"Antithesis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rhetoric," he writes, "if we observe that it employs but one simple principle in practice, and that it applies this, not only to the ordering of the single sentence, but in every structural relation[17]": and this simple principle is "the inducement of artificial emphasis through Antithesis and Repetition—Antithesis to give pointed expression to the thought, Repetition to enforce it[18]." When Lyly set out to write his novel, it seemed that his intention was to produce a most elaborate essay in antithesis. The ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... politics. The revolutionary movement meant that governments in general were, for the time, the natural enemies of 'reason.' Philosophers who upon any ground sympathised with the movement took for their watchword 'liberty,' which, understood absolutely, is the antithesis to all authority. They then sought to deduce the doctrine of liberty from their own philosophy, whatever that might be. The a priori school discovered that kings and priests and nobles interfered with a supposed 'order of nature,' or with the abstract 'rights of man.' The utilitarian's ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of Man, it appears from Mr. SPENCER WALPOLE'S book, has thriven on Home Rule. We all know that Club Land gets on very well, Club-law being administered by men only, seeing that men only are the governing and governed. But "Home" is the antithesis of the Club, and Home Rule, domestically, means Female sovereignty. In the Isle of Man-sans-Woman there can be no Home Rule properly so called. It must be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... pursuit of seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now, the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a floating sisterhood ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... morning of the 4th, at six o'clock, he called his son to his bed-side, and ordered him to bring him a paper containing his last political opinions. "Add to it," he said, with all his old love of antithesis, "that I die with a love of liberty in my heart, and this declaration in favour of my country, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... may be sure, was profoundly agitated. The whole elements of the scene were almost scenically disposed; the law of antagonism having perhaps never been employed with so much effect: the little quiet brook presenting a direct, antithesis to its grand political character; and the innocent dawn, with its pure, untroubled repose, contrasting potently, to a man of any intellectual sensibility, with the long chaos of bloodshed, darkness, and anarchy, which was to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Heracleitus are worthy of the closest study. Intensely interesting, for example, is his doctrine that strife is the condition of harmony, and indeed of existence. Schelling reproduced this idea in his well-known theory of polarity; Hegel developed it in his dialectic triad— Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis; and the electrical theories of matter and force now in vogue fall easily into line with it—not to speak of the dominant theory of evolution as involving a struggle for existence, and as applied in well-nigh all departments of enquiry and research. But it is enough to have grasped ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... strange in her voice as she looked into the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear. Ah, but she had amazing beauty, and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled womanliness! The two women presented a fine bit of antithesis, Kitty, flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the town, exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth. And in Judith there was a gemlike quality: it was in the bloom of her skin, the iridescent radiance of her hair, that was bluish, like ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... extremely rare, carelessly letting fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his strength lay. In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man, with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always affix very precise ideas to the words he used!" Then we have Byron, who wrote for ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... thither, he being one of the 'enduring dead.' But the 'deaf and viperous murderer' must not hope for a like destiny. His spirit, after death, will be merely like 'cold embers,' cumbering the 'hearth of shame.' As a rhetorical antithesis, this serves its purpose well: no doubt Shelley would not have pretended that it is a strictly reasoned antithesis as well, or furnishes a full account of the post-mortem fate of the ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... use of figurative language is also an aid to clearness and to force. Simile, metaphor, personification, antithesis, balance, climax, rhetorical question, and repetition are all effective aids in the presentation of argument. The speeches of great orators are replete with expressions of this sort. Burke, in his Speech on Conciliation, says, "Despotism ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... The antithesis of the one expression to the other did not annoy her; rather she was sensitive to a tender exultance the recurrence of which, later in the day, subdued her: for Breitmann at tea turned a few phrases of a similar character. Fitzgerald was light-hearted and boyish, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... consequences cannot by that avert them, for the moral disease is followed by physical wreck—if delayed still inevitable. So, physical force is justified, not per se, but as an expression of moral force; where it is unsupported by the higher principle it is evil incarnate. The true antithesis is not between moral force and physical force, but between moral force and moral weakness. That is the fundamental distinction being ignored on all sides. When the time demands and the occasion offers, it is imperative to have recourse to ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... is a more universal aspect of the Magnificat. Essentially it is the presentation of the constant antithesis which runs through all revelation between the flesh and the spirit, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this world. It embodies the conception of God striving to save a world which has revolted from Him, and now at last entering upon that stage of His work which is the beginning of a ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and more that is nonsensical has been written about furniture. Observation tends to justify belief that in general effect the nonsense has proved more potent than its antithesis. ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... and truth: at the dawn of the Christian era, when a new ideal was revealed in Christ: during the period of the Reformation, when men threw off the bondage of the past and made a stand for the rights of the individual conscience: and in more recent times, when in the field of political life the antithesis between individual and social instincts had awakened larger and more enlightened views of civic and social responsibility—the study of Ethics, as a science of moral life, has come ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... knew very well that Reginald—Oh, when one thinks how many people there are in this world who do not get what they wish most—and how many people there are—" Ursula paused, involved in her own antithesis, and Sophy ended it for her ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the gay laughter of a woman or the chatter of children could be heard, for the red Martians are a social, pleasure-loving people—in direct antithesis to the cold and morbid race ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... connected together in one great cycle by means of a common destiny running through the actions of all. Hence the restriction to the number three admits of a satisfactory explanation. It is the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. The advantage of this conjunction was that, by the consideration of the connected fables, a more complete gratification was furnished than could possibly be obtained from a single action. The subjects of the three tragedies might be separated by a wide interval of time, or ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them: and you achieve the "Simple Vision" of the poet and the mystic—that synthetic and undistorted apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision of practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... blasphemy of attributing all the suffering of the world to an all-merciful Creator. (Some religions have done this, on the theory that an almighty God stands beyond good and evil.) The devil is a necessary antithesis to God; to deny him is the first step made by the consistent man of science toward that atheism which originates really from the search for a better God. The Horseherd is wrong when he denies the existence of things beyond our power of conception. There are, as can ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... looked up to what was strong. Everything was different from himself, everything forceful, emphatic and clear-cut, exercised a fascination upon him. He tried in an honest, groping fashion, to learn what it was all about. That was why he had taken to Edgar Marten, the antithesis of himself, bright but dogmatic, a slovenly little plebeian but a man who after all had a determined, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Antithesis, or contrast, is one of the two most effective devices at the disposal of any artist, whether he works with words or colors. Its skillful use often enables a newspaper writer to make a good item out of trifling material. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... moreover, not impossible that this whole cycle of the lucky "anti-hero" grew up as a conscious antithesis to the earlier cycle of the genuinely "Clever Lass" (see No. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... to Hegel, "no motionless, eternally self-identical and unchangeable being, but a living, eternal process of absolute self-existence. This process consists in the eternal self-distinction, or antithesis, and equally self-reconciliation or synthesis of those opposites which enter, as necessary elements, into the constitution of the Divine Being. This self-evolution, whereby the absolute enters into antithesis, and returns to itself again, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... by sharing it. Robert Louis was ever discovering new beauties in his wife and she in him. Eliminate the element of surprise and anticipate everything a person can do or say, and love is a mummy. Thus do we get the antithesis—understanding and surprise. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of course, an idea in our time that 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... some ways "Mac's" exact antithesis and in some his twin brother. He was one of those youths who believe in spending prodigally and in all possible haste what little nature has given them. Wherefore, though he was younger than "Mac" appeared to be, he already ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... precedent, it ought to be enough to say that the words are our Lord's words, and that they were thrown by him into a form which readily lends itself to antiphonal use. The very same characteristics of parallelism and antithesis, that make the Psalms so amenable to the purposes of worship, are conspicuous in the BEATITUDES. If the Church of England, for three hundred years, has been willing to give place in her devotions to the Curses of the Old Testament,[73] ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and trivial thing, have a collection of hells quite unique in their varied unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from the thraldom of ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... the present day, whose elegant taste and whose profound acquaintance with the writers of this and the following reign entitle him to be heard with deference, has favored us with his opinion of Euphues in these words. "This production is a tissue of antithesis and alliteration, and therefore justly entitled to the appellation of affected; but we cannot with Berkenhout consider it as a most contemptible piece of nonsense[90]. The moral is uniformly good; the vices and follies of the day are ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the characters of these two friends, the conflicting qualities of sense and spirit, of worldliness and self-immolation, of the most shrewd and literal perspicacity and the most visionary exaltation, which make up the singular antithesis of the Middle Ages. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Jane dragged out a ponderous, red-lined affair, the very antithesis of the silken, down-filled comfortable that rests so lightly on the couch of the ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... the mass of badly recorded facts about popular superstitions. I do not believe in the generally stated opinion that certain superstitions are universally believed or practised. It is difficult to prove a negative, and such evidence is not absolutely scientific, but when it comes in direct antithesis to positive, there does not seem any harm in accepting it. Every class of superstition wants tracing out geographically, and local variants want careful noting. I cannot doubt if this were properly done that many so-called universal superstitions would be found to be distinctly local. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of the novel is a subject which naturally engages the attention of the novelist-critic. Romantic fiction, he thinks may have sufficient justification if it acts as an opiate for tired spirits. A significant antithesis between his point of view in this matter and the more common attitude taken by critics in his time is illustrated by two reviews of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, to which we may refer, though the book was later than those included ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... at mid-day the sunshine barely freckled the cool, mossy knolls where the animals sought refuge from the summer heat of the open and smoothly-shaven lawn. Here and there, on the soft, green sward, was presented that vegetable antithesis, a circlet of martinet poplars standing vis-a-vis to a clump of willows whose long hair threw quivering, fringy shadows when the slanting rays of dying sunlight burnished the white and purple petals nestling among the clover tufts. Rustic seats of bark, cane and metal were scattered through the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... balanced sentences. In balanced sentences one part is balanced against another,—a noun and a noun, an adjective and an adjective, phrase and phrase. Balanced sentences are especially suited to express antithesis, the figure of speech where two ideas are sharply opposed to each other. In the following from Newman, the balancing is admirable: "Inebriated with the cup of insanity, and flung upon the stream of recklessness, she dashes down the cataract of nonsense and whirls amid the pools of confusion." This ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... phrase, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the various precepts that have been enumerated in the preceding chapters. Surely sufficient evidence has been noted to convince a thinking being that reason is a better guide than theism. Belief is the antithesis of reason; reason is rationality; religious ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... reach the people. Even the great national movement which Mr William O'Brien re-created in the United Irish League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute antithesis of all free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of liberty ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... entered, as if by design, his very antithesis: a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... that, in the passage referred to, the condition of the body before and after death is contrasted, but this is merely incidental. The natural antithesis of "a sensible warm motion" is expressed in "a kneaded clod" and "cold obstruction;" but the terms of the other half of the passage are not quite so well balanced. On the other hand, it is not the contrasted condition of each, but ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... so alien and so incongruous, that neither can influence the other, or determine the other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation of Deity. (The doctrine of Occasional Causes.) This is Dualism,— that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter, which Des Cartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into philosophic significance, and which ever since has been the prevailing ontology of the Western world. So deeply has the thought of that master mind inwrought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... on Tolstoi's title, War and Peace. I used to think that he wanted to express the antithesis of these two states, but now I ask myself if he did not connect these two contraries in one and the same folly—if the fortunes of humanity, whether at war or at peace, were not equally a burden to his mind. By all means let us keep faithful ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the other hand, as the forcible culmination of a new rivalry for colonial empire and the dominion of the seas. But these were in truth but local aspects of a comprehensive German ambition expressed in the antithesis Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Bismarck had made the German Empire and raised it to the first place as a European Power. Europe, it was discovered, was a small portion of the globe; and Bismarck's successful ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... never thought him sincere. He is a rhetorician of GENIUS, as they say. But I don't understand him. He is a specimen of perpetual antithesis, without solution. He affects one like one of the old Sophists whom Socrates ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... of the Church, not excepting the Roman Church, there are many scholars who find no difficulty in remaining Christian while accepting the modern scientific view of the world. This is possible to some because the situation in its sharp antithesis is not present to their minds: by making certain compromises on the one side and on the other, and by framing private interpretations of important dogmas, they can retain their faith in both and yet preserve their mental integrity. A large literature is produced, reconciling ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... antithesis—sprightly and small-framed, roguish of look and behavior, without an iota of hoidenishness about her. She was inordinately fond of her brother, and she could not understand how the Corner House girls had managed to get on ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... Endymion could never see where the joke came in; but the fellow had illustrated it with such a wealth of humorous instances, and had kept his ignorant audience for twenty minutes in such fits of laughter, that he never afterwards approached the antithesis but he skirted it with a ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... replied, in his quavering treble, "That's a false antithesis, Rogers. It's quite possible ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... civilizing influence from the beginning. The train that brought his presses from the East brought civilization with it, a somewhat shy and wraithlike civilization, but yet a thing made in the image and containing in itself the germ of that spirit which is the antithesis of barbarism, based on force, being itself the visible expression of the potency of ideas. The Bad Lands Cowboy brought the first tenuous foreshadowing of democratic government to the banks of the Little Missouri, inasmuch as it was an organ which could mould public opinion and through which public ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... details to certain economists, who, apropos of my critique of property, have heaped dilemmas on dilemmas to prove that, if I was not a proprietor, I necessarily must be a communist; all because they did not understand THESIS, ANTITHESIS, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... and self-deceived. He had grown to distrust the emotions of his heart, and so selected a wife with his head. He chose a woman with income, one who was strong, cool-headed, safe and sensible. Miss Milbanke was the antithesis of his mother. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... those persons who repress all external evidence of internal fires, and bear their crosses in silence, or was as cold blooded as a fish and as heartless as a statue. He found the father the exact antithesis of the daughter: a nervous, fretful, irritable individual (gout had him by the heels at the time), who was as full of "yaps" and snarls as any Irish terrier, and as peevish and fussy as a fault-finding old woman. Added to this, he had a way of glancing all round the room, and ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... he stopped himself at that. But his voice was enough for me; the unspoken antithesis was stronger than words could have made it. Scales fell from my eyes. "Where on earth did ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... knew what to expect. Mr. Greeley had not been tried, and though the best known man in his own field of journalism, he was the least known and most doubted in the field of Governmental administration. No other candidate could have presented such an antithesis of strength and of weakness. He was the ablest polemic this country has ever produced. His command of strong, idiomatic, controversial English was unrivaled. His faculty of lucid statement and compact reasoning has never been surpassed. Without the graces of fancy or the arts ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a minority among the general circle of English readers—this work comes recommended by the strongest claims both of interest and instruction. It presents in direct antithesis two most conspicuous representatives of the modern speculative mind of England—Sir W. Hamilton and ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... household, one entirely for children. The boss is a great pal of mine. Name of Farraday—an American. Come on!" And he wheeled her abruptly back the way they had come. She followed unresistingly, intensely amused at his quick, jerky sentences and crisp manner—the very antithesis ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... this subject which is of such weight that in the history of thought it must be assigned a place above all others, is that of Kant in his "Kritik." Here we find two opposing propositions—the thesis that the universe occupies only a finite space and is of finite duration; the antithesis that it is infinite both as regards extent in space and duration in time. Both of these opposing propositions are shown to admit of demonstration with equal force, not directly, but by the methods of reductio ad absurdum. The difficulty, discussed by Kant, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... love to talk of, and the wise to follow as an example," and points to Alexander's foresight as a conqueror, and the "extension of commerce and civilization" which followed his victories. But, surely, the antithesis lies between Alexander the ideal of the young, and Alexander the deterrent example of the old. The phrase, "beacon of the wise," if Hector in Troilus and Cressida (act ii. sc. 2, line 16) is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... among men "respectable not only for the public offices they had held, and for their services to the state, but also for the noble way in which they had endured poverty." There does not, however, seem any very good reason known for their becoming proverbial as the antithesis to revolutionaries.] ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Bates, erect and soldierly, was standing at the rendezvous. With him were two men whom Theydon had never before seen. One, a bulky, stalwart, florid-faced man of forty, had something of the military aspect; the other supplied his direct antithesis, being ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... inferior in interest to its manner. Of that manner, any one who imagines it to be reproduced by Sir Piercie Shafton's extravagances in The Monastery has an entirely false idea. It is much odder than Shaftonese, but also quite different from it. Lyly's two secrets are in the first place an antithesis, more laboured, more monotonous, and infinitely more pointless than Macaulay's—which antithesis seems to have met with not a little favour, and was indeed an obvious expedient for lightening up and giving character to the correct but featureless prose of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the Portraits might form the subject of a separate study. Abjuring antithesis and epigram on the one hand, pomp and declamation on the other, it has yet none of the limpidity, the rapid flow, the incisive directness, of classical French prose. On the contrary, it is full of shadings and undulations. It abounds in caressing epithets, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Herbert Spencer[5] that science or systematised knowledge is of chiefest value both for the guidance of conduct and for the discipline of mind. At the same time we must not fall into the Spencerian error of identifying science "with the study of surrounding phenomena," and in making the antithesis between science and linguistic studies one between dealing with real things on the one hand, and mere words ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... it would be, if Mr. Schlosser were himself more interesting, luxurious to pursue his ignorance as to facts, and the craziness of his judgment as to the valuation of minds, throughout his comparison of Burke with Fox. The force of antithesis brings out into a feeble life of meaning, what, in its own insulation, had been languishing mortally into nonsense. The darkness of his 'Burke' becomes visible darkness under the glimmering that steals upon it from the desperate commonplaces of this 'Fox.' Fox is painted exactly as ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... of respectable regularity either in their reputation or their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square, for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the most disconcerting divarications ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... was so fresh, and her hat so pert against the heavy disorder of the yard, and her eyes were unconsciously so wistful—that Horrocleave caught his breath. He contrasted Rachel with Mrs. Horrocleave, her complete antithesis, and at once felt very sorry for himself and very scornful of Mrs. Horrocleave, and melting with ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Lotte was already betrothed, though the fact was not known to the world. The successful wooer was Johann Christian Kestner, a native of Hanover, and a Secretary of Legation settled in Wetzlar. Kestner was at every point the antithesis of his intruding rival. He was calm, deliberate, unimaginative, yet conspicuously a man of insight and character, with a fund of good sense and good temper, on which the situation made a large draft. "Kestner must be a very good man," was the frequent remark of Merck's ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... I said: 'for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of antithesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all suffering ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... life in which we are founded. 'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each and every one of us IS the One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure as being—whence is all our care—so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... And in that case, he must either himself have created Ahriman, or else Ahriman is as eternal as he; which latter supposition presents us with an absolute, irreconcilable dualism. The better opinion seems, therefore, to be, that behind the two opposing powers of good and evil, the thesis and antithesis of moral life, remains the obscure background of original being, the identity of both, from which both have proceeded, and into ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own—that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this emotional flaccidity ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... latter appears to be inspired by genuine enthusiasm and love of art. The forces of confusion that have dogged the pastoral in all ages show themselves where the poet tells a Christian fable in pagan guise; the antithesis of human and divine love, while suggesting Petrarch's influence over his life, is a theme that runs throughout medieval philosophy and was later embodied by Spenser in his Hymns. One poem stands out from the rest somewhat ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... between 1490 and 1500, a hundred years before its episcopal elevation, and forms a most complete antithesis to Notre-Dame-du-Bourg which it supplanted in 1591. Where Notre-Dame is small, Saint-Jerome is large, where the old church is simple, the newer one is either pretentious or sumptuous, and where the one is Romanesque, the ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... of professional gamblers, who, I am bound to say, usually made good soldiers. One, who was almost abnormally quiet and gentle, was called "Hell Roarer"; while another, who in point of language and deportment was his exact antithesis, was christened "Prayerful James." ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... has been the recent history of the other great branch of the Christian Church—a history developed where it might have been least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly present a more striking antithesis between Religion ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... living Law (Vol. ix., p. 373).—Your correspondent H. P. asks where Aristotle says that a judge is a living law, as the law itself is a dumb judge. The first part of this antithesis is in Eth. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... the limits which bound him in the symphony were not operative in the mass. The very mode of projecting the first movement, the Kyrie, shows the splendor of the conception as it took form in his consciousness. The scheme of the movement can be summed up by the antithesis being presented of humanity, weak and sinful on the one side, and the overwhelming majesty of a just God on the other. It is a prayer for mercy, the cry of the soul in its extremity; the underlying thought being repentance. Here we have the embodiment of prayer, of ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... and divers stimuli, in a manner similar to that of the animal heart. Perhaps the most weird experience was to watch the death-struggle of a plant under the action of poison. Turning from death to its antithesis life and growth, the audience were shown how the latter was made visible by means of the appliances invented by Professor Bose. The infinitesimal growth of a plant became highly magnified in ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... life. The tone is querulous, even peevish at times, and always the egotism and the pride persist, while he seems driven by the whip of desire for intellectual adventure into places where he shrinks from defending himself, or is unable to do so. The antithesis is complete and one is driven to believe that the terrible mutilation to which he had been subjected had broken down his personality and left him in all things less than man. His narrative is full of accusations against all manner of people, ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... well, for I revelled in its very antithesis to life in England. Everything seemed so strange and quiet; the great black rocks casting their shadows over the phosphorescent waves; the star-studded sky, with the pale round moon, across which a gentle breeze wafted silvery gauze-like clouds; the feeling of motion, the sense of freedom, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... members connected by or used disjunctively, generally express contrast or antithesis, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... But much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Naturally the antithesis of old and new was unescapable the chilly September afternoon that I entered the "Roos" gallery. Fresh from The Milk Jug, that miracle in paint by Vermeer (formerly of the Jan Six Collection); from the Rembrandt Night Watch (which was ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drove them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the Mayflower in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right to compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... have said so: but he should have borne in mind that all the great evangelicals have meant much more than this by those words; that on the whole, instead of considering—as he seems to do, and we do—the moral and the spiritual as identical, they have put them in antithesis to each other, and looked down upon "mere morality" just because it did not seem to them to involve that supernatural, transcendental, "mystic" element which they considered that they found in Scripture. From Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them to Wesley, Cecil, and Venn, Newton, Bridges, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... one, frequently opposed to each other. He was an antithesis in human nature—or even a solecism. We possess ample evidence of his shrewdness and of his simplicity; we find the lofty regal style mingled with his familiar bonhommie. Warm, hasty, and volatile, yet with the most patient zeal to disentangle involved deception; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... vile antithesis is that between a man and his faults! If I love a man, I do not love his faults, for they are abstractions, but I love the man IN his faults. Are they not truly himself? He is often more himself in his faults than ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... joke it was certainly a success. If God had made the monkey for no other purpose than to create laughter it wouldn't have been a mistake. The lachrymal glands were placed in us for sorrow to play upon; we are commanded to "weep with those who weep." In antithesis to this the risable nerves were placed in us for mirthful music, and I pity the one who has broken the keys ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... artificers, for their several forms of service. Whence came the oil? From the two olive-trees, which though, as verse 14 shows, they represented the two leaders, yet set forth the truth that their power for their work was from God; for the Bible knows nothing of 'nature' as a substitute for or antithesis to God, and the growth of the olive and its yield of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the "church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad tidings" regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... conviction, a special analysis for each. In fact, having observed in almost every type of created thing two separate motions, he assumed, nay, he asserted, their existence in our human nature, and designated this vital antithesis ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Its absolute antithesis were the gambling dens of '49. Built over-night, destined to remain if the mines were rich, and to melt away if they pinched out, the gambling hells were sometimes the veriest makeshifts. Canvas covered, dirt floored, except for the dancing platform, rough ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... heart. 3. Wealth may seek us but wisdom must be sought. 4. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 5. Occidental manhood springs from self-respect Oriental manhood finds its greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. [Footnote: In this sentence we have a figure of speech called Antithesis, in which things unlike in some particular are set over against each other. Each part shines with its own light and with the light reflected from the other part. Antithesis gives great force to the thought expressed by it. Sentences containing it ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... of the present, himself dimorphous, for both a 'left'-minded and a 'right'-minded Hegel can always be quoted, has best explained the contradictions of life, of history and of the spirit, with his own magic formula. Thesis: affirmation; Antithesis: negation; Synthesis: comprehension! Young man, or rather, comparatively young man! You began life by accepting everything, then went on to denying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehending everything. Be exclusive no longer. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... might have used neve (neu), since from the preceding clause we have to supply ne to et. This is not a very common mode of speaking; but it occurs most frequently when, after a negative clause, et introduces a kind of antithesis, and thus acquires the power of sed. [283] Et non corrects the untrue supposition, that there were no rebels except at Rome. In such a case we can neither use non without et, nor neque. See Zumpt, S 334. [284] 'If Caesar alone is unconcerned, it is more requisite (necessary ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... open fields of thought. The /ut pictura poesis/, so long misunderstood, was at once laid aside: the difference between plastic and speaking art [Footnote: Bildende und Redende Kunst." The expression "speaking art" is used to produce a corresponding antithesis, though "/belles-lettres/ would be the ordinary rendering.—TRANS.] was made clear; the summits of the two now appeared sundered, however near their bases might border on each other. The plastic artist was to keep himself within the bounds of the beautiful, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... he had a mission to fulfil and with a self-sacrificing determination to spare himself no personal labour in the discharge of his duties. But though he bore to his father a certain physical likeness, Philip in character and disposition was almost his antithesis. Silent, reserved, inaccessible, Philip had none of the restless energy or the geniality of Charles, and was as slow and undecided in action as he was bigoted in his opinions and unscrupulous in his determination to compass his ends. He found himself on his accession to power faced with many ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... a lovely delicacy of thought and expression which has kept his reputation secure. He is best known, however, for his prose romance, Euphues, which gave its name to the style of which it was the climax. Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[3] This style, which nowadays seems labored and inartistic, was excessively admired by the Elizabethans. Shakespeare imitated it to some ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... singular, and perhaps I may have been fortunate, but in more than half-a-dozen instances I have found the very parties to whom this character has been given, although high-minded and high-spirited, the very antithesis to the character which has been assigned them. That some do deserve the character is undoubted—but there is no species of calumny to be received with such peculiar caution. It may be right to be on your guard, but it never ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... unison with the peculiar character of subsequent Hebrew poetry; that peculiarity consisting of the repetition of clauses, containing either the same proposition in a slightly different form, or its antithesis; a rhyme of thoughts, if we may so say, instead of a rhyme of sounds, and consequently capable of being preserved ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... and our age, which is preeminently occupied with physical science and material comfort and aggrandizement, is also eminently productive in good poetry. There should be no antithesis between the words physical science and poetry. The secrets of the Universe, the ways of God's working, are surely the highest poetry; but the greater number of scientists have willed a divorce between the material and the spiritual, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... forgiveness. The very greatest and best of them, as St. Paul and St. Augustine, have passed through a violent struggle and a radical revolution, and their whole theological system and religious experience rested on the felt antithesis of sin and grace. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 6th the commander joined. In appearance he is the direct antithesis of the captain, being stout, well knit, and of medium height—the ideal Englishman of the country gentleman type—bluff and hearty, and with a face as cheerful ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... his aspirations and practical suggestions with respect to an ultimate "Christian synthesis." He so far adopts Comte's theory as to speak of religion itself under three successive aspects, historically,—1. Thesis; 2. Antithesis; 3. Synthesis. I made his acquaintance in England; and he inspired confidence at once by his brave independence (incomptis capillis) and self-unconsciousness. J. J. Tayler's address of last month follows in the same ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... himself more in the garden, for, while Lady Merceron and her brother in law took counsel, he strolled through the moonlit shrubberies with Mrs. Marland, and Mrs. Marland was very sympathetically interested in him and his pursuits. She was a little eager woman, the very antithesis in body and mind to Millie Bushell; she had plenty of brains but very little sense, a good deal of charm but no beauty, and, without any counterbalancing defect at all, a hearty liking for handsome young men. She had also ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... pick out a single figure to stand for the finest quality of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of General Joffre. He is something new in history. He is leadership without vulgar ambition. He is the extreme antithesis to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He is the antithesis ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... of Judgment, and is said there to represent the wicked rejected Party, yet it seems to be only on Account of their Similitude to the Sheep, and so to represent the just Fate of Hypocrisy and Hypocrites, and in particular to form the necessary Antithesis in the Story; for else, our whimsical Fancies excepted, a Sheep or a Lamb has a Cloven-Foot as well as a Goat; nay, if the Scripture be of any Value in the Case, 'tis to the Devil's Advantage, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... immediate. Bolshevism is not only the antithesis of Capitalism but its mortal enemy. If Bolshevism persists and spreads through Central Europe, India and China, capitalism will be wiped from ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... tells what he sees and what he imagines with delightful spirit and delightful wit, and tinges the fabric of his fancy with the ever-changing colors of his own versatile personality, fanciful suggestions, homely realism, and bright antithesis. Above all, he has the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... European peace-maker of a hundred years ago, and, however we may choose to regard it, it remains a difficulty, we will not say insuperable, but at all events exceedingly formidable, for the European peace-makers of the twentieth century. The antithesis is the old antithesis between order and progress; between coercion and independence; between the public voice, or, if we like to phrase it so, the public conscience, and the arbitrariness and irresponsibility of individual units. Or we might put the problem ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... his marriage with Helena recalls the Catholic caricature of Luther's marriage; his compact with the devil is such as an apostate might have made. But it is truer to say that Faust is not a caricature of Luther, but his devilish counterpart, just as in early Christian literature Simon Magus is the antithesis of Peter. Faust is the man of Satan as Luther was the man of God; their adventures are somewhat similar ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... outflashings and with a genial warmth and vigour, but it is defaced by false ornament and by a constant anxiety to say fine and forcible things. He seems not to know that simplicity was as rare and as needful a beauty in prose as in verse; he covets the pauses of Sterne and the point and antithesis of Junius, like one who believes that to write prose well he must be ever lively, ever pointed, and ever smart. Yet the account which he wrote of himself to Dr. Moore is one of the most spirited and natural narratives in the language, and composed in a style remote from the strained ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... between the Slavic and the Sanskrit languages indicates the Oriental origin of the Slavonians, which appears also from their mythology. The antithesis of a good and evil principle is met with among most of the Slavic tribes; and even at the present time, in some of their dialects, everything good and beautiful is to them synonymous with the purity of the white color; they call the good spirit the White God, and the evil spirit the Black God. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... toad. Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, In pun, or politics, or tales, or lies. Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies. His wit all see-saw, between that and this, Now high, now low, now make up, now miss, And he himself one vile antithesis. Amphibious thing! that acting either part, The trifling head, or the corrupted heart; Fop at the hostel, flatterer at the board, Now trips a lady, and now struts a Lord. Eve's tempter thus the Rabbins have expressed, A cherub's ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... it is only surrounded, without separating us, would seem to me nothing but a charming antithesis to the sublime frivolity of our marriage. Why should we not take the harshest whim of chance for an excellent jest and a most frolicsome caprice, since we, like our love, are immortal? I can no longer say my love and your love; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Bellamy, the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic state. He had already seen enough to realise that the ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty on the other, still prevailed. He knew enough of the essential factors of life to understand that correlation. And not only were the buildings of the city gigantic and the crowds in the street gigantic, but the voices he had ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... of 14, supernormal in ability, coming from family circumstances which form a remarkable antithesis to his intellectual interests, is found to be a wonderful fabricator. His continuous lying proves to be directly inimical to his own interests and, indeed, his own satisfactions are thwarted by the curious unreliability of his word. The case unfortunately ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Catholic saints and made them subject to the Great Serpent, or Grand Zombi, who is the voudou god. These saints, however, are given voudou names, St. Michael, for example, being Blanc Dani, and St. Peter, Papa Liba. This situation is the antithesis of that to be found in Brittany, where Druidical beliefs, handed down for generations among the peasants, may now be faintly traced running like on odd alien threads through the strong fabric ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... bright, and exhilarating! The one drawback, and the only one, is the north-west wind; and the worst of it is, that it blows very often from this point. However, I am assured that I have not yet seen either a "howling nor'-wester," nor its exact antithesis, "a sutherly buster." ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... nourish the heart more, you would be less of a philosopher, and more of a—" The Parson had the word "Christian" at the tip of his tongue: he suppressed a word that, so spoken, would have been exceedingly irritating, and substituted, with inelegant antithesis, "and more ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... played Uriah Heep, and made the character So "'umble" and so crawly, that for days I loathed my hands, and slapped my fingers well For having knuckles. Thus will I to the tyrant play the slave. An old antithesis. ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... right. Beatrice's name is Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland. I used to sit at my window and hear people call "Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty times in a forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how often they called Towler, every one came before she did. I suppose they spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... a mind to make an epigram," Mr. Waverton announced. "The arrogance of the vulgar, the—the uninstructed—perhaps I lack the mot juste, but quand meme—the mansuetude of the loftier mind. A fine antithesis that, I think." He stood up, walked to the window, and looked out. Away down the hill the fields lay in a mellow mist, the kindly autumn sun made the copses glow golden; it was a benign scene, apt to encourage wit. Mr. Waverton lisped in numbers, but the numbers did not come. He ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Turn, look upon it as the particular Happiness to which Cowley, Ovid and others owe their Reputation, and therefore imitate them only in such Instances; what is Just, Proper and Natural does not seem to be the Question with them, but by what means a quaint Antithesis may be brought about, how one Word may be made to look two Ways, and what will be the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of parents who do not know how to get on, and be one of a big family, is a great blessing. We are taught by antithesis quite as much as by injunction and direction. And chiefest of all we are taught through struggle, and not through immunity in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... spirit, the considerations that swayed the movements of the Grand Fleet at all stages were apparently those of what the enemy might do instead of what might be done to the enemy, the very antithesis of the spirit of Nelson. It is no reflection on the personal courage of the Commander in Chief that he should be moved by the consideration of saving his ships. The existence of the Grand Fleet was, of course, essential to the Allied ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott |
