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More "Paradoxical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... especially in hilly countries, by reason of the snow and ice. The days are short—a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often forced to rise before the sun in the morning—besides, the country looks dismal—nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight appear—yet we have verified it by experience—having for many years found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long, warm days of summer are an agreeable and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... sentimental. It is not uncommon that a book owes its notoriety and sale to its title, and it is not easy to find a title that will attract attention without being too sensational. The title chosen was paradoxical, for while a nun might be a puritan, it was unthinkable that a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... I wished to be paradoxical, that this doctrine seems strange precisely because it is so common. It is what most people who think at all believe, but what nobody likes to avow. We have become so accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold with unequivocal faith doctrines which are notoriously ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... wealthy by merely waiting till the land increases in value tenfold, while making a living by taking fertility from the soil, has been easy and common in the great agricultural states during the last half-century. But, paradoxical as it may seem, land values have increased while fertility and productiveness have decreased and, with shorter days for higher priced and less efficient farm labor, with more middlemen absorbing the profits between the producer and the consumer, it is now difficult ...
— The Farm That Won't Wear Out • Cyril G. Hopkins
... make every test, every experiment, down to the absurd: the crude absurdity of the moment has sometimes proved to be the truth of the morrow. Besides, the well-known story of the Hive-bee should make us wary of rejecting paradoxical suppositions. Is it not by increasing the size of the cell, by modifying the quality and quantity of the food, that the population of a hive transforms a worker larva into a female or royal larva? It is true that the sex remains the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... then, might be expressed: Owe all men, that you may owe none; owe everything, that you may owe nothing. This sounds paradoxical. But one indebtedness is that of love, an obligation to God. The other is indebtedness to temporal law, an obligation in the eyes of the world. He who makes himself a servant, who takes upon himself love's obligation to all men, goes so far that no one dares complain of omission; indeed, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... because it has found its pure function and ultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and silently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all ultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What astonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand suggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely glutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to the inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian craves the assault of a myriad sensations ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... turned off with extraordinary speed. Of Buckle's large volume of the "History of Civilization" Macaulay wrote in his journal: "I read Buckle's book all day, and got to the end, skipping, of course. A man of talent and of a good deal of reading, but paradoxical and incoherent."[30] John Fiske, I believe, was a slow reader, but he had such a remarkable power of concentration that what he read once was his own. Of this I can give a notable instance. At a meeting in Boston a number of years ago of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... of your voice. My tables, containing six hundred classified superficial phenomena peculiar to all human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according to Bertillon's system. It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder—all ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... to which very little attention is given. Paradoxical as it may seem, all rubber hose is not rubber hose, and because of this many lawns suffer from want of water, because the supposedly rubber hose has proved, when most needed, to be a combination of paper and scrap. A first-quality ...
— Making a Lawn • Luke Joseph Doogue
... if thoughtfully applied, might yield a justification for the paradoxical historian. Much more, therefore, might it yield a justification for us at home, who, sitting at ten thousand miles' distance, take upon us to better the Indian reports written on the spot, to correct their ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... "It sounds paradoxical. We are building airplanes to use in time of war, and will continue to build them for war. We think of war and we think of airplanes. Later on, perhaps, we shall think of airplanes in connection with the wisdom of keeping out ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... experiment—that of looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... that was to stir the universe. But too many of these schemes, alas, proved worthless and as their common fate was the rubbish heap, it is strange that the indefatigable Thomas Watson did not have his faith in pioneer work entirely destroyed. But youth is buoyed up by perpetual hope; and paradoxical as it may seem, his enthusiasm never lagged. Each time he felt, with the inventor, that they might be standing on the brink of gigantic unfoldings and he toiled with energy to bring something practical out of the chaos. And ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt himself pitiably unequal to the task, although ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... alluded to is this: "The stricter tenets of Calvinism, which allow no medium between grace and reprobation, and doom man to eternal punishment for every breach of the moral law, as an equal offence against Infinite truth and justice, proceed (like the paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics), from taking a half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable only to the dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and not excusable from the temptations and frailty of human ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... of external nature, from which they differ, but which, properly speaking, do not deserve the qualification of mental, since they are—or at least the best known of them are—laws of the images, and the images are material elements. Although it may seem absolutely paradoxical, psychology is a science of matter—the science of a part of matter which has the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... doubt not the justice of his cause, but the absolute sagacity of his conduct. This being so, he was disinclined to talk about it. The suggestion of the regimental wise men put him in a difficult position. He was disgusted at it, and this disgust, by a paradoxical logic, reawakened his animosity against Lieut. D'Hubert. Was he to be pestered with this fellow for ever—the fellow who had an infernal knack of getting round people somehow? And yet it was difficult to refuse point blank that ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... it may seem,—a pious but garrulous old gentleman was one time invited to lead in prayer; consenting, he approached the throne of grace with becoming humility, saying, "Paradoxical as it may seem, O Lord, it is nevertheless true," etc., the phrase is a good one, it lingers in the ear,—therefore, once more, —paradoxical as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that those who go about all day in machines do not like to be ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... doubt if he could do much to suit them in America. O, my greatest enemy and benefactor in the whole world is this dumb-hearted mother, this America, in whose iron loins I have been spiritually conceived. Paradoxical, this? But is it not true? Was not the Khalid, now writing to you, born in the cellar? Down there, in the very loins of New York? But alas, our spiritual Mother devours, like a cat, her own children. How then can we live with her ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... is somewhat paradoxical to say that these injuries possessed special interest from their comparative rarity of occurrence, since they were not of intrinsic importance. Their infrequency depended on the difficulty of striking ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... up provisions proportionate to the needs of the egg which it is about to lay know beforehand the sex of that egg? Or is the truth even more paradoxical? What we have to do is to turn this suspicion into a certainty demonstrated by experiment. And first let us find out how ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... history. For the Popes who had gone before him claimed powers which, though extensive, were capable of definition; which, though startling, could in the main be defended by appeal to well-established usage. The new policy led to this paradoxical situation, that precedents were diligently invoked to prove the Pope ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... Duigenan and his ministerial disciples. Such is that well-earned popularity, the result of those extraordinary expeditions, so expensive to ourselves, and so useless to our allies; of those singular enquiries, so exculpatory to the accused and so dissatisfactory to the people; of those paradoxical victories, so honourable, as we are told, to the British name, and so destructive to the best interests of the British nation: above all, such is the reward of a conduct pursued ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... "Paradoxical as it may appear, the primary cause of the Glacial epoch may be, after all, an elevation of the temperature in the tropics, causing a greater amount of evaporation in the equatorial regions, and consequently a greater supply of the raw material of snow in ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... a book that deals with a great number of subjects universal in their scope. The writing is at times too paradoxical, leading to obscurity of thought. There are splendid passages in this book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if at times a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... may sound to-day paradoxical, even irreverent. But to the Greek of the sixth, fifth, and even fourth century B.C., it would have been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following an Athenian to his theatre, on the day of the great Spring Festival ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... but I hold that the emancipation of woman, as interpreted and practically applied today, has failed to reach that great end. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free. This may sound paradoxical, but is, nevertheless, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... and it is amusing to observe that he is unable to suppress his learning even in his prayers. One is reminded of the anecdote of the New England minister, who, in the course of an unctuous prayer, proclaimed, with magisterial authority, "Paradoxical as it may appear, O Lord, it is ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... a whole palace of beauty; but it is in the air,—it is in the air! You know what I mean: it must always be giving with me; she will never care. She never could, having loved once. And it is curious, Helen, but in a certain paradoxical way I'm content she shouldn't. She would not be the woman she is, if she could ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... held as property, and therefore, as the clause refers to persons, it cannot mean slaves. But this is criticism against fact. Slaves are recognized not merely as property, but also as persons—as having a mixed character—as combining the human with the brutal. This is paradoxical, we admit; but slavery is a paradox—the American Constitution is a paradox—the American Union is a paradox—the American Government is a paradox; and if any one of these is to be repudiated on that ground, they all are. That it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... series, there is no escape from the answer that man, the thinker, in thinking God made him.' All the world, including man, is but the reflexion, the revelation in forms of the finite, of an unceasing action of thought of which the ego is the object. Nothing more paradoxical than this conclusion can be imagined. It seems to make the human subject, the man myself, the creator of the universe, and the universe only that which I happen ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... industries whose owners are economically as dependent as the ordinary wage-workers, or even poorer and more to be pitied. Where, on the contrary, it is a stage in social ascent, the petty industry is, paradoxical as the idea may appear, frequently part of the process of industrial concentration. By independent gleaning, it endeavors to find sufficient business to maintain its existence. If it fails in this, its owner falls back to the proletarian level from which, in most instances, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... In the introduction to the Memoirs of Sir Ewan Cameron is a very sensible remark: "It may appear paradoxical: but the editor cannot help hazarding the conjecture that the motives which prompted the Highlanders to support King James were substantially the same as those by which the promoters of the Revolution were actuated." The ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which is adopted by Plato in the Protagoras and other dialogues is repeated until we grow weary of it. The legislator is always addressing the speakers or the youth of the state, and the speakers are constantly making addresses to the legislator. A tendency to a paradoxical manner of statement is also observable. 'We must have drinking,' 'we must have a virtuous tyrant'—this is too much for the duller wits of the Lacedaemonian and Cretan, who at first start back in surprise. More than in any other writing of Plato the tone is hortatory; the laws are sermons as ...
— Laws • Plato
... the neurological standpoint, let us consider it from the psychological standpoint. How are the ideas being modified during the intervals between impressions? Modern psychology has discovered that much memorizing goes on without our knowing it, paradoxical as that may seem. The processes may be described in terms of the doctrine of association, which is that whenever two things have once been associated together in the mind, there is a tendency thereafter "if the first ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... words have sufficed to show that here we are dealing with one of the great mystics of the world. Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, "a simple creature, unlettered," yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought and ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... way—'I give for the life of the world.' And that there may be no misunderstanding, there is a third, deeper, more mysterious statement still: 'My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.' Repulsive and paradoxical, but in its very offensiveness and paradox, proclaiming that it covers a mighty truth, and the truth, brother, is this, the one Food that gives life to will, affections, conscience, understanding, to the whole spirit of a man, is that great Sacrifice of the Incarnate Lord ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book, Burns says, "I own, sir, at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical: that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... only a pretty paradox?" asked the lady, observing that Claudius had thrown himself boldly into a crucial position. Upon his answer would probably depend her opinion of him as being either intelligent or banal It is an easy matter to frame paradoxical questions implying a compliment, but it is no light task to be obliged to answer them oneself. Claudius was not thinking of producing an effect, for the fascination of the dark woman was upon him, and the low, strange voice bewitched him, so ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... This sentence of Schopenhauer's, which he held to be both true and paradoxical, flashed into his mind. He took one of her dolls in his hand, and tried in the kindly way that he had acquired with his patients to make Ingigerd Hahlstroem understand that one does not go through life unpunished in the belief that life is ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... eyes gleaming momentarily with something like the militant enthusiasm that must have enlisted her in the paradoxical ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... sight, hearing, speech. The wonder, I think, with the wise man will be, not that there are deaf and dumb persons to be found here and there among us: but that the average, nay, the majority of mankind, are not deaf and dumb. Paradoxical as this assertion may seem at first, a little thought I believe will prove ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced Dante. But we must remember not to judge races by single and exceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly, Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... we choose to practise and study anything rather than the means by which we shall be unimpeded and free. You say: "Philosophers talk paradoxes." But are there no paradoxes in the other arts? And what is more paradoxical than to puncture a man's eye in order that he may see? If any one said this to a man ignorant of the surgical art, would he not ridicule the speaker? Where is the wonder, then, if in philosophy also many things which are true appear paradoxical to ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... to sit and smile at Quisante as she had at old Foster the maltster. She could not; Foster was not part of her life, near and close to her, her chosen husband, the father of her child. Unless she clung to her effort, and to her paradoxical much-disappointed hope, her life and the thought of what she had done with it would become unendurable. Dick and his wife had not quite understood what ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... England the greatest possible decency and respect with regard to morals and religion is still observed, I have no hesitation in saying that I do not think the New Englanders a religious people. The assertion, I know, is paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that is, if a strong and earnest belief be a necessary element in a religious character: to me it seems to be its very essence and foundation. I am not now speaking of belief in the truth, but belief in something or any thing which ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... drew all eyes on Veronique, and the whole company waited for an explanation of so paradoxical ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... to secure a young lawyer of little experience but of much principle, who was utterly bewildered by the mystery of the case, and the apparently paradoxical scruples of his client, but who worked diligently and hopelessly for him. He saw the flaw in the indictment and pointed it out to Charlton, but told him that as it was merely a technical point he would gain nothing but ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... I thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among worlds, as one feels, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... There is something paradoxical in the descriptions of this fruit by various writers, but all agree that it is inexpressibly good! Says one—writing of the sixteenth century—"It is of such an excellent taste that it surpasses in flavour all the other ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the Statesman may be conveniently embraced under six or seven heads:—(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest; (3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which can hardly ...
— Statesman • Plato
... mounted the steps which lead to the Stock Exchange, or, as Principal, who, though one among them, may be said not to be one of them, observed, we had arrived at the wolves' den, "the secret arcana of which place, with its curious intricacies and perplexing paradoxical systems and principles, I shall now," continued our friend, "endeavour to explain; from which exposition the public will be able to see the monster that is feeding on the vitals of the country, while smiling in its face and tearing at its heart, yet cherished ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring from our facial expressions rather than the other way about. Certainly to an experienced actor, his paint—the mere act of putting it on and looking at himself in the glass as it is applied—effects for him ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the talkative short story that forms a serious stumbling block to the novice is the dialect story. If you have an idea of trying that style of composition, let me warn you: Don't! Dialect stories never were very artistic, for they are a paradoxical attempt to make good literature of poor rhetoric and worse grammar. They have never been recognized or written by any great master of fiction. They are a sign of a degenerate taste, and their production or perusal is a menace to the formation ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... It may appear paradoxical, that ideas can exist, and not be attended to; but all our perceptions are ideas excited by irritation, and succeeded by sensation. Now when these ideas excited by irritation give us neither pleasure nor ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... and the public from the contemplation of nobler and sterner models. In truth, though a rude state of society is that in which great original works are most frequently produced, it is also that in which they are worst appreciated. This may appear paradoxical; but it is proved by experience, and is consistent with reason. To be without any received canons of taste is good for the few who can create, but bad for the many who can only imitate and judge. Great and active minds cannot remain at rest. In a cultivated age ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... APPLIED SCIENCE. Thus far we have been considering science chiefly as an activity which satisfies some men as an activity in itself, by the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual values they derive from it. But a fact at once paradoxical and significant in the history of human progress is that this most impersonal and disinterested of man's activities has been profoundly influential in its practical fruits. The practical application of the sciences rests on the utilization of the exact ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... them is to speak the truth and that I always do. Nothing surprises English people more than truth; they don't like it; they don't pay any attention to those (such as my friend Mr. H. G. Wells and myself) who trade in truth; but they listen and go away saying, 'How very whimsical and paradoxical it all is,' and 'What a clever adventurer the fellow is, to be sure.' 'That was a good joke about duty and beauty being the same thing'—that was a joke I did not make. It is not my kind of joke—but when people begin ascribing to you the jokes of other people, you become a living—I ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... perhaps in the multitude of the stories, paradoxical though it seem, that lies the strength. In the number of them (ninety-two "histories" there are) is an element of universality. It is like the broom: one straw does not make, nor does the loss of one destroy it; somewhere in the mass lies ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own languid, paradoxical self. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... class of men in certain states of society who are manly, but not masculine. There is nothing paradoxical in the statement, nor is it a mere play upon the meanings of words. There are men of all ages, young, middle-aged, and old, who possess many estimable virtues, who show physical courage wherever it is necessary, who are honourable, strong, industrious, and tenacious of purpose, but who undeniably ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the Life Ray is responsible for the miraculous growth of all life in New Eden. The Life Ray is Nature's most powerful force. Yet Nature is often niggardly and paradoxical in her use of her powers. In New Eden, we have forced the powers of creation to take ascendency over the powers ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... "fixed stars.'' In the beginnings of astronomy it was not known that the "fixed stars'' had any motion independent of their apparent annual revolution with the whole sky about the earth as a seeming center. Now, however, we know that the term "fixed stars'' is paradoxical, for there is not a single really fixed object in the whole celestial sphere. The apparent fixity in the positions of the stars is due to their immense distance, combined with the shortness of the time during which we are able to observe them. It is ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... presented a somewhat paradoxical familiarity with the ways of a mysterious Providence. This was exceedingly perplexing to the thoughtful child, whose queries as to justice were too often hushed by parent or teacher. In real life, every child expected, even if he did not receive, a tangible reward for doing the right thing; ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition seemed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a man may, of various pretty faces that had been the undoing of their owners, and wondering a little dimly and confusedly about the paradoxical contrariness of Nature, who gives a man his strongest desires nearly always towards forbidden ends. Why create a beautiful thing, and then create a longing for it, and then probably descend in wrath upon both heads which did but follow the bent she ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... taken sensu proprio. But look at it sensu allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation. What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its "creation out of nothing," and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Why this paradoxical relation of precept to practice? Why is this, the most hygiene-instructed country in the world, the Elysium of the patent-medicine and cocaine traffic? If we have only the expected divergence of achievement from ideal, then there is nothing for us to ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the love of home, that perhaps no one can thoroughly enjoy his home who does not sometimes wander away. They are like exertion and rest, each the complement of the other; so that, though it may seem paradoxical, one of the greatest pleasures of travel is the return; and no one who has not roamed abroad, can realize the devotion which the wanderer feels for Domiduca—the sweet and gentle goddess who ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... the village had thus become of much significance. While it was too far behind the lines to be in grave danger of enemy raids, yet such danger existed to some extent. Wherefore the presence of the "Here-We-Comes"—for the paradoxical double purpose of "resting up" and of ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... that pull it up." "In philosophy," he observes, meaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with his orthodoxy in religion—in philosophy, "where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself:" which is true, we may think, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the "paradoxical" that he actually preferred. Happy, at all events, he still remained—undisturbed and happy—in a hundred native prepossessions, some certainly valueless, some ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... legs, he has never assumed that position for nothing. [Laughter.] My own private opinion, which I confide to you, knowing it will go no further, is that he assumes that tone, as a rule, to draw sovran woman. [Laughter.] Mere man is a paradoxical creature—it is not always possible to distinguish between his sober earnest and his leg-pulling exercises. [Laughter.] One has to be on one's guard, and woe be to the woman who in these days displays that absence of the sense of humor which is such a prominent characteristic of our comic papers. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... piece of property left under his charge by a stranger, he chivalrously braves the displeasure of his own people; smiling complacently at their shouts of disapproval, he triumphantly bears it out of their sight and from the fell influence of the possible fenna ghuz. Another strange and seemingly paradoxical phase of these occasions is that when the crowd is shouting out its noisiest protests against the withdrawal of the machine from popular inspection, any of the protestors will eagerly volunteer to help carry the machine inside, should the self-important personage having it in custody ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... greatly taken to. It seemed then, and it seems to me still, that for one who does not intend to make a living by teaching them, the dead languages, like all other pursuits, are only worth a limited amount of labor. It may appear paradoxical at first, but it is true, that one reason why I did not like Latin and Greek was because I was extremely fond of reading. The case is this: If you are fond of reading and have an evening at your disposal, you will wish to read, will you not? But construing ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... lowering of the temperature by the inert atmospheric nitrogen, renders necessary the combustion of a greater amount of gas to produce the necessary light. In fact, though the statement may appear paradoxical, it is entirely because of its enormous actual temperature that the electric light seems so cool. It is this temperature that renders the proportion of luminous to non-luminous heat greater in the electric light than in our brightest flames. The electric light, moreover, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... "to prove to you that I was correct when I asserted that there was no such thing in this world as liberty, paradoxical as it may appear, Liberty is but Liberty when in bondage. Release her, and she ceases to exist; she has changed her nature and character; for ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... The shrew-type is defined as possessing an "active unimpassioned temperament." In other words, shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"[207] and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... ever on the basis, "All slave-holding is sin; no fellowship with slave-holders." In 1843 an antislavery secession took place, which drew after it a following of six thousand, increased in a few months to fifteen thousand. The paradoxical result of this movement is not without many parallels in church history: After the drawing off of fifteen thousand of the most zealous antislavery men in the church, the antislavery party in the church was vastly stronger, even in numbers, than it ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... they should do. At the same time, though watchful over his own vanity, he was keen and prompt in snubs—playful and challenging retort—to those he liked, but in the nature of scornful exposure, when he had to do with coarseness or coxcombry, or shallow display of sentiment. It was a paradoxical consequence of his suppression of egotism that he was more solicitous to show that you were wrong than that he ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... are never so vivid, so precise, nor so reliable as the sympathetic sensations. In other words, the hearer is better able to judge of the singer's throat action than the singer himself. This may seem a paradoxical statement, but a brief consideration will show it ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... that a humming-bird drowned in honey must experience sensations very similar to mine in her presence. Is it not the Chinese who serve as the greatest of delicacies a lump of ice rolled in hot pastry? The condiment with which she feeds my vanity reminds me of this singular and paradoxical dainty. If you penetrate the warm, sugared, outer crust, you find ice within. But, as my uncle does not anticipate Chinese diet at the table of the marchioness, he desires me to accept her invitation; and, as you are invited, I wish you to do the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... unselfishness, whereby he elects to share the offence and punishment of Eve, is a vice in him, a "bad compliance." Self-abnegation, the duty of Eve, is hardly within the right of Adam; and Dr. Johnson expressed a half-truth in violently paradoxical terms when he said that Milton "thought woman made only for obedience and man only for rebellion." It would be truer, and weaker, to say that Milton thought woman made for the exercise of private, and man for the exercise of public, virtues. Hence in their ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Paradoxical as it may seem, the weed is the best friend the farmer has because it compels him to cultivate his land in order to exterminate the intruder. Cultivation keeps the soil open to air and moisture and conserves the latter. It is best, therefore, ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... this paradoxical plight, she looked with new longing at the shack. She felt that if she were on the other side of that threshold, and it were hers by right, she could stand behind it with some assurance of power against him, some dependence in forces not her own. For a door-sill ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... walled by precipices of red sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence. The least poetical man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Canon, half a day's journey from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... there intervenes that terrible time in the history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it sounds paradoxical, yet there is a ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... are trained and accustomed to refrain from saying or doing at all. He has the self-consciousness of a sensitive child; he is for ever thinking of what people think of him, and trying to create an impression. Then, with a paradoxical sincerity, he confesses that the motive of this or that action was simply to create an impression, and thereby destroys the impression. Sometimes he caps this by wilfully letting it appear that the double move was carefully designed to produce the reverse impression of the first—until ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... rather with the authority of a diplomatic person who had access to cabinet intelligence, than as a simple spectator of the great scenes which were unfolding in Europe. At the time of the French Revolution, he threw out many conjectures, and what were then accounted paradoxical anticipations, especially in regard to military operations, which were as punctually fulfilled as his own memorable conjecture in regard to the hiatus in the planetary system between Mars and Jupiter,[Footnote: ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... can be seen, heard, and learned," he says, "are what I prize the most." This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth. "The sun is new every day," is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection, and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the night. Actual observation ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... more paradoxical than ever. — The late gulp he had of his native air, seems to have blown fresh spirit into all his polemical faculties. I congratulated him the other day on the present flourishing state of his country, observing that the Scots were now in a fair way to wipe off the national reproach of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... brother, she is his para kha (lit. birth sister). Similarly he cannot marry the daughter of his father's paternal uncle. He can, however, marry the daughter of his mother's brother, provided that the brother is dead. This somewhat paradoxical state of affairs is explained by the fact that the children of the mother's brother belong to a different clan to that of the mother, i.e. to the mother's brother's wife's clan. The Khasi, Synteng, War, and Lynngam divisions are not strictly endogamous groups, and there is nothing to prevent intermarriage ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... arguments that tend to disprove what has been asserted; but as I attempt not to affirm what did happen in a period that will still remain very obscure, I flatter myself that I shall not be thought either fantastic or paradoxical, for not blindly adopting an improbable tale, which our historians have never given themselves the ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... Thus Mr. Bailey's attempts to discover, by quotations from Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Goethe, the qualities without which no poet can be great, and his condemnation of Racine because he is without them, is a fallacy in criticism. There is only one way to judge a poet, as Wordsworth, with that paradoxical sobriety so characteristic of him, has pointed out—and that is, by loving him. But Mr. Bailey, with regard to Racine at any rate, has not followed the advice of Wordsworth. Let us look a little more closely into ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... in his first chapter, is 'absolutely essential to value,' but it is 'not the measure of exchangeable value.'[327] A solution of these puzzles may be sought in any modern text-book. Ricardo escapes by an apparently paradoxical conclusion. He is undertaking an impossible problem when he starts from the buyers' desire of an 'utility.' Therefore he turns from the buyers to the sellers. The seller has apparently a measurable ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... great a paradox even for our wise and paradoxical age to endure; therefore I shall handle it with all tenderness, and with the utmost deference to that great and profound majority ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... the Morgante Maggiore ... the brusque transition from piety to ribaldry, from pathos to satire," the paradoxical union of persiflage with gravity, a confession of faith alternating with a profession of mockery and profanity, have puzzled and confounded more than one student and interpreter. An intimate knowledge of the history, the literature, the art, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... school, M. Claude Debussy, has, in his writings in the Revue Blanche and Gil Blas, attacked Wagnerian art. His personality is very French—capricious, poetic, and spirituelle, full of lively intelligence, heedless, independent, scattering new ideas, giving vent to paradoxical caprice, criticising the opinions of centuries with the teasing impertinence of a little street boy, attacking great heroes of music like Gluck, Wagner, and Beethoven, upholding only Bach, Mozart, and Weber, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... say, on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavourable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born "an age too late." ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... half day ashore is, of course, the most novel and exciting; but who, as Mr. Higginson says, can describe his sensations and emotions this first half day? It is a page of travel that has not yet been written. Paradoxical as it may seem, one generally comes out of pickle much fresher than he went in. The sea has given him an enormous appetite for the land. Every one of his senses is like a hungry wolf clamorous to be fed. For my part, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... watch called me with news that the first iceberg was in sight. I had to go up and see it. Yes, there it lay, far to windward, shining like a castle in the rays of the morning sun. It was a big, flat-topped berg of the typical Antarctic form. It will perhaps seem paradoxical when I say that we all greeted this first sight of the ice with satisfaction and joy; an iceberg is usually the last thing to gladden sailors' hearts, but we were not looking at the risk just then. The meeting with the imposing colossus had another significance that had a stronger ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... if many people preferred it to her letters to Musset. In the first place, it is not spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing literature. Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics. It is Nature which speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less sorrowful. They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom. We can easily imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and jealous. We know, too, that more than once ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... "Destroyers", like Nin-sun and the Queen of Hades, Eresh-ki-gal or Allatu. They were accompanied by shadowy male forms ere they became wives of strongly individualized gods, or by child gods, their sons, who might be regarded as "brothers" or "husbands of their mothers", to use the paradoxical Egyptian term. Similarly Great Father deities had vaguely defined wives. The "Semitic" Baal, "the lord", was accompanied by a female reflection of himself—Beltu, "the lady". Shamash, the sun god, had for ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... equality with the worst of theirs—by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book of less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books just noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and the paradox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with a surprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her Evelina (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful Diary, have been the subject of a great ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Andrew McByle was stealing away on tip-toe. This raised Steve's ire, for the thought flashed through his brain that if anybody had a right to run it was he, the boy of the party; and he wanted to make off very badly, but, paradoxical as it may sound, he at the same time did not want to run, but to ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... the shape of the country abets it, the herd can be driven into a corral; sometimes with extra fine mounts they can be run down, but by far the commonest way, paradoxical as it may seem, is ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... centers. I do not think that this is much more exact. In a dream we become no doubt indifferent to logic, but not incapable of logic. There are dreams when we reason with correctness and even with subtlety. I might almost say, at the risk of seeming paradoxical, that the mistake of the dreamer is often in reasoning too much. He would avoid the absurdity if he would remain a simple spectator of the procession of images which compose his dream. But when he strongly desires to ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... Aryans were rival and hostile peoples), but all the traits of each deity, even those depicting the old Aryan conception of their deadly combat, are reproduced in America under circumstances which reveal an ignorance on the part of the artists of the significance of the paradoxical contradictions they are representing. But even many incidents in the early history of the Vedic gods, which were due to arbitrary circumstances in the growth of the legends, reappear in America. To cite one instance (out of scores which might be quoted), in the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and freely—THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY. I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have seen done with admirable effect) ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of the Irish Bull, a paradoxical Bovine whose cross-eyed horns can toss a British commonplace in two directions ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... Christianity, but also of the Gospel in general, which is partly a narrow legal view, partly an enthusiastic one. He has arrived ex errore per veritatem ad errorem; but there are few books from which so much may be learned about early church history as from this paradoxical "Kirchenrecht."] ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... device to remind man to keep sexual intercourse within bounds, for while in moderation it is harmless, in excess it causes great prostration. Exactly the same applies to self-abuse, for, paradoxical as it seems, the real harm is done by the fear of ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... on the confidence which others have in his veracity. And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess himself a child of the older morality. "This book," he says in the preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, 'Dawn of Day,' "This book ... implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in it we break with the faith in morals—why? In obedience to morality! Or what name shall we give to that which passes therein? We should prefer more modest names. But it is past all doubt that ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... be said, all this is too paradoxical, too violently in conflict with what is notorious concerning the religion ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... that she rather liked his looks, though he did not strike her as a very amiable young man. Perhaps she was a bit tired of amiable young men. His face was thin, and refined, and strong—the strength of level brows, straight nose and square chin, with a pair of paradoxical lips, which were curved and womanish in their sensitiveness; the refinement was an intangible expression which belonged to no particular feature but pervaded the whole face. As to his eyes, she was left to speculate upon ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... sixth triennial meeting of the General Missionary Convention, 1829, the committee on the African Mission made this report[191] which in some particulars was paradoxical: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... interposition of those darker powers which he had so long, and hitherto so vainly invoked. He went about his preparations for the meeting in an exaltation of spirit, such as he had never before experienced. Paradoxical as it may seem, absurd as it really was, he was sustained, uplifted, by the sense of immolating himself upon the altar of an ideal cause. He was about to do an ideally evil thing, to the accomplishment of an ideally evil end. Insane as this feeling was, it ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... over the performance with the look-out of a critic, and to draw up forsooth a deep learned digest of strictures on a composition, of which, in fact, until I read the book, I did not even know the first principles. I own, Sir, that at first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a jew's-harp: that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... about politics here," she said, "though I do at home, of course. I must say, though, Mr. Harrington did not seem so very paradoxical." ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... up and found a large hole excavated to a great depth; it was yielding literally nothing, and this determined that paradoxical personage to buy it if it was cheap. "What there is must be somewhere ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... business!" Hamilton objected, raising his head to gaze curiously at this most paradoxical person. "And, now, you are urging me to keep at it. I ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... everything that his most bitter critics say, but he is so much more that his faults and follies sink into ashes before the divine fire of his genius, and we still have the gold. Inconsistent, paradoxical, preposterous—why, yes, of course! Still he is the greatest poet of passion the world has ever seen—don't cavil—passion's ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... have drawn of the actual condition of the colony; after having represented both its agricultural and commercial interests as being already not only in a state of impair, but also of increasing dilapidation and ruin, it may appear somewhat paradoxical that I should attempt to wind up the account with an enumeration of the advantages which it holds out to emigration. If due consideration, however, be given to the nature of the ingredients of which the agricultural body is composed; ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... of October witnessed the ratification of this proposal by the Unionists. The action at once consolidated the Premier's position. I doubt if in all political history you can uncover a series of events more paradoxical or perplexing or find a solution arrived at with greater skill and strategy. It was a revelation of Smuts with his ripe statesmanship put to the ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... civilization are conjured from the darkness of vanished centuries, to settle rules for the government of commerce, personal conduct, and the social relations of the times in which we live. There seems to be something paradoxical in the idea that the older the decision the better the law—the more ancient the commentator, the profounder the wisdom of his axioms. This might be well, were it true that civilization is 'progressing backwards,' ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... minister.' 'But,' he adds, 'I looked upon his religious sentiments as rank fanaticism, and entertained a very contemptible opinion of his abilities, natural and acquired.' He heard him preach, and 'made a jest of his sermon;' he read one of his publications, and thought the greater part of it whimsical, paradoxical, and unintelligible. He entered into correspondence with him, hoping to draw him into controversy. 'The event,' he says, 'by no means answered my expectations. He returned a very friendly and long answer to my letter, in which he carefully avoided the mention ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... its lawless journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous thing in this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross diagonally both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth Building, I would say that there seemed to me something rather comically paradoxical in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a structure which was erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial genius whose boast it was to have made his fortune out of articles sold at a rate ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... peasant—for their author was no more—may write at least correctly in the matter of measure, language, and rhyme; and I shall add several extracts in further illustration of the same fact, a fact whose assertion, it must be allowed, may appear somewhat paradoxical even to those who are acquainted, though superficially, with Hibernian composition. The rhymes are, it must be granted, in the generality of such productions, very latitudinarian indeed, and as a veteran votary of the muse once assured me, depend wholly upon the wowls (vowels), as may ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Hinchinbrook Channel, through which the passing of steamers is of everyday occurrence, they still exist, though not in such numbers as in the early days. It would seem that the waters within the Great Barrier Reef may long continue one of the last resorts of this strange, uncouth, paradoxical mammal. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... advice, offered to him by his friend in the paradoxical form of a command. He got out his books and papers again, and began devoting his mornings to work. Pilar was delighted. She was far too wise not to know that honeymoons do not last forever, and although she was persuaded that she, for her part, would never desire anything better than to be always ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... To this paradoxical threat no answer was returned. Standing in the shadow at the head of the stairs, the jester only gripped tighter the hilt of the coveted sword, while across his vision flashed the picture of the young ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Alliance between Church and State (1736), which brought him into notice. But it was entirely eclipsed by his Divine Legation of Moses, of which the first part appeared in 1737, and the second in 1741. The work, though learned and able, is somewhat paradoxical, and it plunged him into controversies with his numerous critics, and led to his publishing a Vindication. It, however, obtained for him the appointment of chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales. In 1739 W. gained the friendship of Pope by publishing ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... It seems paradoxical to speak of child-life in this hard-pressed, serious-minded colony, but it was there and, doubtless, it was normal in its joyous and adventuresome impulses. Under eighteen years of age were the girls, Remember and Mary Allerton, ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... limited, he plays on a few strings, with wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... written is safely smuggled out of the prison. There is a man I can trust who will see that it is published. No longer am I in Murderers Row. I am writing these lines in the death cell, and the death-watch is set on me. Night and day is this death-watch on me, and its paradoxical function is to see that I do not die. I must be kept alive for the hanging, or else will the public be cheated, the law blackened, and a mark of demerit placed against the time-serving warden who runs this prison and one of whose duties is to see that his condemned ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the country abets it, the herd can be driven into a corral; sometimes with extra fine mounts they can be run down, but by far the commonest way, paradoxical as it may seem, is to walk ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... fiercely persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will either shut ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... with the web of human destiny. There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,—"I believe, because it is impossible,"—is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers maintained that there was ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a contradiction to say, that, though these Crinoids were the only representatives of their Class in the early geological ages, while it includes five Orders at the present time, Echinoderms were as numerous and various then as now. But, paradoxical as it may seem, this is nevertheless true, not only for this Class, but for many others in the Animal Kingdom. The same numerical proportions, the same richness and vividness of conception were manifested in the early creation as now; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... feel at all nervous about the fate of the play—no English public will damn an attempt of that description, however much it may deserve it; and paradoxical as it may sound, a London audience, composed as it for the most part is of pretty rough, coarse, and hard particles, makes up a most soft-hearted and good-natured whole, and invariably in the instance of a new actor or a new piece—whatever partial private ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... it for Frank's love, paradoxical as it may seem, that it had conquered just at that moment of terrible distress. Valencia's acceptance of him had been hasty, founded rather on sentiment and admiration than on deep affection; and her feeling might have faltered, waned, died away in self-distrust of its own reality, if giddy ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has not a head of its own,—an intelligence,—a meaning,—a certain virtue, I was going to say,—but that might, perhaps, sound paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all body and tail. So I have found ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in a Christian marriage more of the true spirit of adventure and romance, a greater readiness for sacrifice, a more willing acceptance of parental responsibilities, and of the obligation of self-denial for the children's sake. There can be no question but that modern families— with the paradoxical exception of the families of the very poor—have been tending to be smaller than they either need ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... along with him in his general principles of judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... I have written a long letter . . . with my own heart's blood. . . . Think over it well, before you despise it. . . . And if you can refute it for me, and sweep the whole away like a wild dream when one awakes, none will be more thankful—paradoxical as it may seem—than ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... always said that England's difficulty would be Ireland's opportunity, but they did not reckon with the paradoxical character of the Irish people. England's difficulty has indeed been Ireland's opportunity—the opportunity of displaying that generous nature which has already contributed thousands of men to the Expeditionary Force, and is mustering tens of thousands ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... educational work is entitled "Universal Instruction." Jacotot is best known for his paradoxes, two of the most famous of which are, "Everything is in Everything," and "All men have equal intelligence." But his method rather than his paradoxical statements has proved his greatest contribution to educational progress. His method consisted in the selection of fundamental examples or types, having the pupils commit them to memory, repeating this work daily, amplifying it, deriving the rules or principles in relation to ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... several, of an ass, for instance, a cock and a crocodile, so as to produce an outrageous individual, with whom even a duck-billed Platypus would think twice before he fraternized—ornithorynchous and paradoxical though he be, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Christians, although worshiping the same Jehovah, are disputing with each other, and indeed, amongst themselves, with regard to the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Jehovah himself appears to be on the decline and his unity is steadily disintegrating into a paradoxical trinity. But we are progressing, for in 1300 years no new prophet has arisen, and no new divine revelation is perturbing our race; the old ones, however, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... had experienced peace of mind, absence of remorse. If he could have put away from him his love for the girl he would have done so willingly. Why should he battle and strive for an unattainable something as intangible as a dream? It was so paradoxical that Allis's love for Mortimer seemed hopeless because of the latter's defeat, while his, Crane's love, was equally hopeless in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... wonderful singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always a conscious hypocrite—a form of character, however paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between the profession and the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... either to say the opposite, and to attribute to God that he wills the evil; because that is not seemly, and would appear to accuse God of lack of goodness. He believes, therefore, that in these matters telling the truth is not advisable. He would be right if the truth were in the paradoxical opinions that he maintains. For indeed it appears that according to the opinion of this writer God has no goodness, or rather that that which he calls God is nothing but the blind nature of the mass of material things, which acts ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... than His life and example, 'is My flesh, which'—in some as yet unexplained way—'I give for the life of the world.' And that there may be no misunderstanding, there is a third, deeper, more mysterious statement still: 'My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.' Repulsive and paradoxical, but in its very offensiveness and paradox, proclaiming that it covers a mighty truth, and the truth, brother, is this, the one Food that gives life to will, affections, conscience, understanding, to the whole spirit of a man, is that great Sacrifice of the Incarnate Lord who gave ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... every other genus (with the exception of Scalpellum), in the several families, in the three Orders of Cirripedia, are hermaphrodite or bisexual. Why, then, is Ibla unisexual; yet, becoming, in the most paradoxical manner, from its earliest youth, essentially bisexual? Would food have been deficient, and was the seizure of infusoria by another and differently constructed individual, necessary for the support of the male and female organs? The orifice of the sack ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... was all a game to him, and the one game he knew that was always exciting, always full of danger and of drama, I could just then have found it in my heart to try the game myself! Not that he treated me to any ingenious sophistries or paradoxical perversities. It was just his natural charm and humor, and a touch of sadness with it all, that appealed to something deeper than one's reason and one's sense of right. Glamour, I suppose, is the word. Yet there was far more in him than that. There ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... phlegmatic indifference of disposition, although diametrically in opposition to each other, will produce the same results: in the former, it is mental, in the latter, animal courage. Paradoxical as it may appear, the most certain and most valuable description of courage is that which is acquired from the fear of shame. Further, there is no talent which returns more fold than courage, when constantly in exercise: for habit will ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... It is a good and good-humoured man, but pestilently prolix and paradoxical and personal [8]. If he would but talk half, and reduce his visits to an hour, he would add to his popularity. As an author he is very good, and his vanity is ouverte, like ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... far more powerful than Spain, although the world had not yet recognised the fact. Yet it would have been difficult for both united to crush the new commonwealth, however paradoxical such a proposition ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it sensu allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation. What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its "creation out of nothing," and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all times. To remove the enormous evil arising from Augustine's ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... as of old. Dogma everywhere has fallen into the background; in the Eastern Church it has given place to ritual, in the Roman Church to ecclesiastical instructions, in the Protestant Churches, so far as they are mindful of their origin, to the Gospel. At the same time, however, the paradoxical fact is unmistakable that dogma as such is nowhere at this moment so powerful as in the Protestant Churches, though by their history they are furthest removed from it. Here, however, it comes into consideration as an object ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... crushed the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of Hosts. Now, you see, the point that people don't understand is the absolute and utter humility of science, in opposition to this doctrinal self-sufficiency. I don't doubt this may sound a little paradoxical at first, but I think you will find it is all right. You remember the courtier and the monarch,—Louis the Fourteenth, wasn't it?—never mind, give the poor fellows that live by setting you right a chance. "What o'clock is it?" says ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you avoid the stumbling-block over which others fell. Prosperity is, of course, a great benefit; it is one of the aims of human society; but when prosperity becomes too material, it does not always guarantee the future. Paradoxical as it may appear, too much prosperity is often dangerous, and some national misfortune is now and then a good preservative of prosperity. For great prosperity makes nations careless of their future; seeing no immediate danger, they believe no danger possible; and then ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... say, if I wished to be paradoxical, that this doctrine seems strange precisely because it is so common. It is what most people who think at all believe, but what nobody likes to avow. We have become so accustomed to the assertion that it is a duty for the ignorant to hold with unequivocal ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... need be surprised at nothing; extreme cases have come at Crunden to be the average, if I may be permitted to be paradoxical. We were interested but not surprised when Sophie Polopinsk, a little girl but a short time from Russia, wheeled up the truck, climbed with great difficulty upon it and promptly lost herself in a volume of Tolstoi's ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... and vastly diminished by his open-hearted, swift responsiveness to every sudden or permanent appeal to his purse, the family wardrobe, or the larder. In this excellent and honoured man, whose very piety was as sublime as it was confused, rambling, and paradoxical, we have the quaint original of Dr. Primrose, one of the most lovable characters that has ever lived to charm the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... The Strayed Reveller does not cease with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line-division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the strangest peculiarity, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... had troubled her passed from her mind. She now yielded submissively to her sad allotment, believing, as during her sickness she had often been told, that afflictions come but for our own good, however paradoxical such a ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Rabbis. But subject to this verbal veneration, the Rishis, or learned divines, used the utmost freedom in regard to the forced and fanciful interpretations extorted from the sacred text, a freedom which again reminds us of the paradoxical caprice shown by some schools of Jewish Rabbis in their treatment of the volume they professed to regard with awe. The various finite gods, such as Vishnu, Indra, Krishna, Marut, or Varuna, were not the subjects of any church creed chanted ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... of more than forty machines, and it is these, rather than his purely mathematical discoveries, that gave his name popular vogue both among his contemporaries and with posterity. Every one has heard of the screw of Archimedes, through which the paradoxical effect was produced of making water seem to flow up hill. The best idea of this curious mechanism is obtained if one will take in hand an ordinary corkscrew, and imagine this instrument to be changed into a hollow tube, retaining precisely ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... reprobation the King and the deputies, have found no lack of subjects for the pencil in the ridicules and rascalities of common life. We have said that public decency is greater amongst the French than amongst us, which, to some of our readers, may appear paradoxical; but we shall not attempt to argue that, in private roguery, our neighbors are not our equals. The proces of Gisquet, which has appeared lately in the papers, shows how deep the demoralization must be, and how a Government, based itself ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Commonsense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany, where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay, is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... same reason for which they received them in ancient Rome when that State conquered the world. Honors and rewards stimulate and encourage talent and praise arouses men to a generous emulation. It encourages men to enter the army. It is paradoxical to treat officers contemptuously and call theirs an honored profession. The men who are the principal supports of the State must be encouraged and be preferred to the soft and insipid society men who can ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... to reign, and slaves to groan, and nations to suffer from the lust of gold or power, this beautiful picture of the prophet shall become a reality: "The whole earth," said the seer, "is at rest, and is quiet; they break forth into singing." Till then, paradoxical though it appears, the cause of peace may be pled with most effect by the mouths of cannon. Fitness for war is often the strongest security for peace; and a nation whose wishes and interests both run in the direction of peace, may find no ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... College, Dublin. He became a law student in London, but he did not eventually adopt the law as a profession. He brought out in 1756 a Vindication of Natural Society, in which he so skilfully imitated the style and the paradoxical reasoning of Bolingbroke that many were deceived into the belief that the Vindication was a posthumously published production of the viscount's pen. In the following year Burke published in his own name A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... properly speaking, do not deserve the qualification of mental, since they are—or at least the best known of them are—laws of the images, and the images are material elements. Although it may seem absolutely paradoxical, psychology is a science of matter—the science of a part of matter which ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... critic, and to draw up forsooth a deep learned digest of strictures on a composition, of which, in fact, until I read the book, I did not even know the first principles. I own, Sir, that at first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a jew's-harp: that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... are short—a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often forced to rise before the sun in the morning—besides, the country looks dismal—nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight appear—yet we have verified it by experience—having for many years found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long, warm days of summer are an agreeable and infallible corrective of the inconveniences ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... that "honesty is the best policy:" the East African has never dreamed it in the moments of his wildest imagination. Pre-eminent liars, they are, curious to say, often deceived by the falsehoods of others, and they fairly illustrate the somewhat paradoxical proverb: ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... a little paradoxical, but after that slave camp business, like you I am inclined to believe in paradoxes. And now, Father, what do ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and HE IS ONLY COMPLETELY A MAN WHEN HE PLAYS. This proposition, which at this moment perhaps appears paradoxical, will receive a great and deep meaning if we have advanced far enough to apply it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny. I promise you that the whole edifice of aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of life will be supported by this principle. But this proposition is only ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a la troubadour, at the open window, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., a somewhat paradoxical figure, his splinter-structure enshrouded in the gown, the cap on his classic head, this regalia symbolic of dignity, and the torturesome banjo in his grasp, twanged a ragtime accompaniment, and to the bewilderment of the old Grads on the campus, as well as the wrath of 1919, he roared ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... rare books which, paradoxical as it may seem, are not rare. Take, for example, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; the first folio Shakespeare, 1623; Milton's Lycidas, Poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, in the editiones principes; the works of the minor poets, Suckling, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... condition of the colony; after having represented both its agricultural and commercial interests as being already not only in a state of impair, but also of increasing dilapidation and ruin, it may appear somewhat paradoxical that I should attempt to wind up the account with an enumeration of the advantages which it holds out to emigration. If due consideration, however, be given to the nature of the ingredients of which the agricultural body is composed; if it be recollected ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavourable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born "an age too late." For this notion Johnson ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and Christian civilization? We have Chambers of Legislature, infallible and omnipotent Parliaments, princes full of the enlightenment of the age, and reigning by divine right, or the sovereignty of the people, or what not;—we ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... produce a partial paralysis of the hands and arms to the elbow. Again and again I tried it in every case of extraction and many other experiments, doubting my own senses for a long time at a result so anomalous and paradoxical. I was reminded just here of a phenomenon which gave me additional proof—that of blowing a dull fire to revive it. For a minute or so one blows and blows in rapid succession until, rising from the effort, a sense of giddiness for a few moments so overcomes that the upright ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the moon's surface is the enormous magnitude of its volcanic crater formations. In comparison with these, the greatest on the surface of the earth are reduced to insignificance. Paradoxical as the statement may at first appear, the magnitude of the remains of the primitive volcanic energy in the moon is simply due to the smallness of its mass. Being only about one-eightieth part of the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... descend from experience to interpretation, the paradoxical character of such a personal sense of intimacy is eased for us, if we remember that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling Spirit, or of a Divine companionship—whatever name he gives it—is just his limited realization, achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of a universal and not ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... concealing it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say,—of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffusiveness, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... in all the rich variety of natural detail is permissible. And this is how it happens that painters who have gloried in rich details have always painted small pictures, and painters who have preferred larger truths pictures of bigger dimensions. It sounds rather paradoxical to say the smaller the picture the more detail it should contain, and the larger the less, but it is nevertheless true. For although a large picture has not of necessity got to be part of an architectural scheme, it has to be looked at from a distance at ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... irony of Socrates and the self-assertion of the Sophists. There is quite as much truth on the side of Protagoras as of Socrates; but the truth of Protagoras is based on common sense and common maxims of morality, while that of Socrates is paradoxical or transcendental, and though full of meaning and insight, hardly intelligible to the rest of mankind. Here as elsewhere is the usual contrast between the Sophists representing average public opinion and Socrates seeking for ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... computation carried to paradoxical length, in order to illustrate a method, is the solution of x^3 - 2x 5, the example given of Newton's method, on which all improvements have been tested. In 1831, Fourier's[142] posthumous work on equations showed 33 figures of solution, got with enormous labor. Thinking this a good opportunity ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... and theocratic governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more liberty in the best sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual's lot is ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... which should serve to satisfy the cravings of mortals for some definite solution of the puzzle of life. Lao Tz[)u] himself had enunciated a criterion which he called Tao, or the Way, from which is derived the word Taoism; and in his usual paradoxical style he had asserted that the secret of this Way, which was at the beginning apparently nothing more than a line of right conduct, could not possibly be imparted, even by those who understood it. His disciples, however, of later days ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated or assimilated to a sort ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... youthful imagination. But Mr. Godfrey presently found the truth of that maxim, as paradoxical as it is indisputable, that the heart of man is naturally hard and unamiable. He conducted himself in his new situation with the most unexceptionable propriety, and the most generous benevolence. But there were men in his audience, men who loved better to criticise, than to ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... It is very probable that all conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... inches across its brilliant bloom; an amaryllis bred up from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter; several kinds of fruit trees which withstand frost in bud and in flower; a chestnut tree which bears nuts in eighteen months from the time of seed-planting; a white blackberry (paradoxical as it may appear), a rare and beautiful fruit and as palatable as it is beautiful; the primusberry, a union of the raspberry and the blackberry; another wonderful and delicious berry produced from the California dewberry and the Cuthbert-raspberry; pieplants ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... by your sun-kissed, rose-embowered, semi-tropical summer-land of Hellenic sky and hills of Hymettus, with its paradoxical antitheses: of flowers and flannels; strawberries and sealskin sacks; open fires with open windows; snow-capped mountains and orange blossoms; winter looking down upon summer—a topsy-turvy land, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... not to say paradoxical. To call a thing good only with reference to what lies outside itself would be almost equivalent to saying that nothing is good. For if the moment anything becomes good it refers all its goodness to something beyond its own walls, should we ever ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... his own eyes something of the atrocious misery which its administration involves. A murderer like Musolino, crowned with an aureole of saintliness, would be an anomaly in England. We should think it rather paradoxical to hear a respectable old farmer recommending his boys to shoot a policeman, whenever they safely can. On the spot, things begin to wear a different aspect. Musolino is no more to be blamed than a child who has been systematically misguided by his parents; and if ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... appreciation of what is good in letters, his combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his own moderation. Nothing better has ever been written as a general view of the subject than his introduction to his Lectures on ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... learned," he says, "are what I prize the most." This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth. "The sun is new every day," is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection, and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the night. Actual observation must also have suggested to him his central doctrine, that Fire ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... the thickly wadded headgear which I wore for protection against the sun saved my life. The notion of my being able to get up again after falling head-foremost from such an immense height seemed to me at first too paradoxical to be acted upon, but I soon found that I was not a bit hurt. My dromedary utterly vanished. I looked round me, and saw the glimmer of a light in the fort which I had lately passed, and I began to work my way back in that direction. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... tailor—would have struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking. It was a truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institution. A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a "personality." Moreover one would scarcely come across two ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... that we can only appreciate the work of England in a place like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true that we can only appreciate the work of France in a place like Egypt. But this work is of a peculiar and even paradoxical kind. It is too practical to be prominent, and so universal that it ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact that the American knows more of English history and English politics than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United States. This by no means implies that the American knows ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... at the meetings of the club has from time to time excited interest because of its connection with a fundamental principle of evolutionary astronomy. This principle, which looks paradoxical enough, is that up to a certain stage, as a star loses heat by radiation into space, its temperature becomes higher. It is now known as Lane's Law. Some curiosity as to its origin, as well as the personality of its author, has sometimes been expressed. As the story has never ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... extraordinary speed. Of Buckle's large volume of the "History of Civilization" Macaulay wrote in his journal: "I read Buckle's book all day, and got to the end, skipping, of course. A man of talent and of a good deal of reading, but paradoxical and incoherent."[30] John Fiske, I believe, was a slow reader, but he had such a remarkable power of concentration that what he read once was his own. Of this I can give a notable instance. At a meeting in Boston a number of years ago of the Military Historical ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... finally disappears inside. At the moment when he is forcing his way in, causing the lower lip to spring up and down, the eyeless turtle seems to chew and chew until the most sedate beholder must smile at the paradoxical show. Of course it is the bee that is feeding, though the flower would seem to be masticating the bee with the keenest relish! The counterfeit tortoise soon disgorges its lively mouthful, however, and away flies the bee, carrying ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... precisely that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... thing in school-work which I wish to press on you; and that is, that you should not confine your work to the girls; but bestow it as freely on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it may seem) will respond to it more deeply and freely—THE BOYS. I am not going to enter into the reasons WHY. I only entreat you to believe me, that by helping to educate the boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a class (as I have seen ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... (Lophius piscatorius) has not usurped his rather paradoxical name. He retires to the midst of the sea-weed and algae. On his body and all round his head he bears fringed appendages which, by their resemblance to the leaves of marine plants, aid the animal to conceal himself. The colour of his body also does not contrast with neighbouring objects. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... bon enfant both to Eleanor and to her on this golden afternoon. He remembered Eleanor's love for broom and brought her bunches of it from the steep banks; he made affectionate mock of Neal's old-maidish ways; he threw himself with ejaculations, joyous, paradoxical, violent, on the unfolding beauty of the lake and the spring; and throughout he made them feel his presence as something warmly strong and human, for all his provoking defects, and that element of the uncommunicated and unexplained ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... again, to utter a syllable. Then, indeed, the Delaware girl gave a brief translation of the substance of what had been both read and said, confining herself to one or two of the more striking of the verses, those that had struck her own imagination as the most paradoxical, and which certainly would have been the most applicable to the case, could the uninstructed minds of the listeners embrace the great moral truths ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... The paradoxical aspect of the matter with Mr. Tutt was that while he was known as a criminal lawyer whenever he was asked for advice he concerned himself quite as much with his client's moral as his legal duty. The rather subtle reason for this was probably to be found in the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... was the most paradoxical reply which the little maiden could possibly have made, and Noddy was perplexed almost beyond the hope of redemption. What in the world was she crying about, if she did not wish to get out of the scrape? What could make her cry if ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... be a somewhat paradoxical application of the text: but the last anecdote of Antony which I shall quote is full of wisdom ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... privileges had been unknown for ages, and which lost nothing but the right of destroying themselves by continual wars, the empire was such an era of prosperity and well-being as they had never before experienced; and we may add, without being paradoxical, that it was also for them an era of liberty. On the one hand, a freedom of commerce and industry, of which the Grecian state had no conception, became possible. On the other hand, the new regime could not but be favorable ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... accompanied with cards thrust into your hands, "Hotel des Bains, Monsieur." "Hotel Waterloo, Monsieur." "Hotel Bellevue." "Hotel Bedford, Monsieur." "Hotel d'Angleterre," ad infinitum—and then there was the pouring out of the Noah's Ark, with their countenances wearing a most paradoxical appearance, for they evidently showed that they had had, quite enough of water, and, at the same time, that they required a great deal more. I looked at my children, as they were hoisted up from the ladies' cabin, one after another; ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... alone; as a simple matter of inclination, she wished that she felt free to sit and smile at Quisante as she had at old Foster the maltster. She could not; Foster was not part of her life, near and close to her, her chosen husband, the father of her child. Unless she clung to her effort, and to her paradoxical much-disappointed hope, her life and the thought of what she had done with it would become unendurable. Dick and his wife had not quite understood what had come ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... by which our inventor arrives at the seemingly paradoxical conclusion, that the air is destined to be the high-road par excellence, and to serve as the medium of transportation for the heaviest loads, is certainly very ingenious; of its conclusiveness, we must leave our readers ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... friendship the same privileges which are undisputably granted to the darker passions of enmity and resentment; such a philosophy is more like a satyr than a true delineation or description of human nature; and may be a good foundation for paradoxical wit and raillery, but is a very bad one for ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... rise to his own defense. But his throat filled, and the words which he would utter died on his trembling lips. The room whirled about him. Floods of memory began to sweep over him in huge billows. The conflicting forces which had culminated in placing him in the paradoxical position in which he now stood raced before him in confused review. Objects lost their definite outlines and melted into the haze which rose before his straining eyes. All things at last merged into the terrible ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and viewing all that inimitable spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy Hook. But an intervening week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though of infinite and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler and wider and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws of the States, or the common ground of Congress, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... probably nearer to his fellow-man than ever before in his life; but the truth revealed made him the more unhappy. He had grown to consider his own unhappiness totally different and infinitely more acute than that of others; he had even taken a sort of morbid, paradoxical pleasure in considering it so; and now even this was taken from him. Not only had his own secret skeleton been visible when he believed it concealed, but all around him there suddenly sprang up a very cemetery of other skeletons, grinning at his blindness ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... remarkable—and, without a previous explanation, it might seem paradoxical to say it—that oftentimes under a continual accession of light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for explanation—all appeared one monotonous blank. But no sooner had an early twilight ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Wallace reviewed "Life and Habit" in Nature (March 27, 1879), but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication from Mr. Spencer's works. He called it "an ingenious and paradoxical explanation" which was evidently new to him. He concluded by saying that "it might yet afford a clue to some of the deepest ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... eat into the toughest rock of patience and self-satisfaction, I have spoken at considerable length elsewhere. Its evils are so evident that they hardly call for further illustration. The garrulous man, paradoxical as it may seem to say it, is a kind of pickpocket without intending to steal anything—nay, rather he is fain to please you by placing something in your pocket—though too often it is like the egg of the cuckoo in the nest of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him perittutatos, and saw the humour of it—and one would expect to find in ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... nothing in the nature of man more paradoxical than conscience. It is that which lifts him to God; and yet it is that which makes him capable of sin, and without which he could not be a sinner. It gives him the sense of right, but at the same time makes him conscious of wrong. It makes him capable of duty, but thereby also capable ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... which worked the pump. Professor Clerk Maxwell thought this discovery the greatest of the century; and the remark has been repeated more than once. But it is a remark which derives its chief importance from the man who made it, and its credentials from the paradoxical surprise it causes. The discovery in question is certainly fraught with very great consequences to the mechanical world; but in itself it is no discovery of importance, and naturally follows from Faraday's far greater and more ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
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