insulted, honoured him with the title of Pater Patriae. This was inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... discoveries. When men of this character were informed by those to whom they were accustomed to look up as teachers in religious matters, that the discoveries, of the truth of which they were so firmly convinced, and in which they took such justifiable pride, were contradictory to the teaching of the Bible, they were placed in a position of extreme difficulty. For this statement was, in fact, a demand made upon them that they should give up these discoveries as erroneous, or else renounce ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... questions appeared to embarrass the natives greatly. All their accounts were contradictory: one giving me to understand that Toby would be with me in a very short time; another that he did not know where he was; while a third, violently inveighing, against him, assured me that he had stolen away, and ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... really many miles away near Murviedro. Other dragoons were induced to feign desertion, while some permitted themselves to be taken prisoners, and as each vied with the others in the extravagance of his false information, the Spanish generals were utterly bewildered by the contradictory nature of ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... aroused George's antipathy, because he seemed to detect antipathy in them—not against himself but against the male in him. These women, though by their glances they largely mistrusted and despised each other, had the air of having combined sexually against a whole sex. The situation was very contradictory. They had beautified and ornamented themselves in order to attract a whole sex, and yet they appeared to resent the necessity and instinct to attract. They submitted with a secret repugnance to the mysterious and supreme bond which kept the sexes inexorably together. And while stooping to ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... meaning. When Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same way—frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they were ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... of the barrel-organ's one leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they cursed Jimmy with ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... servants and her friends in the neighborhood gave very contradictory accounts concerning the amount, and Victoria openly avowed ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... said Durtal, who thought over again the contradictory declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most attractive and the most atrocious life; "the fact is that the good God deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while they seek hell there. I have myself ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... it that reason can accept an imagination that makes what in a cold light she considers her enemy, appear her friend? All things impress the mind with two contradictory notions—their actual condition and their perfection. Even the worst of its kind impresses on us an idea of what the best would be, or we could not know it for the worst. Reason, then, seizes on this aspect of things which suggests their perfection, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... much may be excused him on account of his youth. It is difficult to form an opinion of his style; the epithets, gravis, vehemens, exilis (which apply rather to his oratory than to his poetry), seem contradictory; the last strikes us as the most discriminating. Besides short elegies like those of Catullus, he wrote an epic called Io, as well as lampoons against Pompey and other leading men. We possess ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... been seen alive by twelve of his most intimate friends, who were the heads of the party who had believed that the Marquis of Argyle would fulfill the prophecies aforesaid, and not content with receiving this contradictory story with avidity themselves, (which after all might have been invented as a salvo for his non-fulfillment or postponing the fulfillment of these prophecies, by submitting to be decapitated) insisted that ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... just what his thoughts were at that particular moment; probably because they were so many and so contradictory and confusing. Whether from this uncertainty of mind; from a habit of depending upon his young foreman, or because of that something, which Phil and the stranger seemed to have in common, he shifted the whole matter by saying, "It's up to Phil here. He's ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... all records of these campaigns are fragmentary, confused, contradictory. The Normans fought, and had no time to write history. The English, beaten and crushed, died and left no sign. The only chroniclers of the time are monks. And little could Ordericus Vitalis, or Florence of Worcester, or he of Peterborough, faithful as he was, who filled up the sad pages of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... reconciliation—perhaps this, perhaps that, but certainly somewhat. So he goes straight on the road marked for him, quite sure that it will not end in a blind alley, from which there is no exit. That is the very climax of faith—to trust God so absolutely, even when His ways seem contradictory, as to be more willing to believe apparent impossibilities than to doubt Him, and to be therefore ready for the hardest trial of obedience. We, too, have sometimes to take courses which seem to annihilate the hope and aims of a life. The lesson for us is to go straight on the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the present grace of the coming Lord. 'Our Lord cometh. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.' These two things are not contradictory, but we often deal with them as if they were. And some men lay hold of the one side of the antithesis, and some men lay hold of the other, and rend them apart, and make antagonistic theories of Christianity out of them. But the real doctrine puts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... electric bodies. I say apparently so, because the air seems to be in a great measure concerned in those experiments, and perhaps the whole effect may be produced by that surrounding medium. But, though the irregular, contradictory, and unaccountable effects observed in these experiments do not as yet furnish any satisfactory theory, and though much is to be attributed to the circumambient air, yet the metallic substances themselves seem to ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... stop to discuss, that it is impossible for Christianity at that early date to have found its way to this distant island, beyond the boundary of the world. An argument on a different plane is (I.), the undoubtedly contradictory and inconsistent character of the Life. It is easy however to exaggerate the importance of this point. Modern critical methods were undreamed of in the days of our hagiographer, who wrote, moreover, for edification only in a credulous age. ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... have been written on the subject, both in this country and on the continent; but it cannot be said that the result has been eminently satisfactory. When carefully inquired into, it has been found that the most contradictory state of things has been in existence. It is not always to the strong that long life is given, nor is such, as often supposed, hereditary. Riches and the comforts and luxuries they place at man's disposal no more conduce to long life than poverty. Even moderation and temperance, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... to its further sectionalization and destruction. Philadelphia called together the heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, to establish a broader and juster nationality. Such a fusion of contradictory elements was never witnessed in this country before since the times of the Revolution. Nor could it happen now save under a great emergency, and from a controlling necessity. Such a combination of the material and mental forces of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... depravity, have seldom been surpassed, even in California. Before proceeding to relate in detail the late transactions, allow me to remark that the wonderful narrative of Parker excited throughout this county sentiments of the most profound and contradictory character. I, for one, halted between two opinions—horror and incredulity; and nothing but subsequent events could have fully satisfied me of the unquestionable veracity of your San Francisco correspondent, and the scientific authenticity of ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... uniforms, with grimy hands and faces, and boots knee-deep in stains of mud, stood about or sat in the empty carts, talking, gesticulating, giving sundry, confused and contradictory accounts of the great battle—describing Napoleon's decisive victory—Wellington's rout—the prolonged absence of Bluecher and the Prussians, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... requirements has resulted, according to a common expression, in a compromise, the most dubious of all military solutions,—giving something to all, and all to none,—so preparation for war involves many conditions, often contradictory one to another, at times almost irreconcilable. To satisfy all of these passes the ingenuity of the national Treasury, powerless to give the whole of what is demanded by the representatives of the different elements, which, in duly ordered proportion, constitute a complete scheme of national ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... writings also begin with this. As the Koran is the direct word of God, any statement in it has the unquestioned and complete force of law. On some points, however, separate utterances in the work itself are contradictory, and the necessity then arises of determining which is the later and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... the opposite direction, and give it nothing in respect to which it showed the slightest temper. The practical result was that the boy was committed to the care of Maude, whom both agreed in trusting, with the most contradictory orders concerning his training. Maude followed the dictates of her own common sense, and implicitly obeyed the commands of neither of the rival authorities; but as little Richard throve well under her care, she was never called to ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Romanists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Restorationists, Quakers, Arians, Unitarians, etc., etc. We have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, but various opinions. All these persons, of so many and contradictory opinions, weekly meet around our Lord's table in hundreds of churches all over the land. Our bond of union is faith in the slain Messiah, in his death for our sins and his ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... time extremely distracted by the various and contradictory opinions of their preachers; and as they were totally incapable of judging of the force of arguments adduced on one side or the other, but conceived that everything spoken from the pulpit was of equal authority, great confusion and perplexity of mind ensued. In order to "tune the pulpits" and ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... everywhere, but more especially dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the classic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine; they perished by the sword or at ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... carries in it all the internal marks of TRUTH. When this is admitted, we must also admit the propriety of bringing in these external evidences as auxiliaries; and when we find that they also, instead of being contradictory to, are perfectly consistent with the supposed truth, they add not a little to the weight of testimony. Hence we find that our faith is strengthened by the consideration of circumstances, which ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... king's jester, who laughs at the king as well as all his subjects. But am I not nearer Truth for not being caged in a creed or a clan? Who dares to think Truth frozen—on this phantasmagorical planet, that whirls in beginningless time through endless space! Let us trust, for the honor of God, that the contradictory creeds for which men have died are all true. Perhaps humor—your right Hegelian touchstone to which everything yields up its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction—gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... syllogism.' Possibly not; but yet there can be no safety in an illogical position, and one's chances of snug quarters in eternity cannot surely be bettered by our believing at one and the same moment of time self-contradictory propositions. ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... case which the English make the immediate casus belli—the murder of Richardson—there are contradictory statements; it is denied by the Japanese that he and his party turned back to make way for the prince of Satzuma's cortege; they say, on the contrary, that he was killed only after obstinate persistence in dashing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... old children since the time of its creator, William of Orange. It is a feature of the Dutch style of landscape gardening imprinted by him upon the Hampton grounds. He failed to impress a like stamp upon that chaos of queer, shapeless and contradictory means to beneficent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... enough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that, while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Which being so, the distaste of readers to the contrary sort in books, can hardly arise from any sense of their untrueness. It ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... and obtaining as much information as I was able, I found little solidity and certainty on the subject; which, joined to the opinion of some prudent and respectable persons whom I consulted, had induced me to give up my design entirely, and to renounce laboring on a subject which is so contradictory, and embraces so ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... difficult one. The Five Nations would fain have remained neutral, and let the European rivals fight it out; but, on account of their local position, they could not. The exactions and lies of the Albany traders, the frauds of land-speculators, the contradictory action of the different provincial governments, joined to English weakness and mismanagement in the last war, all conspired to alienate them and to aid the efforts of the French agents, who cajoled and threatened them by turns. But for Johnson ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... of the fabulous era of Grecian history, we now enter upon a period when the crude fictions of more than mortal heroes begin to give place to the realities of human existence; but still the vague, disputed, and often contradictory annals on which we are obliged to rely shed only an uncertain light around us; and even what we can gather as the most reliable cannot be taken wholly ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... with Elizabeth Hunter and called for much perplexed introspection. It had been a perplexing day. There was no reason that she could assign for her contradictory actions. She found herself even softened toward John and able to enter into his attempt to be sociable after Silas's departure. He seemed to be anxious to set himself before her in a kindlier light ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... the goods of fortune:—still tost on the billows of passion, hurried from care to care the whole time of our existence here, is one continued scene of restlessness and variated disquiet.—Strange propensity in man!—even nature in us seems contradictory to herself!—we wish long life, yet shorten it by our own anxieties;—nothing is so dreadful as death, yet we hasten his approach by our intemperance and irregularity, and, what is more, we know all this, yet still run on in the ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... always ready to extol others, and was never heard to speak ill of anybody under the sun, appears to some the very crown of excellence. But what is the panegyric worth that has no discrimination, that finds any mortal faultless, or bestows on the varying and contradictory behaviors of men an equal meed? To what does universal commendation amount more than universal indifference? What value do we put on the lavish regard which is not individual, or founded on any intelligent appreciation of its object, but scattered blindly abroad ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... went into the Land Court, Mr. Strachan buying part of the estate for L2,765. It was easy enough to buy, and even to pay, but to get possession was quite another thing. Precise information is difficult to get, for while some decline to say a word, others are mutually contradictory, and a State Commission would hardly sift truth from the confusing mass of details, denials, assertions, and counter-assertions. This much is clear enough. A tenant named Ruane was required to leave a house, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... from Cologne to Ostend, the idea suddenly occurred to me to spend one night at Bruges, and make inquiries into your condition—and that of Mr. Foster. You know the papers have been publishing the most contradictory accounts." ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... suggestion in silence, a silence which left his audience uncertain how deeply he resented it. Indeed, they were painfully uncertain, and showed it. Bits of advice reached the Judge's ears, contradictory, though much of it sound, but he took no notice of it. He only smiled his patient and wistful smile and waited, like a man who knew ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... place to me, Wynnie," he said, when I had ended. "I must go and see her. I have a suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that she is one whose acquaintance ought to be cultivated at any cost. There is some grand explanation of all this contradictory strangeness." ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... afterward that she must have had two simultaneous and contradictory ideas as to who he was. She knew,—she must have known, instantly—that he was Anthony March, but his uniform suggested Rush and drew her over toward him just as though she had actually believed him to be her brother. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... difficulty boldly, and say—"X Y and Z certainly lie within the circle, but I believe they lie without it. How this should be, I know not. I merely state what I conceive to be the fact. The modus operandi is beyond my comprehension." This man's answer is contradictory, and will never do. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... twelve to be accounted for; these fell on the sheds themselves, one greatly damaging a Zeppelin, the other destroying the gas-works, which exploded and sent up gigantic flames in the sky. The bombs made the town tremble; the military officers lost their heads and gave contradictory orders to the troops. The mitrailleuse section, however, kept cool, and fired from 200 to 250 shots before Squadron Commander Briggs was brought down. The three British biplanes crossed, recrossed, and circled at such a speed over Friedrichshafen that many onlookers thought there were ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... so exceeding difficult that very few Persons in an Assembly are capable of it; and when they attempt it, if their Thoughts should be enquir'd one by one, you would find very various, wretched, and contradictory Meanings put upon the Words of the Hebrew Psalmist, and all for want of an Evangelical Translation of him. 'Tis very obvious and common to observe that Persons of Seriousness and Judgment that consider what they sing, are often forced to break off in ...
— A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody • Isaac Watts
... British Empire, was at the height of his own and his country's glory. He summarized the new England of the Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... time he was influenced by all these contradictory views, but presently his strong common sense asserted itself, and he began to laugh at the fallacies which first of all fascinated him. Nevertheless the life of Brunford influenced him greatly, and his whole ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... religious symbolism of the peoples of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... disagreeable expression which they occasionally assumed, were frequently so much at variance with his words, that it was an utter impossibility to draw anything like a certain inference from them. On the discovery of Fenton, the old man's face went through a variety of contradictory expressions. Sometimes he seemed elated—triumphant, sometimes depressed and anxious, and occasionally angry, or excited by a feeling that was altogether unintelligible. He often turned his eye upon Fenton, as if he had discovered some precious treasure, then ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory feelings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's Park, her husband's chivalry ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
