"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inevitably consequent the one to the other. It remains to the philosopher to discover these mysterious affinities, and it is the proudest triumph of his skill to detect and drag forth some latent chain of causation, which at first sight appears a paradox to the inexperienced observer. Thus many of my readers will doubtless wonder what connection the family of Noah can possibly have with this history; and many will stare when informed that the whole history of this quarter of the world has taken its character ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... yet subdued and humble, since this paradox may be at times in human hearts, was Richard Kendrick, as he stood waiting in the vestibule of St. Luke's, on Christmas morning, for a tryst he had made. Not with Roberta, for it was not possible for her to be present to-day, but with Ruth Gray, that young sister ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... however, for a moment that the present volume is Miss Austen's greatest, as it was her first published, novel, would be a mere exercise in paradox. There are, who swear by Persuasion; there are, who prefer Emma and Mansfield Park; there is a large contingent for Pride and Prejudice; and there is even a section which advocates the pre-eminence of Northanger Abbey. But no one, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... man hath seen God at any time.' What is the tone of the passage? It is reproach. Then he reproaches them that they had not seen God, when no man hath seen God at any time, and Paul says no man can see him! Is there here any paradox? There cannot be the sophism: 'No man hath seen God; ye are to blame that ye have not seen God; therefore all men are to blame that they have not seen God!' If we read, 'No man hath seen God, but some men ought to have seen him,' we do not reap ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... officers ought to be in the Church of Christ now under the New Testament for the well guiding thereof; by which it may notably appear, that in asserting the office of the ruling elder in the Church, we take not upon us to maintain any singular paradox of our own devising, or to hold forth some new light in this old opinionative age: and that the ruling elder is not a church officer first coined at Geneva, and a stranger to the Church of Christ for the first 1500 years, (as the ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... faith. If you have faith, faith in God, faith in the Saviour, faith in things that are true and pure, you need never fear that your house of life will be broken into by burglars. You are secure if you have the lock of faith. Now here is a strange paradox, namely—you lock your door only by opening it. Open your ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... that glorious epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the historian,[637-1] in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men:[638-1] "Good ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... without paradox be it spoken, thy horses at your owne proper costs and charges shall kneed vp to the knees all the while thou art here in spruce beere & lubeck licour. Not a dog thou bringst with thee but shall be banketted with rhenish wine and sturgion. On our shoulders we weare no lamb skin or miniuer like ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... quench my thirst a little... Porter, bring me a lemonade and a glass of English bitter, there's a good fellow. Gentlemen, I will not speak of the moral aspect of our profession nor of its social importance. Doubtless you know better than I the striking and brilliant paradox of Proudhon: La propriete c'est le vol—a paradox if you like, but one that has never yet been refuted by the sermons of cowardly bourgeois or fat priests. For instance: a father accumulates a million by energetic ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... little startled at its real doctrines and intentions. The author has the most supreme and avowed contempt for liberal ideas in Church and State; and for every good-natured axiom about toleration and representative government he spurns from his path as a novelty and paradox. There is nothing dominant in England which he does not oppose. The Whig party he deems the avowed enemies of loyalty, order and religion. The Conservatives, with Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington at their head, he conceives destitute of principle, and the destroyers of the British ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... night, though he had seen never a turn in the road, though he had gone a true and straight course, suddenly he had looked up to find he was headed the opposite way. After facing his goal so long, he was now going from it—and never a turn! It was the wretched paradox of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... illegitimate order."[26] That is to say, we can see how such simple laws as that action and reaction are equal and opposite may have been self-evolved, and from this fact we go on generalising and generalising, until we land ourselves in wholly symbolic and—a paradox is here legitimate—inconceivable conceptions. Now the farther we travel into this region of unrealisable ideas, the less trustworthy is the report that we are able to bring back. The method is in a sense scientific; ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to the peat will break it down rapidly and make it more available as a fertilizer, but until the decomposition reaches a certain point; its effect is to impoverish rather than to enrich the mixture. This seeming paradox can perhaps best be explained by some experiments I have been making with sawdust. A number of plots were prepared and given various treatments, including mixing one surface-inch of sawdust with the soil, and wheat was sown on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... wind-blown ribbons across a desert which isn't a desert, past caravans of camels led by picturesque Mongol horsemen, the Twentieth Century suddenly and violently interjected into the Middle Ages, should be contrast and paradox enough for even the most blase sportsman. I am a naturalist who has wandered into many of the far corners of the earth. I have seen strange men and things, but what I saw on the great Mongolian plateau fairly took my breath away and left me ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... Emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. Without ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... finer in them, there was so much eclat in their stooping to charity. But her knowledge of his character would not allow her to think for a moment that he could say aught but from the bottom of his heart—no, it was one of his one- sided views that led him into paradox. "It was just like papa," and so there was no need to attend to it. It was one of his enthusiasms, he was so very fond of Ethel, probably because of her likeness to himself. Flora thought Ethel put almost too forward—they all helped at Cocksmoor, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... this day been tired, jaded, nay, tormented, by the company of a most worthy, sensible, and learned man, a near relation of mine, who dined and passed the evening with me. This seems a paradox, but is a plain truth; he has no knowledge of the world, no manners, no address; far from talking without book, as is commonly said of people who talk sillily, he only talks by book; which in general conversation is ten times worse. He has formed in ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... same tone, as of one who is exposing an outrageous paradox, Cleon proceeds to deal with the actual subject of debate. To massacre a whole population, was, in his view, a commonplace and ordinary proceeding; and, in the present instance, the only course consistent with prudence and common sense. Those ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... her go. Mrs. Marston would simply have said 'Fiddlesticks!' She could not explain that Reddin's touch drugged her. If Mrs. Marston had ever been made to feel that madness of passivity— which seemed impossible, so that Edward's existence was a paradox—she had long since forgotten it. Besides, Hazel had no words in which to express these things; she was not ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox—and sometimes he realised it—his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, that, if it may, by clever manipulation and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words that Basil's friend had said to him—words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them—had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... age, perhaps—especially in the United States—which rather makes a hero of the business man. For this reason there are many who are ambitious for commercial success. Every year thousands upon thousands of young men and women leave school in order to enter business. By a very natural psychological paradox, there seems to be a fascination about commerce and finance for many young people who have little aptitude for these vocations. Many people, feeling their deficiencies, yearn to convince themselves and others ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young. ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Queen's favour, concurred, and did alike conspire his remove and ruin. But into Ireland he went, where he did the Queen very great and many services, if the surplusage of the measure did not abate the value of the merit, as after-time found to be no paradox to save the Queen's purse, but both herself and my Lord Treasurer Burleigh ever took for good service; he imposed on the Irish the charge for bearing their own arms, which both gave them the possession and taught ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... The esoteric meaning of religious practices. The penetrating power of spiritual insight. The mystery of conversion. The paradox of Self-attainment and the necessity for selflessness. The Oriental teachings regarding the Self. The wisdom of the Illumined Master. The test of fitness for Nirvana. What caused Buddha the greatest anxiety? Experiences ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... and assist in the protection of property, viewed the complications and mysteries of the social system with a simple and penetrating logic. The rich are not dangerous, reasoned Policeman Billings, because they have what they want. But the poor who have not what they want are, despite paradox and precedent, always to be watched closely. A raggedly dressed man walking in a dark, lonely street may be honesty itself. Yet rags, even when worn for virtue's sake, are a dubious assurance of virtue. They are always ominous ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... once more he began to reflect—not to hope—no! Hope, they say dies but with life: but that is a paradox. He still lived, but hope had died. Hope of escape there was none. He was too well guarded. His exasperated enemies, having experienced the difficulty of his capture, were not likely to leave him the slightest chance ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... burning lips—that message will be heard. In this period of strain and suffering the public mind is keyed to its highest pitch, ready to snap at any moment. Strong feeling has generated in many minds intellectual hysteria. "In war time," says E. H. Griggs, "there is a curious paradox of widening radicalism of thought, with constantly decreasing freedom of action and expression. When the discrepancy becomes too great, you have the explosion,—a revolution." Therefore in this time of intellectual ferment, the continued affirmation of truth, and the persistent statement ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... boilers. As their mechanism is much the same as that of ordinary force pumps, which will be described in a later chapter, we may pass at once to the injector, now almost universally used on locomotive, and sometimes on stationary boilers. At first sight the injector is a mechanical paradox, since it employs the steam from a boiler to blow water into the boiler. In Fig. 15 we have an illustration of the principle of an injector. Steam is led from the boiler through pipe A, which terminates in a nozzle surrounded by a cone, E, connected ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... with something more than pain,—to ask it, if only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make out with certainty what it is or whence ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... speak in the mere simplicity of truth, so mysterious is human nature, and so little to be read by him who runs, that almost every weighty aspect of truth upon that theme will be found at first sight to be startling, or sometimes paradoxical. And so little need is there for chasing or courting paradox, that, on the contrary, he who is faithful to his own experiences will find all his efforts little enough to keep down the paradoxical air besieging much of what he knows to be the truth. No man needs to search for paradox in this world ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... apart from the purposes for which it has been given, well illustrates the paradox of form and substance in the development of law. In form its growth is logical. The official theory is that each new decision follows syllogistically from existing precedents. But just as the clavicle in the ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... make my peace with my mother was not surprising, but my old professional mentor, Mr. Hanks, loved a paradox; if he wanted to call a man a fool, he praised him for his wisdom; if he wished to disprove a proposition, he argued for it, adroitly exposing its weakness, and yet ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... of view matter is supposed to be the one reality with which we are in immediate contact, which we see and touch and taste and handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter—matter in the sense of the Materialist—is something which nobody has ever seen, touched, or handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or otherwise come ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... suffered greatly from a scheme of government which did not allow of administration such as Turgot's. In some respects the virtues of Englishmen have been singularly unfavourable to their success in conciliating the goodwill of Ireland. It will always remain a paradox that the nation which has built up the British Empire (with vast help, it may be added, from Ireland) has combined extraordinary talent for legislation with a singular incapacity for consolidating subject ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... flanks. She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking and spreading homely themes over an inept-looking clavier confounding the wits of his children and all men's children down to the last generation. He marvels at the paradox, drums his head with the tattoo: how can a thing as small as he shape and maintain an art out of himself universal enough to carry her daily vigil to crystalled immortality? She ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... prepared to admit the importance to the world of Greek poetry, Greek art, and Greek philosophy, may still feel it rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion specially repays our study at the present day. Greek religion, associated with a romantic, trivial, and not very edifying mythology, has generally seemed one of the weakest spots in the armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I will ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... revolutionary illegalities, besides perhaps altering fundamental articles of the Constitution—such as the right of the Crown to appoint and dismiss Ministers and to dissolve Parliaments—powers which essentially belong to a Constituent Assembly. But he wanted it to be merely Revisionist. The paradox made havoc of his logic; but it no way affected his purpose; which was that, while as Constituent in its nature the Assembly should effect any alterations in the government of the country that he desired, as Revisionist in name it would not ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... 'thinking things together.' Every man, says Hegel, is a philosopher, and in so far as it is the natural tendency of the human mind to connect and unify the manifold phenomena of life, the paradox of the German thinker is not without a measure of truth. But while this is only the occasional pastime of the ordinary individual, it is the conscious and habitual aim of the philosopher. In daily life people are wont to make assumptions which they do not verify, and employ ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... god with a dozen arms; and even then I couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy what my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas.... It's a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I'm perfectly cool, too, which seems a paradox but isn't. And all the while, inside me, is a constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every brush stroke with an 'I told you so!'—if you know what ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... short time he was an enthusiastic modern. But presently he became dissatisfied. The new systems did not go far enough, they were still scientifically inadequate. At the same time they went too far, and carried metaphysical paradox beyond the limits ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... had done oiling his paradox with fresh polysyllables, to make it slip into the banker's narrow understanding, he met with a curious interruption. Jane Hardie fluttered in to say a man was at the door accusing himself of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... rapidity and completeness of assimilation depends directly upon the intimacy of social contact. By a curious paradox, slavery, and particularly household slavery, has probably been, aside from intermarriage, the most ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... dragged themselves away upon leaden feet, yet—apparent paradox—with frightful rapidity; for I now no longer had a household to attend to my wants; my meals were brought to me with unfailing regularity by my guards, but they had apparently been forbidden to communicate with me, for not a word could I get out of them, good, bad, or indifferent. I was not ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... arrange, and His power to execute, it does seem hard to believe that eternal conscious torment will be the fate of any of His creatures. We may see but a short way into the whole scheme of the divine administration; but the heart will refuse to believe in such a paradox. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... and real, and further, are a struggle against continual difficulties, and further still, because anything in the form of accidental injury, or any kind of illness or disability is so very serious in their own sphere. I will explain this seeming paradox of mine. Take the case of a Christmas Pantomime. Surely nobody supposes that the young mother in the pit who falls into fits of laughter when the baby is boiled or sat upon, would be at all diverted ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... the hill, towered a cathedral. The size of it turned the city into a close. Its site, its bulwarks, however, turned the church into a castle. Here was an abbot filling the post of constable. The longer you gazed, the stronger the paradox became. Pictures of peace and war became inextricably confused. Men-at-arms mumbled their offices; steel caps concealed tonsures: embrasures framed precious panes: trumpets sounded the Angelus: mail chinked beneath vestments: sallies became processions: sentinels cried "Pax vobiscum".... ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... which the long-living must pass, and, like all the other experiences of life, it is true only to one's self—it cannot be communicated by words. "Old memories are spectres that do seem to chase the soul out of the world,"—an old quotation which may be admitted without embracing the metaphysical paradox, that "subjective thought is the poison of life," or conceding the sharp sneer ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... yonder church-yard; and perhaps the very tomb which now glistens by the moonbeam is the one which consecrates his memory! That man was passionately addicted to literature;—he had a strong mind; a wonderful grasp of intellect; but his love of paradox and hypothesis quite ruined his faculties. NICAS happened to discover some glaring errors in his last treatise, and the poor man grew sick at heart in consequence. Nothing short of infallibility and invincibility satisfied him; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... are part of some endeavour to surround De Wet, but the whole operations seem to get more obscure. He has played this game for months in this part of the Free State, and is no nearer capture. Thinking over it, one's mental state during a fight is a strange paradox. I suppose it arises from the nature of my work, but, speaking for myself at least, I feel no animosity to any one. Infantry, no doubt, get the lust of battle, but I don't for my part experience anything like it, though gunners tell me they do, which is natural. One feels one is taking ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... maintaining (1) that virtue cannot be taught; (2) that the virtues are one; (3) that virtue is the knowledge of pleasures and pains present and future? These propositions to us have an appearance of paradox—they are really moments or aspects of the truth by the help of which we pass from the old conventional morality to a higher conception of virtue and knowledge. That virtue cannot be taught is a paradox of the same sort as the profession of Socrates ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... perhaps, puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental speculation,—unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by these familiar men,—these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men. He might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its course; but Mr. Hogg ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... "A paradox," Nasha said. "Anyhow, in the morning I think we should send out a search party. And meanwhile we should keep on trying to get the ship in condition for ...
— The Gun • Philip K. Dick
... possible; but that, so far as it is believed, it should not produce any good, but rather a bad effect upon public happiness, is a proposition which it requires very strong evidence to render credible. Yet many have been found to contend for this paradox, and very confident appeals have been made to history and to observation ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... hesitated for a moment, and, then, bracing himself against the shock, he touched his finger gently to this rude old paradox. There was no shock, and, reassured, he leaned across the table and tried with both ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... time to cool and shape itself; then, in order to save your credit with the more captions and scrutinizing, give, at some convenient interval, such an explanation or modification as will show that, after all, you were as wise as your reader. State your paradox in all the startling force of unmitigated diction, and refute it yourself afterwards, or say enough to prove that you could have done so. This, well managed, gives two occasions for brilliant display; a sober statement has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... without being re-minded of a sentence in Huxley's famous essay, On the Physical Basis of Life:—"The living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... rationally enough I must say, that you had made me a present of one before this; the omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence; but it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now diverted from the pursuit of BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his friend Frend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative quantities of mathematicians were merae nugae, things scarcely in rerum natura, and smacking too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Frend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... place him even below Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument, or by exaggerated statements of facts. But, if while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Ministry that he was "well assured that it was the intention of the faction in Boston to cause an insurrection against the crown officers." At this time he favored Lord Hillsborough with a lucid explanation of a paradox,—how a few leaders of bankrupt reputation ruled with a rod of iron the most virtuous town in the world. "It has been a subject of wonder," are the Governor's words, (May 19,1768,) "how the faction which harasses this town, and through it the whole continent, which is known to consist ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... chemistry, and history as he could get hold of. For instance, he does not preach abstinence from flesh on pure a priori grounds, but because "the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth." We catch here what is perhaps the fundamental paradox of his character—the combination of a curious rational hardness with the wildest and most romantic idealism. For all its airiness, his verse was thrown off by a mind no stranger to thought ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... established. This assertion I shall shortly prove, and then leave it to more sagacious politicians than myself, to demonstrate the consistency of what appears to me the most absurd and incongruous paradox that is to be met with in the history of governments. And first that the present system is burdensome to this country, and what is worse, must become every year still more so, is evident from the gradually progressive augmentation ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... allow that it's a great paradox, aunty! If you believe in my doctrine, it turns out a mere delusion; if you don't believe in it, 'tis sure to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... hard. Sez he, "I do not wish to be President again, I shall refuse to be nominated. At the same time I do wish to be President and shall work hard for the nomination if you can understand the paradox." ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... book may have been a mere paradox,(404) the effort of a young mind going through the process through which all young men of thought pass, and especially in an age like Toland's, of trying to understand and explain what they believe. But students who are thus forming their views ought ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of this kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy, "Life is much too important to be taken seriously." Those who look at the matter ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... diverted Windham and roused him from his brooding melancholy. Obed Chute's fancies were certainly whimsical; he had an odd love for paradox and extravagance; he seized the idea that happened to suggest itself, and followed it out with a dry gravity and a solemn air of earnestness which made all that he said seem like his profound conviction. Thus in these conversations Windham never failed to receive entertainment, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the message, that while a State has no right to secede, the Union has no right to coerce, has been universally condemned as a paradox. The popular estimate of Mr. Buchanan's proposition and arguments was forcibly presented at the time by a jesting criticism attributed to Mr. Seward. "I think," said the New York Senator, "the President has conclusively proved two things: ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... innovators of the day, who, rousing men out of their lazy sleep, sound in their ears the tocsin and the clarion, and force them to come forth that they may do battle for their creed. Of all evils, torpor is the most deadly. Give us paradox, give us error, give us what you will, so that you save us from stagnation. It is the cold spirit of routine which is the nightshade of our nature. It sits upon men like a blight, blunting their faculties, withering ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... original. Get headway of personal experience, some power of self-teaching. Then when you have something to work on, organs that act and react on what is presented to them, confront your Italy—whatever it may be—and the Past, and give yourself over to it. The result is paradox and power, a receptive, creative man, an obeying and commanding, but self-centred and self-poised man, world-open, subject to the whole world and yet who has a whole world subject to him, either by turns ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... I would solicit free discussion Upon all points, no matter what or whose, Because as ages upon ages push on, The last is apt the former to accuse Of pillowing its head on a pincushion, Heedless of pricks because it was obtuse. What was a paradox becomes a truth or A something like ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... enlarge and to render as precise as possible this record, which in some places is dim, in others very clear. We cannot do without it, such as it is, and taken as a whole, it is rich in truth. In a spirit of paradox only, can one doubt if there ever were a Greece or a Rome, an Alexander or a Caesar, a feudal Europe overthrown by a series of revolutions, that on the 1st of November 1517 the theses of Luther were seen fixed to the door of the church of Wittenberg, or that the Bastile was ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that, whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive power of the central government, and in England the most palpable evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the French reformers demanded more government, and the English ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... from paradox," said his brother, with something rather like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe that truth is ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... perceiving that many of its passages have been stripped of all logical coherency of thought. The defect which he so clearly sees in the writings of other advocates of necessity, not excepting those who embrace his own paradox in relation to cause and effect, we can ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... determine the exact nature of that struggle, but at length it evolved into the paradox that Helen Rayner had opened his eyes to his duty as a man, that he accepted it, yet found a strange obstacle in the perplexing, tumultuous, sweet fear of ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... grip and stepped back a pace, his expression one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... true conception of Intellectual Freedom. It is the freedom of the individual to follow his star and reach his goal. That star binds him down to certain lines and his freedom is in exact proportion to his fidelity to the lines. The seeming paradox may be puzzling: a concrete example will make it clear. Suppose a man, shipwrecked, finds himself at sea in an open boat, without his bearings or a rudder. He is at the mercy of the wind and wave, without freedom, helpless. ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... when I was in Italy, and I arrived at the conclusion that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it. It would complete the paradox if Father Roberts should help me to see the error of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... prepared for an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was to cure me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a lock ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the Dies Irae. There have been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies Irae is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... does, since he goes, advance, Though he doth not advance who goeth back, And he that seeks, though he on nothing chance, May still by words be said to find a lack. This paradox of having, that is nought In the world's meaning of the things it screens, Is yet true of the substance of pure thought And there means something by the nought it means. For thinking nought does on nought being confer, As giving not is acting not to give, ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... meaning of the favorite paradox of Christ, "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath;" "take therefore the talent from him." The religious faculty is a talent, the most splendid and sacred talent we possess. Yet it is subject to the natural conditions and laws. If any man take his ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Anderson was a woman who did nothing by halves. She was vixenish, she was selfish, she was dishonest and grasping; but she was religious. If any man think this paradox impossible, he has observed character superficially. There are criminals in State's-prison who have been very devout all their lives. Religious questions took hold of Mrs. Anderson's whole nature. She was superstitious, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... understanding him completely; his meaning was not at all times obvious. It was hard to see what he meant for instance by speaking of his provincial side—which was exactly the side she would have taken him most to lack. Was it a harmless paradox, intended to puzzle her? or was it the last refinement of high culture? She trusted she should learn in time; it would be very interesting to learn. If it was provincial to have that harmony, what then was the finish of the capital? And she could put this question in spite of so feeling ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... purpose and the result of the freedom which Christ gives to His disciples and the freedom into which man enters when he fulfils his life. The purpose and result of freedom is service. It sounds to us at first like a contradiction, like a paradox. Great truths very often present themselves to us in the first place as paradoxes, and it is only when we come to combine the two different terms of which they are composed and see how it is only by their meeting that the truth ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... tenderly, if there was still a spice of mischief in it. 'You have found out then the solution of Dr. Maryland's old paradox"Love likes her bonds"?' ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... wrought at the North, the Ossawatomie raid awoke at the South. The main features of Buchanan's administration to hasten the "irrepressible conflict" were the well-weighed words of the Chief Justice and the wild invasion of a border ruffian. Strange paradox, but such were the influences at work in those disordered times. Men lost their moorings, and political parties abandoned settled policies. Events crowded with remorseless impact ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... precisely opposite we fail to glimpse the ephemeral lights obscuring the truly great. The lesson seems never to be learned; indeed it can, of course, never be learned. For that would imply an eternal paradox that the present generation must always distrust ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... observations, and illumined it with his theories. His speculations, even when they were, as we now know, quite erroneous, had such an astonishing verisimilitude to the actual facts of nature that they commanded universal assent. Even in these modern days we not unfrequently find lovers of paradox who maintain that Ptolemy's doctrines not only seem ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... my inheritance of storms hath been In other elements, and on the rocks Of perils, overlooked or unforeseen, I have sustained my share of worldly shocks, The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen My errors with defensive paradox;[ac] I have been cunning in mine overthrow, The careful ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... paradox, Mrs. Colum makes two admirable suggestions to remedy this condition of affairs. "A few magazine editors could do a great deal to raise the level of the American short story. They could at once eradicate two of the things that cause a part of the evil—the wordiness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf child and every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very stuff that language is made of, the thought and the experience of his race. The language must be one used by a nation, not an artificial thing. Volapuk is a paradox, unless one has French or English or German or some other language that has grown up in a nation. The deaf child who has only the sign language of De l'Epee is an intellectual Philip Nolan, an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the thoughts of an Englishman, or a ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... never wrote a sentence which he did not believe was true. He will generally be found to be the advocate of the discomfited and the oppressed. So his conclusions are often opposed to popular impressions. This was from no love of paradox, to which he was quite superior; but because in the conduct of his researches, he too often found that the unfortunate are calumniated. His vindication of King James the First, he has himself described as "an affair of literary conscience:" his greater work on the Life and Times of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... resolved to ornament the whole sanctuary of his church with intersecting semicircles, conceived the idea of opening them, by way of windows, which at once produced a series of highly-pointed arches." Hence arose the seeming paradox, that "the intersection of two circular arches in the church of St. Cross, produced Salisbury steeple." Conclusive as this hypothesis may appear, it has been much controverted, and among its opponents have been men of great practical knowledge in architecture. Messrs. Brayley ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... inescapable, cumulative, between science and common sense, on one side, and love, of various types, on the other. It is what Mr. Bernard Shaw has called a "drama of discussion"; it has the splendid movement of the best Shaw plays, unrelieved—and undiluted—by Shavian paradox, wit, and irony. We imagine that many audiences at the Fulton Theater were astonished at the play's showing of sheer strength as acted drama. Possibly it might not interest the general public; probably it would be inadvisable to present ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... (1906), Beside Still Waters (1907), and Thy Rod and Thy Staff (1912) have strengthened faith and proved a tonic to many. Chesterton is a suggestive and stimulating essayist in spite of the fact that he often bombards his readers with too much paradox. Early in life he was an agnostic and a follower of Herbert Spencer, but he later became a champion of Christian faith. Sometimes Chesterton seems to be merely clever, but he is usually too thought-provoking to be read passively. His Robert Browning ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... on his brilliant paradox, regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... even supposing that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. In the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answering ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... very good material to go on. He has been unfortunate in attracting the notice of popular writers such as Burnet, Campbell, and Macaulay, who have all found him a convenient subject for picturesque abuse; and a tendency to not too ingenious paradox diminishes the value of the work of a more recent biographer written from the opposite ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... feature of our age that the highest walk of the real-life drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance should be the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and imaginative. What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce here. The greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a railroad contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that magnetic captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than any one I ever listened to. He scorned the pictorial, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... this war, as the master mind of all the ages said of adversity, that "its uses are sweet," even though they be as a precious jewel shining in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. While the world-war has brutalized men, it has as a moral paradox added immeasurably to the sum of human nobility. Its epic grandeur is only beginning to reveal itself, and in it the human soul has reached the high water marker ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... has observed how much will be believed, if only published with the apparent authority of a few known names, and announced with a sufficient parade of technical verbiage; nor is it so easy as might be thought, even for those who are acquainted with the facts, to disprove either a hoax or a paradox. Nothing, indeed, can much more thoroughly perplex and confound a student of science than to be asked to prove, for example, that the earth is not flat, or the moon not inhabited by creatures like ourselves; ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... both admired and looked upon him—with reverence, even with enthusiasm. She was eager for his praise, distressed by his censure. Practically and morally, patriotically, above all, she despised him, thought him 'a worm and no man'! There was the paradox of the situation and as full of tingling challenge and ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Charles Osborne was yet ill, had felt a childish diminution of her affection for her convalescent dove, whilst at the same time something whispered to her that it possessed a stronger interest in her heart than it had ever done before. This may seem a paradox to such of our readers as have never been in love; but it is not at all irreconcilable to the analogous and often conflicting states of feeling produced by that strange and mysterious passion. The innocent girl was wont, as frequently as she could without ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... circumstances. Russians are the children of vast plains and forests, dry air, and extremes of heat and cold; the English, of the sea, small, uneven hedge-rowed landscapes, mist, and mean temperatures. By an ironical paradox, we English have achieved a real liberty of speech and action, even now denied to Russians, who naturally far surpass us in desire to turn things inside out and see of what they are made. The political arrangements of a country are based on temperament; and a political freedom which ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... gained no small point, since you make so light of departing from common phrases and opinions; it being a main part of our inquiry, to examine whose notions are widest of the common road, and most repugnant to the general sense of the world. But, can you think it no more than a philosophical paradox, to say that REAL SOUNDS ARE NEVER HEARD, and that the idea of them is obtained by some other sense? And is there nothing in this contrary to nature and ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... the change which transformed the party. Somebody mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody, it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the criterion with his ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... truly a Semite in spirit. We have so thoroughly confused, distorted and forgotten all the holy and true traditions, we have so thoroughly lost the habit of applying our reason to the lucid, old truths learned by heart, that this statement may sound like a paradox. ...
— The Shield • Various
... itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of philosophes, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it is called—yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a story of that sort—well, it's ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... returned to the library and found Patricia in tears, was still having its effects upon him, for he did not understand the cause for those tears. He knew only that he had made her cry, that her abandonment of grief was due to his acts, and her father's. By a strange paradox, he pitied himself as deeply as he did the woman he loved. He felt that he had been forced into a second false position by so readily accepting the terms Patricia had insisted upon for their betrothal. She had told him plainly that if she ever became his wife at all, the fact could be accomplished ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... come to a passage with a fixed idea it is always easy to get out of it what we wish to find. As to the relevancy or irrelevancy of the clause in Matt. xxii. 14 I shall say nothing, because it is in either case undoubtedly genuine. But it is surely a strange paradox to maintain that the words 'Many were created but few shall be saved' are nearer in meaning to 'Many are called but few chosen' than the repetition of those very words themselves. Our author has forgotten to ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... casuistry, but only to exhibit the ideal of patient virtue which refuses to do the least evil in order to avoid the greatest, and to show his master maintaining in death the opinions which he had professed in his life. Not 'the world,' but the 'one wise man,' is still the paradox of Socrates in his last hours. He must be guided by reason, although her conclusions may be fatal to him. The remarkable sentiment that the wicked can do neither good nor evil is true, if taken in the sense, which he means, of moral ...
— Crito • Plato
... theory that artistic power was not an intellectual faculty, but I could not quite determine whether he was not putting it forth as mere paradox. One could fancy the paroxysm of rage into which Haydon would have been thrown had such a theory been advanced in his presence; or Fuseli, who, as Haydon reports, exclaimed, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles, with his strange accent, "Those Greeks, they were godes." But the thought of Michel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... in nature, that is quite clear," said Mrs. Logan. "Yet how it should be that I should think so—I who knew and nursed him from his infancy—there lies the paradox. As you said once before, we have nothing but our senses to depend on, and, if you and I believe that we see a person, why, we do see him. Whose word, or whose reasoning can convince us against our own senses? We will disguise ourselves as poor ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... might have hoped to have come off for eight battalions. Then they tell you that the French had four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is still a stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the French.[1] This loss was balanced by a pompous ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... must be the paradox myself,' Hazel answered with a half laugh. 'I could do that—I could bear the arrows: I think I could. But you never saw anybody, sir, that liked giving up— ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... another advantage if this bill is passed. The very strength at which we are aiming necessarily renders us pacific. This sounds like a paradox, but ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of the kingdom of Judah, and that the Pentateuch in its present compass was not publicly accepted as authoritative till the reformation of Ezra—declared themselves convinced by Wellhausen's arguments. Before 1878 the Grafian hypothesis was neglected or treated as a paradox in most German universities, although some individual scholars of great name were known to have reached by independent inquiry similar views to those for which Graf was the recognised sponsor, and although in Holland the writings of Professor ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... author no injustice in saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his epigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox than the sober guise of truth. The intelligent and well-informed reader of the volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse the decisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan's hand. And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... use of a paradox, it is not done when it is done; for this reason, there is the conscience to torment the evil-doer while living, and the dread of punishment in another world after death: the "bank and shoal of time" refers to the interval between life and death, and to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox? ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... enlightened French traveller passing to these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to the Mainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rent by wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not in the way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have in my mind merely the relative depth and extent—the non-insularity, in fact—of the impressions made by the several nations on the world. But this island ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... are thinking perhaps, without saying so, that I am maintaining a hard paradox. To look for the source of liberty of conscience in religion, is not this to forget that the Christian Church has often marked its passage in history by a long track of blood rendered visible by the funereal light of the stake? I forget nothing, Sirs, and I beg of you not to forget ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... cruel illusions of their illegitimate governors. Calvin is right, when, after a careful reservation of the duties of private citizens to their government at war, he pronounces that "Jeremiah could not have brought better counsel" to the civilians and soldiers of Jerusalem.(592) And it is no paradox to say that the Prophet's sincerity in giving such advice is sealed by his heroic refusal to accept it for himself and resolution to share to the end what sufferings the obstinacy of her lords was ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... faith became knowledge. Equally impossible, and for the same reason, is any place for faith on the opposite hypothesis; for if man is to believe nothing but what his reason can comprehend, and to act only upon evidence which amounts to certainly, the same paradox is true; for when there is no reason to doubt, there can be none to believe. Faith ever stands between conflicting probabilities; but her position is (if we may use the metaphor) the centre of gravity between them, and will be proportionally nearer the greater ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... every man. It must be discovered, before one can cry, "Save me or I perish." It must be discovered, before one can feelingly assent to Christ's words, "Without me ye can do nothing." It must be discovered, before one can understand the Christian paradox, "When I am weak, then am I strong." To aid the mind, in coming to the conscious experience of the truth taught ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... it. His tenet is always singular and aloof from the vulgar as he can, from which you must not hope to wrest him. He has an excellent humour for an heretic, and in these days made the first Arminian. He prefers Ramus before Aristotle, and Paracelsus before Galen,[22] [and whosoever with most paradox is commended.] He much pities the world that has no more insight in his parts, when he is too well discovered even to this very thought. A flatterer is a dunce to him, for he can tell him nothing but what he knows before: and yet he loves him too, because he is like himself. ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... dreamed, methought what a strange paradox is human nature. How often the night's convivialities are followed by despondent morning reflections! In the evening we grow valiant over the inspiriting converse and the inspiring glass; in the morning we are tame and calculating. The artificial gaslight disappears, and the sober, grey morning ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... too often the result of thoughtlessness; of a wish to get rid of truths unwelcome to the heart; of a vain love of paradox, or perhaps, in many cases, (as a friend of mine said,) of an amiable wish to frighten "mammas and maiden aunts." But let us be assured that a frivolous sceptic,—a sceptic indeed,—after duly pondering and feeling the doubts he professes ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... various ways, she has come to be almost the topic of the age, and strangely enough is she considered. According to the standpoint of the observer, woman is a riddle to be solved, a conundrum to be guessed, a puzzle to be interpreted, a mystery to be explained, a problem to be studied, a paradox to be reconciled. She is a toy or a drudge, a mistress or a servant, a queen or a slave, as circumstances may decide. She is at once an irresponsible being, who must accept the destiny which comes to her with as little power of resistance as the thistle-down ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... we are led to see where the solution of a great problem and apparent paradox of geology may lie. Satisfactory evidence now exists that some animals in the existing world have been derived by a process of gradual modification from pre-existing forms. It is undeniable, for example, that ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... effrontery of the ambassador's scoundrelly servant in passing himself off for a man of condition formed the point of departure for every conversation. It was discovered that there were but three persons present who had not suspected him from the first; and, by a singular paradox, the most astute of all proved to be old Mr. Bicksit, the traveler, once a visitor at Chateaurien; for he, according to report, had by a coup of diplomacy entrapped the impostor into an admission that there was no such place. However, like poor ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... of course one observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the youngest quantities of art and character taken together that ever arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to something more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self- consciousness, the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Overland's broad shoulders stooped beneath the weight of the heavy stock saddle. Something in the man's humorous simplicity, his entire willingness to serve those whom he liked and his stiff indifference to all others, appealed to Winthrop. So this flotsam of the range, this erstwhile tramp, this paradox of coarseness and sentiment, had an object in life? A laudable object: that of serving with his sincerest effort the boy friend he had picked up on ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... vast exaltation drove out everything that had been oppressing him for so long. He was free! He was free of the thing that had been driving him to death. Joy, so overwhelming in its rush that he almost collapsed as it assailed him, swept aside every vestige of resistance,—and, paradox of paradoxes,—made a man of him! He was a man and he would—But even as his jaw set and his body straightened in its old, dominant strength, she opened the door and passed into the dim ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... of particular statements is confined to the use of a single method, which, by a curious paradox, is the study of the universal conditions under which documents are composed. The information which is not furnished by the general study of the author may be sought for by a consideration of the necessary processes of the human mind; for, since these are universal, they must appear ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... the life and death of Jesus all previous revelations of the Father's heart are surpassed, if it is true and only if it is true, as He Himself said, that 'I and the Father are one,' can Paul's words here be anything but an incredible paradox. But unless these great words close and crown the Apostle's glowing vision, it is maimed and imperfect, and Jesus interposes between loving hearts and God. One could almost venture to believe that at the back of Paul's mind, when he wrote these words, was some remembrance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... has taught me that love and hate for the same object can exist in the same heart, and at the same time. If this be a paradox, I am ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... had in my mind the apprehension of an emergency of a different nature. Germany was more likely to attack France than ourselves. The German Emperor had told me that, altho he was trying to develop good relations with France, he was finding it difficult. This seemed to me ominous. The paradox presented itself that a war with Germany in which we were alone would be easier to meet than a war in which France was attacked along with us; for if Germany succeeded in over-running France she might establish naval bases on the northern Channel ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... over now; this was the beginning of the end; the shadow had fallen. By that paradox of nature which makes disaster itself less hard to bear than the apprehension of disaster, Ralph felt relieved when he knew the worst. There was much of the mystery still unexplained, but the morrow would reveal it; and Ralph lay down ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it— consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty—and hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we do not ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler |
