"Paradoxical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we consider the insignificance of that individual man, moving in yonder street and who is scarcely visible to us, that we ourselves are equally insignificant. It is in such a situation that the superiority of the mind over the body is felt. Paradoxical as it may at first seem, its greatness is evinced in the feeling of its own littleness.... After gazing here for a while we were shown into the chapel through the choir.... In the sacristy is a picture ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... to the meagre tactics of the 'Systeme de la Nature;' or to the pellets of logic which Condillac has cast in the foundry of national vanity, and tosses about at hap-hazard—self-persuaded that he is proceeding according to art. The Spaniards are a people with imagination: and the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau, and the flippancies of Voltaire, are plants which will not naturalise in the country of Calderon and Cervantes. Though bigotry among the Spaniards leaves much to be lamented; I have proved that the religious habits of the nation must, in a contest of this ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by his paradoxical ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and Normans were of the same great Teutonic family, however modified by the different circumstances of movement and residence, there was no new ethnic element introduced; and, paradoxical as it may seem, the fusion of these peoples was of great benefit, in the end, to England. Though the Saxons at first suffered from Norman oppression, the kingdom was brought into large inter-European relations, and a far better literary culture was introduced, more varied ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the age he lived in as "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic."[1] It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron—in a word of the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry in this ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... he is," he whispered. "I never realised before how magnificently paradoxical your Irish minds are. That pose of abject self depreciation which is in reality not wholly a pose but a vehement protest against the shallow ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... There is something paradoxical in the descriptions of this fruit by various writers, but all agree that it is inexpressibly good! Says one—writing of the sixteenth century—"It is of such an excellent taste that it surpasses in flavour all the other fruits of the world." Another writes: "This ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... What a paradoxical process! But what I want you to suggest is something for Miss Rhody—something ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... to leave this world about that age, when most men think they may best enjoy it, though paradoxical unto worldly ears, was not strange unto mine, who have so often observed, that many, though old, oft stick fast unto the world, and seem to be drawn like Cacus's oxen, backward, with great struggling and reluctancy unto the ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... thought. And truly Mr. Chesterton is invaluable as a quickener and stimulator of the minds of his readers. Moreover, by adopting the method of paradox, he has undoubtedly done one remarkable thing. He has proved what an astonishing number of paradoxical surprises there actually are, lying hidden beneath the apparent commonplace of the world. Every really clever paradox astonishes us not merely with the sense of the cleverness of him who utters it, but with the sense of how many strange ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... reason for which they received them in ancient Rome when that State conquered the world. Honors and rewards stimulate and encourage talent and praise arouses men to a generous emulation. It encourages men to enter the army. It is paradoxical to treat officers contemptuously and call theirs an honored profession. The men who are the principal supports of the State must be encouraged and be preferred to the soft and insipid society men who can only grace ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... divorced himself, or was dead—certainly none of those theories connected themselves with the present bridegroom. As for Sally, her only feeling, over and above her ordinary curiosity about her father, was a sort of paradoxical indignation that his intrusion into her mother's life should have prevented her daughter figuring as a bridesmaid. It would have been so jolly! But Sally was perfectly well aware that widows, strong-nerved from experience, stand in no need of official help in getting their "things" ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... fascinated and enthralled by your sun-kissed, rose-embowered, semi-tropical summer-land of Hellenic sky and hills of Hymettus, with its paradoxical antitheses: of flowers and flannels; strawberries and sealskin sacks; open fires with open windows; snow-capped mountains and orange blossoms; winter looking down upon summer—a topsy-turvy land, where you dig for your ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... every other country involved, the Socialist movement was sharply divided by the war. Paradoxical as it seems, in spite of the great revival of revolutionary hope and sentiment in the first half of the year, the Socialist parties and groups were not strong when the war broke out. They were, indeed, at a very low state. They had not yet recovered from the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... tired, they had the avowed intention of sleeping there; so they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished one another good-night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere one of the warlike arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last when utterly beaten. Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a Bell, not ostensibly communicating ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exercise and composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that "the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style," which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ill-advised, irrational, preposterous, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical and disturbing as our imaginary defence of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... a double Papist. But, alas, the momentum of his uncontrolled zeal carried him a step too far—over the precipice. He declared that good works are detrimental and injurious to salvation, bona opera perniciosa (noxia) esse ad salutem. He defended his paradoxical statement in a publication of 1559 against Menius, with whose subscription to the Eisenach propositions, referred to above, he was not satisfied; chiefly because Menius said there that he had taught and defended them also in the past. The flagrant ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... remarkable—and, without a previous explanation, it might seem paradoxical to say it—that oftentimes under a continual accession of light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for explanation—all appeared ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... object; if he can draw consequences, this will be an excellent lesson: if you are so tender of blame in the veriest trifles, how impeachable must you be in matters of importance! As to personal habits, begin by denying that you have any; or in the paradoxical language of Rousseau,[71] declare that the only habit you have is the habit of having none: as all personal habits, if they have been of any long standing, must have become involuntary, the unconscious culprit may assert her innocence ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... least, to be able to do the will of the immortal gods. And even if he had, I doubt if he could do much to suit them in America. O, my greatest enemy and benefactor in the whole world is this dumb-hearted mother, this America, in whose iron loins I have been spiritually conceived. Paradoxical, this? But is it not true? Was not the Khalid, now writing to you, born in the cellar? Down there, in the very loins of New York? But alas, our spiritual Mother devours, like a cat, her own children. How then can we live with her in the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... restraint and reason just then, and Joyce's well-considered words went—much to his mortification—for next to nothing. Bond, who better apprehended the spirit of the hour, let himself loose in a vein of pure fantasy,—he ventured on the whimsical, the sprightly, the paradoxical. The poor fellow sent to interview him might as well have tried to grasp a bundle of sunbeams or a handful of quicksilver. His report turned out a frightful bungle; the wretched Bond, made clumsy, fatuous, pointless, sodden, when he had meant to show himself as ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Jehovah, are disputing with each other, and indeed, amongst themselves, with regard to the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Jehovah himself appears to be on the decline and his unity is steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical trinity. But we are progressing, for in 1300 years no new prophet has arisen, and no new divine revelation is perturbing our race; the old ones, however, are ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... certain sense in which we should feel a sympathy with children in the wrong that they do. It would seem paradoxical to say that in any sense there should be sympathy with sin, and yet there is a sense in which this is true, though perhaps, strictly speaking, it is sympathy with the trial and temptation which led to the sin, rather than with the act of transgression itself. In whatever light a nice ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... possibly be suited to his "cosmic" epic, or that he has written a novelette solely in order to have once written a novelette. Although in these confessions, as well as in Edgar Allen Poe's celebrated Poet's Art, self-delusion and pleasure in the paradoxical may very likely be mingled, it still remains true that such dicta as these point to certain peculiarities in the development of literatures. Experiments with all kinds of forms, imitation of certain literary genres without intrinsic necessity, and deliberate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... their lordships long. He could not, however, help expressing his astonishment at what had fallen from the last speaker; for he had evidently confessed that the Slave Trade was inhuman and unjust, and then he had insinuated, that it was neither inhuman nor unjust to continue it. A more paradoxical or whimsical opinion, he believed, was never entertained, or more whimsically expressed in that house. The noble viscount had talked of the interests of the planters; but this was but a part of the subject; for surely the people of Africa were not to be ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... away the coffee-tray. Madame de Montcornet perceived that the princess and Madame d'Espard had a word to say to each other, and she drew around her d'Arthez, Rastignac, and Blondet, amusing them with one of those clever paradoxical attacks which Parisian women ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... all eyes on Veronique, and the whole company waited for an explanation of so paradoxical ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... live in dogma, as of old. Dogma everywhere has fallen into the background; in the Eastern Church it has given place to ritual, in the Roman Church to ecclesiastical instructions, in the Protestant Churches, so far as they are mindful of their origin, to the Gospel. At the same time, however, the paradoxical fact is unmistakable that dogma as such is nowhere at this moment so powerful as in the Protestant Churches, though by their history they are furthest removed from it. Here, however, it comes into consideration as an object of immediate religious interest, which, strictly ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of his public reputation, especially in Edinburgh, where the recollection of his daft student days was as yet stronger than the impression made by his recent performances in literature, he was well aware that his candidature must seem paradoxical, and stood little chance of success. The election took place in the late autumn of the same year, and he was defeated, receiving ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reference to other supposed laws than those of material nature—the only laws which we know in a determinate manner. It would be unfair to decry the latter philosopher, who endeavoured to harmonize his paradoxical opinions with the interests of religion, and to undervalue an honest and reflecting man, because he finds himself at a loss the moment he has left the field of natural science. The same grace must ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and glad to have an opportunity of saying a word in reference to one incident in which I am happy to know you were interested, and still more happy to know, though it may sound paradoxical, that you were disappointed—I mean the death of the little heroine. When I first conceived the idea of conducting that simple story to its termination, I determined rigidly to adhere to it, and never to forsake the end I had in view. Not untried in the school of affliction, in the death of ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... wonderful singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always a conscious hypocrite—a form of character, however paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness. There would ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... for nothing. [Laughter.] My own private opinion, which I confide to you, knowing it will go no further, is that he assumes that tone, as a rule, to draw sovran woman. [Laughter.] Mere man is a paradoxical creature—it is not always possible to distinguish between his sober earnest and his leg-pulling exercises. [Laughter.] One has to be on one's guard, and woe be to the woman who in these days displays ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... may seem paradoxical, because they are not explained by application to visible things; yet things abstract, being universals, are often better comprehended than things applied, for these are of perpetual ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... I have drawn of the actual condition of the colony; after having represented both its agricultural and commercial interests as being already not only in a state of impair, but also of increasing dilapidation and ruin, it may appear somewhat paradoxical that I should attempt to wind up the account with an enumeration of the advantages which it holds out to emigration. If due consideration, however, be given to the nature of the ingredients of which the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... itself, as exhibited in the life and character of the Lord Jesus, as illustrated by his simple, beautiful and touching parables, and as it breathes through all his discourses. They will feel it to be true. Depend upon it, paradoxical as it may sound, children will be much more likely to believe Christianity without what are called the evidences, than with them; and the remark applies to some who ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... invisible threads with the web of human destiny. There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,—"I believe, because it is impossible,"—is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers maintained that there was not a verse, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... by the law are his rights; and the great charter of England declares that the ancient privileges enjoyed by Englishmen, are the undoubted rights of Englishmen. But, as we have seen, the XIV. and XV. Amendments distinguish between privileges and rights; and it must be confessed that it is paradoxical to say, as the XIV. Amendment clearly does, that the "privileges" of a citizen shall not be abridged, while his "right" to vote may be. But a judicial construction of the Constitution is wholly different from a mere exercise in philology. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Nekhludoff suddenly exclaimed aloud, and the inner voice of the whole of his being said, "Yes, it is all." And it happened to Nekhludoff, as it often happens to men who are living a spiritual life. The thought that seemed strange at first and paradoxical or even to be only a joke, being confirmed more and more often by life's experience, suddenly appeared as the simplest, truest certainty. In this way the idea that the only certain means of salvation from the terrible evil from which men were suffering was that they should ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... of honesty, who would have starved to death rather than touch the gold intrusted to his care,—he consoled Malgat, finding all kinds of apology for him, telling him, that, after all, he was not so very much to blame, that there were temptations too strong to be resisted, and repeating even those paradoxical principles which have been specially invented as an apology for thieves. Malgat had still some money of his own; but M. Elgin did not ask him for it, for fear of hurting his feelings. He continued to invite him, and urged him to come and dine ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... said, all this is too paradoxical, too violently in conflict with what is notorious concerning the religion and morality ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... yet under the circumstances rather paradoxical, desire to live yet a little longer upon the earth in the light of the sun. Fitfully the mortal Hindu regales himself with saccharine promises of paradise; in his every-day mood he clings to life and shrinks with the uneasy sense that his paradise may not materialize, even ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... of brightness and lightness, and most of them have that peculiar kind of ingenuity which is one of Mr. PAIN's strong points. Suddenly they land you at a point which is nowhere near to that to which you thought you were travelling. The characters, even when they are engaged in paradoxical and preposterous actions, are real men and women, such as you could meet almost anywhere in a day's walk, and they are set off with Mr. PAIN's fancy so as to become additionally lifelike. Many things have struck me in the reading of this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... applies with special force to our estimate of his rank in poetry. That he was a poet, the most exacting, the most paradoxical criticism will hardly deny; but there is urgent need for moderation and self-control when we come to consider his place among the poets. Are we to call him a great poet? The answer must be ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... that education should do all this? This question is not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... haste" in his position would be fatal and yet the streak of whimsey that ran through him brought a paradoxical answer. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... conference was to be promotive of our marriage. Miss King was compelled, therefore, to make an arrangement with Mr. Porter, by which our interviews should be held in his house when I should arrive, as I was expected to do so in a few days, from Boston. Strange to say, however, and paradoxical as it may seem, on the day on which I was expected to arrive in Fulton, the Elder himself took his daughter from Fulton to Phillipsville to meet me. I reached Phillipsville, on Saturday afternoon, January 29th, and, of course, was not advised of this altered state of things, until my arrival ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... over the "crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... of Ceylon as the abode of demons Rise of the Mahometan power Persians and Arabs trade to India Story in Beladory of the first invasion of India by the Mahometans (text and note) Character of the Arabian geographers Their superiority over the Greeks Greek Paradoxical literature A.D. 851. The two Mahometans Their account of Ceylon Adam's Peak Obsequies of a king Councils on religion and history Toleration Carmathic monument at Colombo (note) Galle, the seat of ancient trade ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the subtle arcana of this marvellous book, rejecting as equally erroneous and unreliable the magnifying zeal of optimism and the gloomy jaundiced lenses of sneering pessimism,—thoroughly satisfied that it was a solemn duty, obligatory upon all, to study that complex paradoxical human nature, for the mastery of which Lucifer and Jesus had ceaselessly battled since the day when Adam and Eve were called "to dress and to keep" the Garden by the Euphrates,—that heaven-born, heaven-cursed, restless human nature, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... striking pose, a la troubadour, at the open window, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., a somewhat paradoxical figure, his splinter-structure enshrouded in the gown, the cap on his classic head, this regalia symbolic of dignity, and the torturesome banjo in his grasp, twanged a ragtime accompaniment, and to the bewilderment of the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... asked for the most necessary service as though it were a courtesy, and never forgot an interest in Aunt Tipping's affairs. On bright days he revealed a vein of quite boyish gaiety; and in his talk with Henry he flashed out a strange paradoxical humour, too often morbid in its themes, which, as usually the case with such humour, was really sadness coming to the ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... morality, they raised unwittingly the standard of taste. Some of the songs of Lovelace, however, such as 'To Althea, from Prison,' are exquisitely simple, as well as pure. Sir Egerton Brydges has found out that Byron, in one of his be-praised paradoxical beauties, either copied, or coincided with, our poet. In the 'Bride of Abydos' ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... working-classes shrewd men are now going about putting some very awkward questions which seem paradoxical at first sight, but which are quite understood by many intelligent men to whom they are addressed. The query "Are we wealthy?" seems easy enough to answer; and of course a rapid and superficial observer gives an affirmative in reply. It seems so obvious! ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Quisante as she had at old Foster the maltster. She could not; Foster was not part of her life, near and close to her, her chosen husband, the father of her child. Unless she clung to her effort, and to her paradoxical much-disappointed hope, her life and the thought of what she had done with it would become unendurable. Dick and his wife had not quite understood ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... heard denied, namely, that an Irish peasant—for their author was no more—may write at least correctly in the matter of measure, language, and rhyme; and I shall add several extracts in further illustration of the same fact, a fact whose assertion, it must be allowed, may appear somewhat paradoxical even to those who are acquainted, though superficially, with Hibernian composition. The rhymes are, it must be granted, in the generality of such productions, very latitudinarian indeed, and as a veteran votary of the muse once assured me, depend wholly upon the wowls ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Paradoxical as it may seem, his overthrow is the result of a revolution mainly pacific in its nature, and in substance a revolt of public feeling against abuses that have become stereotyped in the system of government by the too long domination of one masterful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... This appears paradoxical, but it is true. A day's labour on a fertile tropical soil is better recompensed when it is directed to grow cotton, than it would be, were the same labour applied to weaving the wool into cloth; for although this climate is suitable for the growth of cotton in the fields, ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... abdominal wall.—It is somewhat paradoxical to say that these injuries possessed special interest from their comparative rarity of occurrence, since they were not of intrinsic importance. Their infrequency depended on the difficulty of striking the body in such a plane as to implicate the belly wall alone, and their interest in the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... refers to persons, it cannot mean slaves. But this is criticism against fact. Slaves are recognized not merely as property, but also as persons—as having a mixed character—as combining the human with the brutal. This is paradoxical, we admit; but slavery is a paradox—the American Constitution is a paradox—the American Union is a paradox—the American Government is a paradox; and if any one of these is to be repudiated on that ground, they all are. That it is the duty of the friends of freedom to deny the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the paradoxical fact that the only men who really ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... be expressed: Owe all men, that you may owe none; owe everything, that you may owe nothing. This sounds paradoxical. But one indebtedness is that of love, an obligation to God. The other is indebtedness to temporal law, an obligation in the eyes of the world. He who makes himself a servant, who takes upon himself love's obligation to all men, goes so far that no one dares complain of omission; indeed, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... affected by the schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle, they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much that is inharmonious and paradoxical, and a frequent lack of concord between the component parts. St. George, standing erect in his niche, holds the shield in front of him, its point resting on the ground. But, notwithstanding the great progress ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... by Plato is paradoxical enough, and seems rather intended to stimulate than to satisfy enquiry. Virtue is knowledge, and therefore virtue can be taught. But virtue is not taught, and therefore in this higher and ideal sense there is no virtue and no knowledge. The teaching of the Sophists ...
— Meno • Plato
... may rightly fail to take a great pride in what has been accomplished by means of the destruction of our natural resources so far as it has gone. It is a paradoxical statement, perhaps, but nevertheless true, because out of this attack on what nature has given we have won a kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are new in the world. For example, ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... the vision is shut in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons. We shall long to be weary of it all again—its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its cold, star-studded nights. It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true, that a society composed altogether of agreeable people would become a terrible bore. We are a "kittle" lot, and hard to please for long. We know how it is in the matter of climate. Why is it that the masses of the human race ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 1913. Paradoxical as it may seem, legislators now became more friendly. The Legislature of 1913 passed by a large majority in both Houses another referendum bill introduced by Senator Robert Glenn but it was vetoed by Governor McGovern ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... consultation as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo, and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he thought quite as much of another reason—his promise to Gwendolen. The sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. It was no treason ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... slay me, yet will I trust in him,' there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... from my subject—a most bitter and revolting one to me, eventually—that I will not return to it just now; nor, indeed, do I even in thought revert to it with any thing like patience or pardon. There are some things, paradoxical as this may seem, we must forget, in order ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... up against a queer case, Steele, and the strangest thing about it is its very simplicity. It's a job for the greenest rookie in the service, and yet I swear that there isn't another man in Saskatchewan to whom I would talk as I am about to talk to you. Rather paradoxical, isn't it?" ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... the purpose, and the matter evolves to serve Him. He Himself only manifests what He is. And on that, many a saying of the great mystics may come to your mind: "Become," says St. Ambrose, "what you are"—a paradoxical phrase; but one that sums up a great truth: become in outer manifestation that which you are in inner reality. That is the object of ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... words were the usual signal given by the good old man when he felt the length of the conversation fatiguing, or felt his favorite ideas paradoxical, though they sometimes were pressed on by arguments the tenor of which he ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own languid, paradoxical self. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... friend, Franz Liszt has been to me. I must enter a little more deeply into the character of this friendship, which to many has seemed paradoxical; indeed, I have been compelled to appear repellent and hostile on so many sides, that I almost feel the want of disclosing all that relates to this ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Commonsense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... would appear paradoxical, if the minor term were there taken in a different sense from that which it bore in its proper premiss. This therefore would be an instance of the fallacy of ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... the cold unfeeling, immovable animal that some people seem to think he is. On the contrary, and paradoxical as it may appear, he is warm-hearted, sympathetic, and generous spirited and his mind often reverts to home, kindred, and friends, when least expected. His love and sympathy for his fellow-soldier is proverbial in the army. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... new invented chemical machines;—a thing equally as impossible as the other, and shewed their ignorance of the causes and nature of diseases. As those who are the most ignorant are generally the greatest boasters, we find that none of them were more so, than that vain, boasting, paradoxical enthusiast Paracelsus, who had acquired great riches by curing a certain disease with a mercurial ointment, the knowledge of which secret he is said to have stolen from Jacobus Berengarius, of Caipo, in his travels thither. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... with the rapacity of the other, these two races, which are identical by reason of their several characteristics, will never perish, never become extinct, except together. But the Jews decline to acknowledge the relationship thus assumed and the paradoxical connexion between themselves and this race of animals; they deny that the idiosyncrasies are in any degree similar, and persist in placing this luminous idea of Fourrier's on a level with that of the sea of lemonade, which will, according to the same ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... chivalrously braves the displeasure of his own people; smiling complacently at their shouts of disapproval, he triumphantly bears it out of their sight and from the fell influence of the possible fenna ghuz. Another strange and seemingly paradoxical phase of these occasions is that when the crowd is shouting out its noisiest protests against the withdrawal of the machine from popular inspection, any of the protestors will eagerly volunteer to help carry the machine inside, should the self-important personage having it in custody ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... present Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on Elizabethan Literature; and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... misgivings; behind this shield, even in rapacity, he had experienced peace of mind, absence of remorse. If he could have put away from him his love for the girl he would have done so willingly. Why should he battle and strive for an unattainable something as intangible as a dream? It was so paradoxical that Allis's love for Mortimer seemed hopeless because of the latter's defeat, while his, Crane's love, was equally hopeless in his ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... appearance in society, of walking gravely across a salon, ascending the tribune with smiling face, imparting solemnity to trifles and treating serious matters lightly; it was a resume of his attitude in life, a paradoxical distinction. Still handsome, despite his fifty-six years,—a beauty attributable to refined taste and perfect proportion, in which the grace of the dandy was intensified by something of a soldierly character in the figure and the haughty expression ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... goods. Thus the orthodox doctrine explains crises as due not to a surplus of products in general, not to a mere disproportion between production and consumption, but to a transient disturbance of the right relation between the several kinds of production; and it adds that it is simply paradoxical to talk of a deficient demand in view of the misery prevailing all over ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... heart to review the case, and even had come to doubt not the justice of his cause, but the absolute sagacity of his conduct. This being so, he was disinclined to talk about it. The suggestion of the regimental wise men put him in a difficult position. He was disgusted at it, and this disgust, by a paradoxical logic, reawakened his animosity against Lieut. D'Hubert. Was he to be pestered with this fellow for ever—the fellow who had an infernal knack of getting round people somehow? And yet it was difficult to refuse point blank ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist, it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo Ornstein from writing an opera. Berlioz ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... embryo can only be judged of from the vessels of the testa.* And in Lemna I have found an apparent inversion of the embryo with relation to the apex of the nucleus. In this genus, however, such other peculiarities of structure and economy exist, that, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, I consider the exception rather as confirming than lessening the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... merely and immediately and precisely that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and to the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... trust writers more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume noble attitudes or ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... criticised by some because they represent non-productive expenditure of energy. On the other hand, no energy ever expended by man is so highly productive of so precious a material as results from manly athletic sports. The products of these games are the substances consumed by them, paradoxical as that may at first appear. The use of brain, muscle and glands and the consumption of the cell substances of these tissues results in the development of the nerve, muscle and gland cells into a condition larger, better ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... it is a curious and a paradoxical thing that no man of masculine character can read the novels written by women to-day, unless he has to; that is, unless he is a book-reviewer, publisher's reader, magazine editor, proofreader, or some such thing. And the reason he can't do it, in view of George Moore's idea and Miss Austen's ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... "Paradoxical, as it assuredly is, I am convinced that Spinoza's innocence and virtue, guarded and matured into invincible habit of being, by a life of constant meditation and of intellectual pursuit, were the conditions or temptations, 'sine quibus non' of his forming and maintaining ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... deputies, have found no lack of subjects for the pencil in the ridicules and rascalities of common life. We have said that public decency is greater amongst the French than amongst us, which, to some of our readers, may appear paradoxical; but we shall not attempt to argue that, in private roguery, our neighbors are not our equals. The proces of Gisquet, which has appeared lately in the papers, shows how deep the demoralization must be, and how a Government, based itself on dishonesty (a tyranny, that is, under the title and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... paradox!" exclaimed Albert. "Not so paradoxical as you imagine," I replied. "You allow that we designate a disease as mortal when nature is so severely attacked, and her strength so far exhausted, that she cannot possibly recover her former condition under any change ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... pressed too far. Here, as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities to a liberal—and in their century somewhat paradoxical—enthusiasm in antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are mere ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... ponder over the performance with the look-out of a critic, and to draw up forsooth a deep learned digest of strictures on a composition, of which, in fact, until I read the book, I did not even know the first principles. I own, Sir, that at first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a jew's-harp: that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... be his wish. His walking-stick was laid upon the table, and silence at once fell upon all. In like manner, before that editor who should trouble himself and his readers with attempting to refute Johnson's arguments, paradoxical as they often were, should be placed Reynolds's portrait of that 'labouring working mind[9].' It might make him reflect that if the mighty reasoner could rise up and meet him face to face, he would be sure, on which ever side the right might be, even ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Goethe, the qualities without which no poet can be great, and his condemnation of Racine because he is without them, is a fallacy in criticism. There is only one way to judge a poet, as Wordsworth, with that paradoxical sobriety so characteristic of him, has pointed out—and that is, by loving him. But Mr. Bailey, with regard to Racine at any rate, has not followed the advice of Wordsworth. Let us look a little more closely into the nature of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... are an article on America in the National, and on Montalembert in the Edinburgh, and one on Macaulay in the North Briton, of which I am not proud. Froude's History I have not yet seen. I hope now, as I write less, I shall have more time for reading. It seems to be somewhat paradoxical. By the way, is not Carlyle sadly gone off? I met him the other day, and he did nothing but blaspheme, and pour out a torrent of bad language against blackguards, fools, and devils that was appalling to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... instead of the father's. I noticed that at Acoma the children seemed to be obedient to their parents and respectful to age, as I have invariably found them to be in all partially civilized countries of the world; for, paradoxical as it may seem, it is only in highly civilized communities, where individualism is cultivated at the expense of strict discipline and parental control, that children become indifferent to their fathers and mothers, and insolent to their ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... has not usurped his rather paradoxical name. He retires to the midst of the sea-weed and algae. On his body and all round his head he bears fringed appendages which, by their resemblance to the leaves of marine plants, aid the animal to conceal himself. The colour of his body also does not contrast with neighbouring ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... with passages where, in a jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him perittutatos, and saw the humour of it—and one would expect to find in his work the force of emphatic condensation and the magic ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... emancipation of woman, as interpreted and practically applied today, has failed to reach that great end. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free. This may sound paradoxical, but is, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... found Rose a very congenial companion, though I never felt sure what he thought, and never aired my enthusiasms in his presence. He had great aplomb, and was troubled by no shyness nor hesitation. There was a touch of frostiness at times between him and Father Payne. Rose was paradoxical and whimsical, and was apt to support fantastic positions with apparent earnestness. But he was an extremely capable and sensible man, and had a knack of dropping his contentiousness the moment it began to give offence. He was by far the most mundane of us, and had ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the immense popularity of Mark Twain, it may seem paradoxical to call Lowell our greatest American humorist. Yet in the refined and artistic qualities of humorous writing and in the genuineness of the native flavor his work is certainly superior to any other humorous writing that is ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... enclosure, the railway station and the foreshore. He was alone, as always. That a man who, since the great folly of his life, had obstinately cultivated solitude should make holiday in Monte Carlo, of all places, is paradoxical enough; but in truth the crowd around the tables, the diners at the hotel, the pigeon-shooters, the whole cosmopolitan gathering of idle rich and predatory poor, were a Spectacle to him and no more. If once or twice a day he staked a few napoleons ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Paradoxical as it may appear, the primary cause of the Glacial epoch may be, after all, an elevation of the temperature in the tropics, causing a greater amount of evaporation in the equatorial regions, and consequently a greater ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... And why this paradoxical situation? Why do we at the same time prepare for war and work for peace? It is simply because many of our statesmen honestly believe that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. It is true ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... far more powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
