"Self-contradictory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she was half disappointed, in spite of her remorse, at his not being as miserable as she had expected. Still, if he had overcome the passion, it was so much better for him. But yet Valencia hardly wished that he should have overcome it, so self-contradictory is woman's heart; and her pity had sunk to half-ebb, and her self-complacency was rising with a flowing tide, as he chatted on quietly, but genially, about the voyage, and the scenery, and Snowdon, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... results were valid may well be doubted. But Kant undoubtedly deserves credit for two things: first, for having perceived that we have a priori knowledge which is not purely 'analytic', i.e. such that the opposite would be self-contradictory, and secondly, for having made evident the philosophical importance ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... the Battle which our Boy-Friend Johann Wolfgang watched with such interest, from his garret-window, hour after hour; all Frankfurt simmering round him, in such a whirlpool of self-contradictory emotions; till towards evening, when, in long rows of carts, poor wounded Hessians and Hanoverians came jolting in, and melted every heart into pity, into wailing sorrow, and eagerness to help. A little later, Papa Goethe, stepping downstairs, came across the Official ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all this deep flood of ideas and suggestions that somehow poured about him from the mind of this self-contradictory German, alternately scientist and mystic, O'Malley emerged with his own smaller and vivid personal delight that he would presently himself—escape: escape under the guidance of the big Russian into some remote corner of his own ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... role of supreme importance in the affairs of the country and the world, it is perhaps more than a matter of merely personal interest to underline his salient traits. Let it be premised that a logical and satisfactory analysis is well-nigh impossible, for his nature is self-contradictory, subject to gusts of temperament, and he himself has pictured the struggle that has gone on between the impulsive Irish and the cautious Scotch elements in him. Thus it is that he has handled similar problems ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... early scientific theology) such gods are not infrequently represented as men who have gone up to the sky; this is a natural way of accounting for their superterrestrial abode. Savage conceptions of the origin and history of such figures are usually vague, and their theologies fluctuating and self-contradictory; but there are two points as to which opinion is firm: the god is like men in everything except power, and his functions are universal. He represents not a monotheistic creed (which takes the whole world as the domain of God), but ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... this youngster all along to be evasive, shifting and self-contradictory, even on vital points. She glibly stated anything that came into her mind, and ideas came very rapidly. She told us stories that with a moment's thought she must have known we could ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... of the idea of education as continuous reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory, but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... forces, which regarded them as material entities, may now be regarded as abandoned. Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, etc., which have hitherto been considered under the self-contradictory designation of "Imponderable Elements," or immaterial matter, are now, by common consent, beginning to be ranked as pure forces; having passed through their material stage, they are regarded as kindred and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... no more." The unwillingness to admit it appears to have arisen solely from a fixed persuasion, gratuitously and very generally entertained, that time {96} has a necessary existence, and therefore cannot come to an end. Some have affirmed that when time ends, eternity begins; which is a self-contradictory dogma, because eternity (from [oe]tas) is essentially time. The teaching of Scripture on this point is directly opposed to these views; for the apostle Peter tells those for whose sake he wrote his second ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... last fortnight of Kant's life, he busied himself unceasingly in a way that seemed not merely purposeless but self-contradictory. Twenty times in a minute he would unloose and tie his neck handkerchief—so also with a sort of belt which he wore about his dressing-gown, the moment it was clasped, he unclasped it with impatience, and was then equally impatient to have it clasped again. But no description can convey an ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the dunce's cap on his own head so that it can never he taken off. The commonest Latin phrases, which the dullest schoolboy could not mistranslate, he misunderstands, turning the pleasant sense of the worthy commentator into the most self-contradictory nonsense. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of {287} secundums, culminating in the very peculiar one of self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions are universally self-contradictory. As this is an important matter, it seems worth while to treat it a ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard, an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and valets ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... term, whether be considered the limits to earth's productiveness, and the possibility of increasing material wealth; or whether, rich being more a relative than an absolute term, that the supposition of all rich is self-contradictory: therefore, in a juster sense, the supposition of all rich must be admissible;—the sense, namely, that whenever riches shall be reasonably estimated simply as the means of meeting capacities of enjoyment surveyed and known, then it will be found that the ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... could at once make a man a free man, and leave him a self-degraded slave—make him the very likeness of God, and good only because he could not help being good, would be an idea of the same character—equally absurd, equally self-contradictory. ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... the attempt to combine the nominalist view of the signification of general terms with the retention of the dictum as the basis of all reasoning, that led to the self-contradictory theories disguised under the ultra-nominalism of Hobbes and Condillac, the ontology of the later Kantians, and (in a less degree) the abstract ideas of Locke. It was fancied that the process of inferring new truths was only the substitution of one arbitrary sign ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... would be permanent so that no pralaya could take place. If they were essentially non-active, their non-activity would be permanent, and no creation could take place. Their being both is impossible because self-contradictory. If they were neither, their activity and non-activity would have to depend on an operative cause, and then the operative causes such as the ad/ri/sh/t/a being in permanent proximity to the atoms, permanent activity would result; or else the ad/ri/sh/t/a and so on not being taken ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... part, or outside of it as its cause. Proof. Of unconditionally necessary existence within the world there can be none. The assumption of a first unconditioned link in the chain of cosmical conditions is self-contradictory. For such link or cause, being in time, must be subject to the law of all temporal existence, and so be determined—contrary to the original assumption—by another link ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... that a rise of wages causes an equivalent rise of prices, is, as we formerly observed, self-contradictory: for, if it did so, it would not be a rise of wages; the laborer would get no more of any commodity than he had before, let his money wages rise ever so much; a rise of real wages would be an impossibility. This being equally contrary to reason and to fact, it is evident that a rise of money wages ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... with goodness. It is always promising to disclose itself a little way beyond, and then evading us, slipping from under our fingers just when we are about to touch it. This meaning of goodness is self-contradictory. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... State, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the State retains the semblance of a ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx |
