"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of any wild-blooded vagabond male. Here in his idea, this other side of a human paradox seemed possible to answer, too. You could go anywhere. Home went with you. Your friends could ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... England in different periods, it must be allowed that, abstracting from the national debt, there is a prodigious increase of power in that, more perhaps than in any other European state, since the beginning of the last century. It would be no paradox to affirm, that Ireland alone could, at present, exert a greater force than all the three kingdoms were capable of at the death of Queen Elizabeth. And we might go further, and assert, that one good county in England is able ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Shakespeare and his great contemporary Cervantes died on April 23 of the year 1616, it strangely happens that Cervantes had been dead ten days when Shakespeare expired. This apparent paradox is due to the fact that while in Spain the Gregorian calendar had already been introduced, the "Old Style", or Julian reckoning, was still used in England; indeed, it was not totally abandoned until 1752, in the reign of George II, 170 years after ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... truly a Semite in spirit. We have so thoroughly confused, distorted and forgotten all the holy and true traditions, we have so thoroughly lost the habit of applying our reason to the lucid, old truths learned by heart, that this statement may sound like a paradox. ...
— The Shield • Various
... public-houses in Kent and Sussex and demand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He does not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, vin ordinaire, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase 'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.' These are the simple and self-evident cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the tendency ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... foes. The struggle need not be one that a looker-on could measure or see, but the warfare must be maintained—the struggle must only cease with life. It had been so with her father, she knew; and through his experience, Graeme caught a glimpse of that wonderful paradox of the life that is hid with Christ in God,—constant warfare— and peace that is abiding; and could the true peace be without the warfare? she asked herself. And what was awaiting them after all ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Maule, Eden Menemon (it will be observed that he has a persistent, balefully procacious, perhaps, indeed, Freudian predilection for the letters U, V, and X),[3] are fantastic and fabulous ... sometimes almost frivolous. And here we may find our paradox. His sense of humour is abnormal, sometimes expressed directly by way of epigram or sly wording but may it not also occasionally express itself indirectly in these purple towers of painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and unbelievable characters ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... counter strokes of the wild wood-rangers, the Indian ravages speedily wrapped the frontier in fire and blood. In such a war the small parties were really the most dangerous, and in the aggregate caused most damage. It is less of a paradox than it seems, to say that one reason why the Indians were so formidable in warfare was because they were so few in numbers. Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to get ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... shew, in addition to the high ideal qualities, the rugged versification, the fantastic paradox, and the perverted taste of their author, great strength and clearness of judgment, and a deep, although somewhat jaundiced, view of human nature. That there must have been something morbid in the structure ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... there is no scientific truth, even including the law of the conservation of matter and motion, which has been enunciated in this work, but what is reconcilable with the existence of an Eternal and Infinite Spirit; and although such a statement may seem a paradox, yet I am convinced that before many more years have passed, the reconciliation of natural with spiritual phenomena will be an accomplished fact. The fool to-day may say in his heart, there is no God, but ere long not only religion, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... the Chair of St. Peter, that is to say, on February 18, the date of the ancient Feralia. Many other practices of this kind may then have prevailed and have since then been extirpated. Perhaps the paradox is only apparent if we say that the popular faith in Italy had a solid foundation just in proportion ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... among the rest, did so intend), these hospitals bear direct witness for Christ. They do this, and would do it, even if—which God forbid—the name of Christ were never mentioned within their walls. That may seem a paradox; but it is none. For it is a historic fact, that hospitals are a creation of Christian times, and of Christian men. The heathen knew them not. In that great city of ancient Rome, as far as I have ever been able to discover, there was not a single ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Brent at the door, was pale with the waxen softness of a magnolia petal and though the vividness of her lips and eyes were emphasized by contrast, suffering seemed to have endowed her remarkable beauty with a sort of nobility—an exquisite delicacy that was a paradox for ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... law of that Sacrifice and that Offering. As death for us men comes "once," and then there follows "judgment," so the death of Christ, the "offering" of Christ, comes "once," and then comes, in a wonderful paradox, not judgment but "salvation," for them that are ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... the very antithesis of the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of divinity, in that we cannot conceive ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... patch of pine woods off there—how sibilant. Or at sea, I can imagine it this moment, tossing the waves, with spirits of foam flying far, and the free whistle, and the scent of the salt—and that vast paradox somehow with all its action and restlessness conveying a sense of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... show your Honor, by the evidence of the priest who baptized her, and by the records of the church, that this young lady is the lawful and only child of Maxime Valois and Dolores Peralta. We have abundant proof to explain the seeming paradox. We are in a position to positively identify the young lady, and to dispose of the contest raised here to-day, as to the marriage of the parents of the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the produce of the very next tree another list of triumphant excellences might be necessary. A first-class mango is compact of so many sensations to the palate, its theme embraces such rare and delicate surprises, that the true artist in fruit-flavours is fain to indulge in paraphrase and paradox when he attempts to record ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... blue eyes beyond any thing I ever saw. He has all the vivacity and enterprize of youth, without the smallest tincture of libertinism and dissipation. I know not how it is, but I find myself perfectly unable to describe his character without running into paradox. He is at once serious and chearful. His seriousness is so full of enthusiasm and originality, that it is the most unlike in the world to the cold dogmatism of pedantry, or the turgid and monotonous ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... same reason, is any place for faith on the opposite hypothesis; for if man is to believe nothing but what his reason can comprehend, and to act only upon evidence which amounts to certainly, the same paradox is true; for when there is no reason to doubt, there can be none to believe. Faith ever stands between conflicting probabilities; but her position is (if we may use the metaphor) the centre of gravity between them, and ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... children the aim for attending should evidently not be too remote. In other words, the problem should involve matter in which the children have a direct interest. For this reason it is sometimes said that young children should set their own problems. This is of course a paradox so far as the regular school work is concerned, though it does apply to the pre-school period, and also justifies the claim that with young children the lesson problem should be closely connected with some vital interest. It would be ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... mostly because he could not resist the temptation to laugh at the clergy. He wrote a very characteristic Work entitled "The Praise of Folly," "Encomium Moriae" (a play on the name of Sir Thomas More), in which he maintains a sort of paradox, setting forth the value and advantages of folly, i.e., of indulging the light fancies and errors of imagination. With much humorous illustration he enumerates a great many conceits, and includes among them jests, but his main ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... boyhood, Turner had led him, marvelling, through the fire and cloud to the mountain-altar; and as, in his youth, Tintoret had interpreted the storm and stress of a mind awakening to the terrible realities of the world. It was no caprice of a changeful taste, nor love of startling paradox, that brought him to "discover Carpaccio;" it was the logical sequence of his studies, and widening interests, and a view of art embracing far broader issues than the connoisseurship of "Modern Painters," or the didacticism of "Seven Lamps," or the historical research of ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... as it is strong in coloring up the external and picturesque features of the subject. Baur's work is an amazingly clever tour de force, but it is not so much a well-proportioned picture of the apostle as a prolonged paradox thrown down as a challenge to the learned. The latest large German work, Clemen's Paulus, proceeds on the principle that the miracle is untrue, and the effect may be sufficiently seen in the account it gives of the first visit to Philippi. In Weinal's ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... blithe and naive inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the burden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the "children in the market-place" repeat ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... a horizontal plane. The second factor is "elevation"—how far up or down it must be pointed in a vertical plane. The latter factor determines how far it will throw its projectile, and up to a certain point the higher the gun is pointed the further will go the shell. A certain paradox seems to enter here. It is a fact that a distant ship presents a target more easily hit if its bow or stern is toward the gunner. If it presents a broadside there is the danger that the shells will ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... away at times; but reaction gradually revealed again what is born under the human skin—the paradox called sex-antipathy. And yet the men in the party would not have hesitated to sacrifice their lives in defence of these women, nor would the women have faltered ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... vulgar though ancient error," observing that until very recent ages the sun was believed to revolve round the earth, and the notion of the antipodes was "a heresy in philosophy"—that to assert the equality of the sexes now was no greater paradox than to advocate either of those theories but a short time ago. "But," she continues, "who shall the matter be tried by?" and here we suspect she has reached the root of the difficulty. Both men and women, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest beside that light, when the house is asleep, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... will follow many a stave. I know it well, so rings the book throughout; Much time I've lost in puzzling o'er its pages, For downright paradox, no doubt, A mystery remains alike to fools and sages. Ancient the art and modern too, my friend. 'Tis still the fashion as it used to be, Error instead of truth abroad to send By means of three and one, and one and three. 'Tis ever taught ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... regarded as the most eminent physician and astrologer among his contemporaries. But his mind was of a peculiar cast, and his temper most inconstant. He had, says Peter Bayle, in his "Historical Dictionary," a decided love of paradox, and of the marvellous, an infantine credulity, a superstition scarce conceivable, an insupportable vanity, and a boasting that knew no limits. His works, though full of puerilities and contradictions, of absurd tales and charlatanry of every description, nevertheless offer ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... threatenin' him too hard. Sez he, "I do not wish to be President again, I shall refuse to be nominated. At the same time I do wish to be President and shall work hard for the nomination if you can understand the paradox." ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... 1873; and by a William Carpenter, One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe, Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class "Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,—the lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of perpetual motion, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... The man's love of paradox had piqued him to select this deaf woman; he confessed to his intimate friends that the ideal companion for a musician was one who could never hear him practise his piano. She rapidly made a request in ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... deepen into awe, there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... creases on either side of a large and rather fleshy mouth, worn as it were by the pull of a bit, you further inferred that the energy he must have displayed somewhere was a thing of will rather than of temperament. He was a paradox, a rolling stone that had unaccountably contrived ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... "Paradox," said the man, "is meant to conceal the insincerity of the aged, not to express the simplicity of youth. But I wander. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... these tiny animals hinder more than all such prospering circumstances can help. Thus, though the loyal wave may be hastening its course, we are informed that the ship stands fixed on the surface of the sea, and by a strange paradox the swimmer [the ship] is made to remain immovable while the wave is hurried along by movements numberless. Or, to describe the nature of another kind of fish, perchance the sailors in the aforesaid ships have grown dull and ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... better lesson may be drawn from it. There is, after all, a right as well as a wrong method of philosophising. The one leads, it may be, but to a few modest results, of no very brilliant or original character, yet of sterling value and importance. The other may conduct to startling paradox, to applauded subtleties, to bold and novel speculations, but baseless, transient, treacherous. It evidently requires something more than intellectual keenness; it requires the virtue of forbearance, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... message, that while a State has no right to secede, the Union has no right to coerce, has been universally condemned as a paradox. The popular estimate of Mr. Buchanan's proposition and arguments was forcibly presented at the time by a jesting criticism attributed to Mr. Seward. "I think," said the New York Senator, "the President has conclusively proved two things: (1) That no State has the right to ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... happiest,—granted. What does happiness consist in? Power, wealth, popularity, and, above all, content! Well, then, no man ever obtains so much power, so much money, so much popularity, and, above all, such thorough self-content as a fool; a fool, therefore (this is no paradox), is the wisest of men. Fools govern the world in purple: the wise laugh at them; but they laugh in rags. Fools thrive at court; fools thrive in state chambers; fools thrive in boudoirs; fools thrive in rich men's legacies. Who is so beloved ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Cecil many American tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of home. Through the open windows of the Piccadilly tea shops you might catch glimpses of the English consuming quarts of hot tea in order to become cool. It is a paradox they ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... arch enemy of the monopolies (not yet called trusts); and so forth and so on. For all that some laughed at him, he was an able politician, and was perfectly honest in all his political transactions, which is something of a paradox. So he came up to Herculaneum to convert the doubting. The laboring party greeted him en masse, and stormed the hall for ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... a travesty on human progress, a social paradox, that war and science go hand in hand. On one side are all of the machines of destruction, the battleships, bombing-planes, huge guns, high explosives, and poisonous gases, products of scientific experiment and inventive genius, and on the other ambulances, hospitals, medical and surgical care, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... argument aristocrats have derived some little amusement. "How is this?" they exclaimed, "what is the meaning of this paradox? You are democrats and that means that you attribute political excellence, 'political virtue,' as we used to say, to the crowd, that is to ignorance. Why then do you wish to enlighten the crowd, that is to destroy the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... is also the seat of His repose. The beneficent activity just described is wielded from a calm, central palace, and does not break the King's tranquillity. That is a paradox, except to those who know that Jesus Christ, sitting in undisturbed rest at the right hand of God, thence works with and for His servants. His repose is full of active energy; His active energy is full of repose. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... importance of pantomime The dialogues appended to The Natural Son His second play, The Father of the Family (1758) One radical error of his dramatic doctrine Modest opinion of his own experiments His admiration for Terence Diderot translates Moore's Gamester On Shakespeare The Paradox on the Player Account of Garrick On the truth of the stage His condemnation of the French classic stage The foundations of dramatic art Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama No Diderotian school Why the Encyclopaedists ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... my battery to one '577, one '400, and one Paradox No. 12, for ordinary game in India, as elephants and other of the larger animals require special outfit. The Paradox*, invented by Colonel Fosberry and manufactured by Messrs. Holland and Holland of Bond Street, is a most useful weapon, as it combines the shot-gun with a rifle that is ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... years have passed, and I comprehend somewhat of the paradox of things, and I know that this death was just what he might have prayed for. It was a fitting close for a life that had done a supreme and mighty work. His face ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... therefore stay where they are, not because they cannot move freely if they wish to do so, but because no inducement to move is offered to them. This is a condition of perfect mobility without motion—of atoms ready to move at a touch without the touch that would move them. The paradox indeed holds that it is the ideally perfect mobility which has existed in the past which positively excludes motion in the present. At some time in the past labor and capital have gone from group to group till they have brought about an adjustment in which they have no incentive for moving farther. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... extensive trade; whilst its distance from the coast is such as to place it, in a great measure, beyond reach of insult from an enemy. Such an assertion, coming from one who has just detailed the particulars of its capture, may, indeed, appear to partake not slightly of the nature of a paradox; but there is no denying that the fall of Washington ought to be attributed much more to the misconduct of the Americans themselves, than to the skill or enterprise of those who effected it. Had the emergency been contemplated, ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... length of brooks down their faces and flanks. She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking and spreading homely themes over an inept-looking clavier confounding the wits of his children and all men's children down to the last generation. He marvels at the paradox, drums his head with the tattoo: how can a thing as small as he shape and maintain an art out of himself universal enough to carry her daily vigil to crystalled immortality? She lets the hydrant ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... appreciate the necessity which managers of competing lines are under to agree upon uniform rates for traffic over their roads, and at the same time the difficulty of doing this. The strange paradox is true that while it is necessary to the continued solvent existence of the competing corporations that such an agreement be made, it is also greatly to their advantage to break it secretly and secure additional traffic. It is necessary, therefore, that the parties ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... away upon leaden feet, yet—apparent paradox—with frightful rapidity; for I now no longer had a household to attend to my wants; my meals were brought to me with unfailing regularity by my guards, but they had apparently been forbidden to communicate with me, for ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... I don't make mistakes where figures are concerned. The paradox of aerial navigation is 'the greater the speed the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... strict a paradox, Striving to make an ugly deed look fair: Your words have took such pains as if they labour'd To bring manslaughter into form, and set Quarrelling upon the head of valour; which indeed Is valour misbegot, and came into the world When sects and factions were newly ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... intentions. The author has the most supreme and avowed contempt for liberal ideas in Church and State; and for every good-natured axiom about toleration and representative government he spurns from his path as a novelty and paradox. There is nothing dominant in England which he does not oppose. The Whig party he deems the avowed enemies of loyalty, order and religion. The Conservatives, with Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington at their head, he conceives destitute of principle, and the destroyers of the British empire. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... complimenting Paul Vence on his brilliant paradox, regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... up had things been different; the real worry was to keep going at any cost. For, as the bank manager had intimated, the whole thing was just hard luck rather than any unsoundness in the business. It was a fine paradox that the more pronounced the success of the idea itself became, the greater grew the danger of complete failure because of the predicament! Death by wheat! An ironical fate indeed for a ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... I have referred, I know not what extent of ground would have been covered by my pronaos. All I have endeavoured to do, at present, is to remove that which seems to have proved a stumbling-block to many—namely, the apparent paradox that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent. Unless the arguments set forth in the Prolegomena, in the simplest language at my command, have some flaw which I am unable to discern, this seeming ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the "cross."... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: "Who was it? what was it?"—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, "Why just in this way?"—this state ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... a paradox, Charles," said Mr. Malcolm; "the smell of roast-beef never went further than to remind a man of dinner; but sounds are ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... most strange fashion cavilled at, called in question, and denied. We specify the Gospel, instinctively, as that part of the Inspired Word which chiefly concerns ourselves, as Christian men; but the entire deposit shares the same fate. I do not think I am delivering a paradox when I say that the Bible is generally very little read. That the amount of study commonly bestowed upon it bears no proportion whatever to its transcendent importance and paramount value, shall not be any paradox at all; but ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... exceedingly reactionary, and so apparently assured that royalty is constructed of an entirely different clay than that used for ordinary folks, gave a manifestation of those democratic notions which constitute such a paradox to the remainder of his character by sending forth his three eldest boys each year during their holidays on a pedestrian tour through the length and breadth of his dominions, just as if they were ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a paradox, it is evident that even what we regard as inspired genius comes to man in a great measure from Instinct, though as I noted before it is aided by reflection. As the young bird listens to its mother and then sings till as a grown nightingale it pours forth a rich flood of varying melody; so the ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... language, under the pretence of unburdening his own soul and revealing his own sorrows. He was always talking about philanthropy and generosity, and yet seldom bestowed a charity. No man was ever more eloquent in paradox, or sublime in absurdity. He spent his life in gilding what is corrupt, and glossing over what is impure. The great moral effect of his writings was to make men commit crimes under the name of patriotism, and permit them ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... childish diminution of her affection for her convalescent dove, whilst at the same time something whispered to her that it possessed a stronger interest in her heart than it had ever done before. This may seem a paradox to such of our readers as have never been in love; but it is not at all irreconcilable to the analogous and often conflicting states of feeling produced by that strange and mysterious passion. The innocent girl was wont, as frequently as she could ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive memory, and accordingly—he ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French,—a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... by any means above reproach, yet withal he was a sincere and devoted Christian, strange and inexplicable as the paradox may seem, but it was an age of devoted Christians, whose devotion and principles fortunately were not translated into daily life. Neither Cortes nor any of his followers—perhaps not even the priests were of different opinion—thought any less of themselves ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Gentle Duke, without paradox be it spoken, thy horses at your owne proper costs and charges shall kneed vp to the knees all the while thou art here in spruce beere & lubeck licour. Not a dog thou bringst with thee but shall be banketted with rhenish wine and sturgion. On our shoulders we weare no lamb skin ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, unexpectedness. Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, and the world is in their debt for many a ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... his performances the name of "The Equine Paradox." He now has his beautiful animals in delightful summer quarters at Newport, where they are counted among the "notable guests." He has the Opera House there for his training school for three months, preparing new ones for next winter's exhibition, and keeping the old ones in practice. It ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... business man who never succeeds because he is always too ready to compromise before the goal of a transaction has been attained. To such a mind the certainty of half a loaf is always better than the probability of a whole one. One merely mentions the type to accentuate the paradox. Great affairs above all things require for their successful conduct that class of mind which is eminently sensitive to the drift of events, to the characters or changing views of friends and opponents, to a careful ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... vessels of the skin, and renders them less capable of being affected by a smaller degree of heat. Thus we see that the effects of the hot and cold bath are different and opposite; the one debilitates by stimulating, and the other produces stimulant or tonic effects by debilitating. This seeming paradox may, however, be easily explained by the principles we have laid down; and though the hot and cold bath produce such different effects, yet it is only the same fluid, with a small variation in the degree of temperature; but these effects depend on the temperature of ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... in the form of colonial enterprises, armament competition, or actual warfare, find a common origin in economic and commercial interests. Commerce and quick communications have drawn the world into closer unity, yet by a kind of paradox have increased the possibilities of conflict. Both by their common origin and by their far-reaching consequences, it is thus possible to connect the story of naval events from the Spanish-American to the World War, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... include Northumbrian, Mercian, "Anglo-Saxon" and Kentish under one designation. The name "Anglo-Saxon" was certainly rather inappropriate, as the speakers of it were mostly Saxons and not Angles at all; which leads up to the paradox that they did not speak "English"; for that, in the extreme literal sense, was the language of the Angles only! But now that the true relationship of the old dialects is known, it is not uncommon for scholars to speak of the Wessex dialect as "Saxon," and of the Northumbrian and ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... since the inner one has the form O(f(x)) and the outer one has the form Y(O(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions, but the letter by itself signifies nothing. This immediately becomes clear if instead of 'F(Fu)' we write '(do): F(Ou). Ou Fu'. That disposes of Russell's paradox. ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... self-sacrifice for humanity, and they had no desire to hush the groans of the afflicted if they thereby ran the risk of having to gnash their own teeth. They could do no good at home. As Mrs. Harrowby said, as one propounding a self-evident paradox, how could they go and see the sick or help to nurse ploughmen and their children? They would only catch the fever themselves, and so spread it still farther. And every one knows what a wicked thing that is to do. Cook had orders to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... in truth, something of a paradox. He was an artist, and yet was rich; he had inherited large wealth, and yet had formed habits of careful industry. The majority of his young acquaintances, who had been launched from homes like his own, were known only as sons of their fathers, and degenerate sons at that. Van Berg was ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... price of glory. The trenches at Port Arthur were filled level-full with the bodies of self-sacrificed martyrs, and upon this gruesome slope the final charges were made. Stripped of all sentiment, war is organized and wholesale murder, a savage and awful paradox which proclaims the shallowness of civilization. Said General Sherman: "Only those who have never heard a shot, only those who have never heard the shrieks of the wounded nor the groans of the dying, can cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... sympathetic colors, those grouped together form your Magnetic Monochrome. Magnetism is the highest form of physicalized power in the universe. It knows no resistance, it passes thru all substances and pervades all space. It is the most vital power in the universe. Our modern life presents a magnetic paradox, it affords the greatest development of magnetism and is the greatest destroyer of it. It is generated by the brain, flows to the right thru the body in form of a figure 8. From the brain to the solar plexus, across ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... through which our own society has passed, there ought to be added to the course of popular instruction as many lectures more, which should trace the history, not of England, but of the world. And the history of the world ought to go before the history of England. This is no paradox, but the deliberate opinion of many of those who have thought most deeply about the far-reaching chain of human progress. When I was on a visit to the United States some years ago—things may have improved since then—I could ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... and of the confessional follow him into the street and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the general condition of things, let them not be thereby disheartened. Let them carry in their minds this divine paradox, that it is far more important to every man that he should do his utmost for Humanity than it ever can be for Humanity that any one man should ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... electrician. The uncle was the Rev. Thomas Twyford, a lean and lively old gentleman with a red, eager face and white hair. He was in the ordinary way a country clergyman, but he was one of those who achieve the paradox of being famous in an obscure way, because they are famous in an obscure world. In a small circle of ecclesiastical archaeologists, who were the only people who could even understand one another's discoveries, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... reported to the Governor, who advised the Ministry that he was "well assured that it was the intention of the faction in Boston to cause an insurrection against the crown officers." At this time he favored Lord Hillsborough with a lucid explanation of a paradox,—how a few leaders of bankrupt reputation ruled with a rod of iron the most virtuous town in the world. "It has been a subject of wonder," are the Governor's words, (May 19,1768,) "how the faction which harasses this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... years ago, to reform Parliament, was on the same erroneous principle. The right of reform is in the nation in its original character, and the constitutional method would be by a general convention elected for the purpose. There is, moreover, a paradox in the idea of vitiated bodies ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of rum and pushed it towards him. 'Twas all hopeless to protest or seek an understanding. I loved the old man, and forgave the paradox of his rascality and loyal affection. The young man from London must take his chance, as must we all, in the fashioning hands of circumstance. 'Twas not to be conceived that his ruin was here to ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... A paradox, as a self-contradictory statement, arrests the attention in the initial sentence of an article. Although not always easy to frame, and hence not so often employed as it might be, a paradoxical expression is an excellent ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before. And yet that something was ALWAYS TRUE. In one sense you create it, and in another sense you FIND it. You have to treat your ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever."—"On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," Complete ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... States—which rather makes a hero of the business man. For this reason there are many who are ambitious for commercial success. Every year thousands upon thousands of young men and women leave school in order to enter business. By a very natural psychological paradox, there seems to be a fascination about commerce and finance for many young people who have little aptitude for these vocations. Many people, feeling their deficiencies, yearn to convince themselves and others that they are not deficient. It is only another phase of the fatality with which ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in "worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judgment, that "personal taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... but his character was weak in some respects. He was full of noble ambitions; he had one of the most powerful minds I have known, a quite extraordinary faculty for grasping abstract ideas. I was first drawn towards him by hearing him argue at a students' meeting. He was maintaining a fatalistic paradox: the total uselessness of effort, and the vanity of all our distinctions between good and bad. All our acts, he argued, are the outcome of circumstances over which we have no control; consequently the man who betrays his best friend for interested motives, and the patriot ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... confirm this strange paradox, that provisions laid up against sieges will continue good for a hundred ears, as ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... was changed not only in the body, but in the spirit. Everybody remarked it. The fierce fires of war seemed to have burnt away his old confident egotism. In giving himself to France he had found more than he had lost; for, by a strange paradox, in the midst of death he had found belief ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the native point of view would embrace and observe so many of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar parlance, "after." In other words (though I appear to utter a foolish paradox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subject too well to feel it—to feel it, I mean, a l'Americaine. He is as tender of it as if he were vague about it, and as certain of it ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... any effectual way to prevent the abstraction of books. He was answered by another librarian (from Cincinnati) who replied that he knew of only one effectual method, and that was to keep a man standing over each book with a club. Of course this was a humorous paradox, not to be taken literally, but it ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... judges, who took alarm and were afraid to provoke the multitude. Caesar at once dismissed Pompeia, but being summoned as a witness against Clodius, said he had nothing to charge him with. This looking like a paradox, the accuser asked him why he parted with his wife. Caesar replied, "I wished my wife to be not so much as suspected." Some say that Caesar spoke this as his real thought; others, that he did it to gratify the people, who were very earnest to save Clodius. Clodius, at any rate, escaped; ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... individual and humanity remember of their past. We strive to enlarge and to render as precise as possible this record, which in some places is dim, in others very clear. We cannot do without it, such as it is, and taken as a whole, it is rich in truth. In a spirit of paradox only, can one doubt if there ever were a Greece or a Rome, an Alexander or a Caesar, a feudal Europe overthrown by a series of revolutions, that on the 1st of November 1517 the theses of Luther were seen fixed to the door of the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... equal abilities have explored this ample field, I know of none, however, who have so thoroughly investigated the first principles of the science, or who have treated it so much at large. If he have indulged to a thousand agreeable visions, and wandered in the pursuit of many a specious paradox, he has however richly repaid us for this defect, by the profoundest researches, and the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... almost to treat conduct of this kind with perfect seriousness; yet I am aware that it ought to be more seriously accounted for—because I am sure it has been a sort of paradox, which must have struck Your Lordships, how any person having so many motives to conceal—having so many reasons to dread detection—should yet go to work so clumsily upon the subject. It is possible, indeed, that it ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... regarded a baby from this viewpoint and fewer still understand its supreme significance. That it is the most utterly helpless thing possessing life is a self-evident fact, and that it should be destined to be King of all mammalian tribes as well as Lord of all the earth is a superlative paradox. Because of its utter inability to care for itself it is more in need of care than any other representative of the animal world. It is not only in need of immediate care, but it demands care longer than the young ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... version of the verse yields no sense. The meaning, however, is this: Atichccheda or Atichcchanda implies a hyperbolic statement, Ativaua means a paradox. It is said that by gift of even a palmful of water one may attain to a place which is attainable by a hundred sacrifices. This ordinance, which looks like a hyperbole, and its statement by Vedic teachers that looks like a paradox, fill me with wonder. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... towered a cathedral. The size of it turned the city into a close. Its site, its bulwarks, however, turned the church into a castle. Here was an abbot filling the post of constable. The longer you gazed, the stronger the paradox became. Pictures of peace and war became inextricably confused. Men-at-arms mumbled their offices; steel caps concealed tonsures: embrasures framed precious panes: trumpets sounded the Angelus: mail chinked beneath vestments: sallies ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... "Doctor Faust, a Dance Poem, with curious information about the Devil, Witches and Poetic Art." This is intended to serve as the ground-work of a ballet and presents the great problems of existence in the form of a jest and a paradox. It was written for Lumley, the London manager, but his ballet-master declared the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... his Favour. A handsome Motto has the same Effect. Besides that, it always gives a Supernumerary Beauty to a Paper, and is sometimes in a manner necessary when the Writer is engaged in what may appear a Paradox to vulgar Minds, as it shews that he is supported by good Authorities, and is not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... trained horses are halting, ragged and poor. I have seen only one that stands out in my records as superlatively fine,—for horses. That was known to the public when I saw it as Bartholomew's "Equine Paradox," and it contained twelve wonderfully trained horses. My record of this fine performance fills seven pages of a good-sized notebook. While it is too long to reproduce here entire, it can at least be briefly described. The trainer called his group a "school," ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's Book of the Ages contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book, nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At the beginning are patriarchs living in the dawn of the world under the guidance of inward vision, and at the end are saints and heretics, whom Franck finds among all races, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... variable to be defined in one sentence; and it is this complexity and variability that I wish to emphasize particularly. Eckermann once suggested to Goethe that no two cases of love are quite alike, and the poet agreed with him. They did not, however, explain their seeming paradox, so diametrically opposed to the current notion that love is everywhere and always the same, in individuals as in nations; nor could they have explained it unless they had analyzed love into its component ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... one's study. Mixing with them is the only plan. No doubt they're inconsistent enough. The more you see of them, the less you trust them; and yet the more you see of them, the more you like them. Can you solve that paradox from ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... But what a paradox is presented in the disregard for law and life today in our common country, including much in our Southland! It is a sad commentary on the weakness and inconsistencies of human nature and often starts the inquiry in many honest minds, as ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... proceeding, maintaining that many an indiscreet fair one had been providentially alarmed by thus becoming the subject of universal conversation; that thus many a reputation had been saved by this charitable slander. There were some malignant philosophers, indeed, doubtless from that silly love of paradox in all ages too prevalent, who pretended that all this Elysian morality was one great delusion, and that this scrupulous anxiety about the conduct of others arose from a principle, not of Purity, but of Corruption. ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... discipline" of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. "But all exaltation neglects," said Prothero. "No religion has ever boasted that its saints were spick and span." This controversy raged between them in the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way through the indescribable ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... to a position analogous to that which General von Bernhardi then occupied in the German army. In any other European country his name would have been practically a household word. Even to the English newspaper writer it was a paradox ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... in uttering this, and the company received the paradox in dead silence, and with a distrustful air, like any other stranger, during which the Burgundian, who understood German but imperfectly, made Gerard Gallicize the discussion. He patted his interpreter ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... that word he had used. For a man to know he is weak; it sounds a paradox, but a man must be strong to know that. And dwelling upon this, and upon his patience and his gentleness, there came to me suddenly remembrance of that postscript, the significance of which ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... deliverer has for its occasion the psalmist's cry of distress, and for its issue, "He drew me out of many waters." All the splendour flames out because a poor man prays, and all the upheaval of earth and the artillery of heaven has simply this for its end, that a poor man may be delivered. The paradox of prayer never found a more bold expression than in this triumphant utterance, of the insignificant occasion for, and the equally insignificant result sought by, the exercise of the energy ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... swamped. At the worst, we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are rarely able to separate ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... So in one and the same set of facts we have the history of Jesus and the revelation of God. They are not only the biography of a man, but they are the unveiling of the heart of God. These Scripture writers take it for granted that their readers will understand that paradox, and do not stop to explain how they change the statement of the subject matter of their message, in this extraordinary fashion, between their Master who had lived and died on earth, and the Unseen Almightiness throned above all heavens. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Windham and roused him from his brooding melancholy. Obed Chute's fancies were certainly whimsical; he had an odd love for paradox and extravagance; he seized the idea that happened to suggest itself, and followed it out with a dry gravity and a solemn air of earnestness which made all that he said seem like his profound conviction. Thus in these conversations ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille |
