"Antithetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, it rationalises the world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; it suppresses the world. "World" is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, are both necessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... highly-favored natures, give utterance to themselves in ingenious and figurative expressions. It has been often remarked that indignation makes a man witty; and as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to itself in antithetical comparisons. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... (2) 'Then he that patiently want's burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations: both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an outburst of emotional nonsense—'hey, nonny nonny—hey, nonny nonny!'—as ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... The commentators compare an antithetical sentence attributed to Simonides,—that a picture is a silent poem, and that a poem is a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... the stage is, in the long run, seen in good circumstances, and vice versa; for, in this country, one of the chief elements of crime is poverty. Hence the picture is reversed; we behold a striking contrast—a scene antithetical. We are shown into a miserable garret, and introduced to a vulgar, illiterate, cockneyfied, dirty, dandified linendraper's shopman, in the person of Tittlebat Titmouse. In the midst of his distresses his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... is one letter of this time the sincerity of which is undoubted. It is Pope's announcement to Martha Blount of his father's death. "My poor Father dyed last night," it says. "Believe, since I don't forget you this moment, I never shall. A. Pope." The antithetical touch shows how art had become a second nature with the writer; but his attachment and devotion to his parents is not one of the disputed points ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... favorite form was a couplet, that is, two lines which rhymed and usually made complete sense. This was not inaptly termed "rocking horse meter." The prose writers loved the balanced antithetical sentences used by Dr. Johnson in his comparison of Pope ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... his fashionable chapel to hear him preach: he is much admired, but I don't like his manner or his sermons—too theatrical and affected—too rhetorical and antithetical, evidently more suited to display the talents of the preacher than to do honour to God or good to man. He told me, that if he could preach himself into a deanery, he should think he had preached to some purpose; and could die with a safe conscience, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... safe, you must defend EVEN those places that are not likely to be attacked;" and Tu Mu adds: "How much more, then, those that will be attacked." Taken thus, however, the clause balances less well with the preceding—always a consideration in the highly antithetical style which is natural to the Chinese. Chang Yu, therefore, seems to come nearer the mark in saying: "He who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven [see IV. ss. 7], making it impossible for the enemy to guard against him. This being ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's will. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler ether, a ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... popularity of "The Spectator" was not a little due to the stronger and more daring genius of Steele. His writing, though not so didactic, or so ripe in style, as that of Addison, was antithetical, sparkling, and more calculated to "raise ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... exposition will show how much Irenaeus and the later old Catholic teachers learned from the Gnostics. As a matter of fact the theology of Irenaeus remains a riddle so long as we try to explain it merely from the Apologists and only consider its antithetical relations to Gnosis. Little as we can understand modern orthodox theology from a historical point of view—if the comparison be here allowed—without keeping in mind what it has adopted from Schleiermacher and Hegel, we can ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... succeed in doing so, we should be none the more disposed, on that account, to give assent to this proposition. Consciousness and matter represent to us the most different and antithetical terms of the whole of the knowable. Were the hypothesis to be advanced that one of these elements is capable of engendering the other, we should immediately have to ask ourselves why this generating power and this pre-eminence should be attributed to one ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... and somewhat fanciful development of this conception the Pythagoreans drew up two parallel columns of antithetical principles in nature, ten ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... the grammatical stiffness of prose. This their poets have often acknowledged and lamented. Besides, the Alexandrine with its couplets, with its hemistichs of equal length, is a very symmetrical and monotonous species of verse, and far better adapted for the expression of antithetical maxims, than for the musical delineation of passion with its unequal, abrupt, and erratic course of thoughts. But the main cause lies in a national feature, in the social endeavour never to forget themselves in presence of others, and always to exhibit themselves to the greatest possible advantage. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel |
