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Contraries   Listen
noun
Contraries  n. pl.  (Logic) Propositions which directly and destructively contradict each other, but of which the falsehood of one does not establish the truth of the other. "If two universals differ in quality, they are contraries; as, every vine is a tree; no vine is a tree. These can never be both true together; but they may be both false."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Contraries" Quotes from Famous Books



... and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... plaything of that picturesque child of nature, just as loneliness caused him to open his eyes to the existence of that, which in the logical and ordinary course of events, he would have entirely overlooked. But since life is made up almost entirely of contraries, it is not so much with reasons that we have to deal as with facts—things as they are. Clothe human nature in whatever garb you like, at heart it remains the same. Time and place and condition make little difference; the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... plantation of this isle, my lord, And were the King on 't, what would I do? I' the Commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things: for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... House of the Triclinium, derives its name from a large triclinium in the centre of the peristyle, which is spacious and handsome, and bounded by the city walls. The House of the Vestals is a little further on. What claim it has to this title, except by the rule of contraries, we are at a loss to guess; seeing that the style of its decorations is very far from corresponding with that purity of thought and manners which we are accustomed to associate with the title of vestal. The paintings are numerous and beautiful, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... childishly, as not knowing that they cannot justify both sides, when the question lies between opposite and contradictory principles. By this sort of simplicity, which approves of errors, if much practised, and of opposites, or essential contraries, when authorities may be found for them, no work, perhaps, is more strikingly characterized, than the popular School Grammar of W. H. Wells. This author says, "The use of but as a preposition is approved by J. E. Worcester, John Walker, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... self- reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any "orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... hilts. Father Brown had also sprung forward, striving to compose the dispute; but he soon found his personal presence made matters worse. Saradine was a French freemason and a fierce atheist, and a priest moved him by the law of contraries. And for the other man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner than a puritan—a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the earth; a man of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... is in history, though the area of its interest is yet wider, and the depths to which it reaches more profound; all its contradictory phenomena move under one embracing law, and all its contraries shall finally be solved in the clear perception of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... pen betwixt both his hands. I have seen many bonds and bills wrote by him. He was much given to debauchery, so that at some times the Daemons would not appear to the Speculator; he would then suffumigate: sometimes, to vex the spirits, he would curse them, fumigate with contraries. Upon his examination before Sir Henry Wallop, Kt. which I have seen, he said, he once visited Dr. Dee in Mortlack; and out of a book that lay in the window, he copied out that call which ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly

... speak any more of false dice, of fullons, high-men, lowe-men, gourds, and brisled dice, grauiers, demies, and contraries, all which haue his sundry vses: but it is not my meaning to stand on this subiect: I would rather vse my pen, and spend my time, to disswade and perswade all gamesters, to beware not onely with what dice, but with what company and where ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid

... a great believer in dreams," she said, sympathetically; "but she always thought they went by contraries; and, if she was right, why, yours bodes ever so much good. But come, Hobert, let us go into the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... philosophy of Hegel. But as he has given to the world a new logic, it may be needful to glance at its general features as a help to the comprehension of his philosophy of religion. The fundamental law of his logic is the identity of contraries or contradictions. All thought is a synthesis of contraries or opposites. This antithesis not only exists in all ideas, but constitutes them. In every idea we form, there must be two things opposed and distinguished, in order to afford a clear conception. Light can not be conceived ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... from lightless hell; For Sinon in his fire doth quake with cold, And in that cold hot-burning fire doth dwell; These contraries such unity do hold, Only to flatter fools, and make them bold; So Priam's trust false Sinon's tears doth flatter, That he finds means to burn his Troy ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... read the future in dreams. The rules of the art, if any existed in ancient times, are not known; but in our day, one simple rule opens the whole secret. Dreams, say all the wiseacres in Christendom, are to be interpreted by contraries. Thus, if you dream of filth, you will acquire something valuable; if you dream of the dead, you will hear news of the living; if you dream of gold and silver, you run a risk of being without either; and if you dream you have ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... things which one ought to avoid, as it is right to see very often those which one ought to imitate, and my friend Hop's manners will frequently point out to you, what yours ought to be by the rule of contraries. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... your course sir; that first took him. I oft have heard him say, how he admired Men of your large profession, that could speak To every cause, and things mere contraries, Till they were hoarse again, yet all be law; That, with most quick agility, could turn, And [re-] return; [could] make knots, and undo them; Give forked counsel; take provoking gold On either hand, and put it up: these men, He knew, would thrive with their humility. And, for ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are good in themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort to the afflicted, will be there a continual torment: knowledge, so much longed ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... voice of God" and "the voice of man," we have an instance of propositions which in logic are called contraries. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, "all men are white" and "no men are white" are contraries, but they are both false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be pronounced on these two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... black patches to make their complexions seem fairer than they are, so when an illustration is more obscure than the sense that went before it, it must of necessity make it appear clearer than it did; for contraries are best set off with contraries. He has found out a new sort of poetical Georgics—a trick of sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects, which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no ...
— English Satires • Various

... all the Senses, your objects have the worst luck; they are always jarring with their contraries; for none can wear civet, but they are suspected of a proper bad scent[290]; whence the proverb springs, He smelleth best, that doth of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... place; should look at them in their assemblies, armies, agricultural labors, marriages, treaties, births, deaths, noise of the courts of justice, desert places, various nations of barbarians, feasts, lamentations, markets, a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries. ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... Ally's brain slept among its dreams, that Rowcliffe's face leaned near to hers without ever touching it, and his arms made as if they clasped her and never met. Even then, always at the first intangible approach of him, she woke, terrified because dreams go by contraries. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... your pocket, Poppy," she said, "and don't on any account let me see it—I must try to forget it, or my courage will go. Evidently, Poppy, names go by contraries. I wrote some dismal papers on purpose for The Downfall; I will now offer them to a magazine which ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... necessary, likewise, to explain many words by their opposition to others; for contraries are best seen when they stand together. Thus the verb stand has one sense, as opposed to fall, and another, as opposed to fly; for want of attending to which distinction, obvious as it is, the learned Dr. Bentley has squandered his criticism to no purpose, on these lines ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... change, it at least marked a turning point, and it deserves to be studied as one of the historic documents of modern printing. It is more than this, however; it is a piece of creative criticism, and though teaching not by example but by contraries, it forms one of the best existing brief compends of what a ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... Cavalry, unless it be dragoons, will only eat victual in case of siege.—No, Broglio will not go with Cavalry; must have those Ten Battalions, must have Sign-manual; won't, in short!"—Will stay, then, thinks Belleisle; and one must try to drive him, as men do pigs, covertly and by the rule of contraries, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... better how our deepest sorrows and bitterest tears, and the wounds that penetrate deepest into our bleeding hearts, all come from the same motive, and are directed to the same end as their most joyful contraries. One thing the Lord desires, that we may be partakers of His holiness, and so we may venture to give an even deeper meaning to the Psalmist's words than he intended, and recognise that the 'moment' is an integral part of the 'life,' and the 'anger' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... July he began to have some doubts if his improved weather-system was correct; he was convinced that it must work by contraries. So when Professor Jones asked him if it would be safe to attempt to have a display of fireworks on the night of the 5th, Bradley brought the improved system into play, and discovered that it promised rainy weather on that night. So then ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... walking the strange world beneath the sea. But the laws by which thought is governed on this sub-surface level are not those of our ordinary waking consciousness. During outcropping association by contraries does not seem readily to take place. Thus the mal-association, which neutralised the desired idea and so prevented acceptation, no longer presents itself. We all know what happens during a "day-dream" or "brown-study," when the Unconscious tide is high. ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks

... frowning, while the other went on eating fish with an air of entire resignation. "If all you can suggest is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly clever, but...well, what would you ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... ambition, &c., we simply mean the immoderate love of feasting, drinking, venery, riches, and fame. Furthermore, these emotions, in so far as we distinguish them from others merely by the objects wherewith they are concerned, have no contraries. For temperance, sobriety, and chastity, which we are wont to oppose to luxury, drunkenness, and lust, are not emotions or passive states, but indicate a power of the mind which moderates the last—named emotions. However, I cannot here explain the remaining ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza

... would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... simply space solidified or incarnate geometry. Its properties therefore could be given as a system of deductions from first principles, and it forms a coherent and self-subsistent whole. Meanwhile the essence of the soul is thought. Thought and matter are absolutely opposed. They are contraries, having nothing in common. Reality, however, seems to belong to the world of space. The brain, too, belongs to that world, and motions in the brain must be determined as a part of the material mechanism. In some way or other 'ideas' correspond to these ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... emotional sensibility. And this, without the too common drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists in loose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow; vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries; feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... have observed my intuitions wherever they drew me, for I felt that the Light within us knows better than any other the need and the way. So I have no book on one theme, and the only unity which connects what is here written is a common origin. The reader must try a balance between the contraries which exist here as they exist in us all, as they exist and are harmonized in that multitudinous meditation ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... departure, but they were not out of hearing at the conclusion. Guy looked after Amy, but she would not look round, and Charles lay twisting Bustle's curls round his fingers, and smiling to himself at the manner in which the letter was working by contraries. The overthrow of Philip's influence was a great triumph for him, apart from the way in which it affected his friend and ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... dishonour, an eminent commander under the usurper Oliver Cromwell: and then it was, as I am informed, he composed this loyal Poem. For, though fate, more than choice, seems to have placed him in the service of a Knight so notorious, both in his person and politics, yet, by the rule of contraries, one may observe throughout his whole Poem, that he was most orthodox, both in his religion and loyalty. And I am the more induced to believe he wrote it about that time, because he had then the opportunity to converse ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... conduct might have been very plausibly pursued. And, upon my word, I am at a loss to know how or why it was that we pursued neither the one nor the other. But, perhaps, the true reason is to be sought in the spirit of the age, which proceeds by the rule of contraries altogether, and is now usually admitted as the solution of every thing in the way of paradox and impossibility. Or, perhaps, after all, it was only the Mummy's exceedingly natural and matter-of-course air that divested his words of the terrible. However this may be, the facts are clear, and no member ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... while to observe this, because fear and passion are not the surest guides to truth, and the rule of contraries is not the rule of wisdom. Other men have been indignant against the peculiar evils of their own time, and from their strong impression of these have seemed to lose sight of its good points; but ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... Shy, untamed, inscrutable, Swifter-fashioned than the fairies. Substance mixed of pure contraries; His vice some elder virtue's token, And his good is evil-spoken. Failing sometimes of his own, He is headstrong and alone; He affects the wood and wild, Like a flower-hunting child; Buries himself in summer waves, In trees, with beasts, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... breaks, she drops down, she lies flat at your feet— Take her then!" Well, I knew it—what fools are men! Take the bee by her horns, will your honey prove sweet? Sweet is grass—will you pasture your cows in a fen? Oh, if contraries could ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... which he inherited from his great master Lao Tzu. To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was his wicked transcendental aim. Like the obscure philosopher of early Greek speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato, he was an idealist, and had all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob Bohme, and held, with them and with Philo, that the object of life was to get rid of self-consciousness, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... love to work by paradoxes and contraries. In the transformations of grace, the bitter is the base of the sweet, night is the mother of day, and death is the gate ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... Cassio. He frequented their house, and his free and rattling talk was no unpleasing variety to Othello, who was himself of a more serious temper: for such tempers are observed often to delight in their contraries, as a relief from the oppressive excess of their own: and Desdemona and Cassio would talk and laugh together, as in the days when he went ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... flatter yourself! Have you found out, Miss Curtis, that it is the property of this species always to go by contraries?" ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... else, and if that wasn't a sign of love in woman, then Jingleberry had studied the sex all his years—and they were thirty-two—for nothing. In short, Marian behaved so like a sister to him that Jingleberry, knowing how dreams and women go by contraries, was absolutely sure that a sister was just the reverse from that relationship which in her heart of hearts she was willing to assume towards him, and he was happy in consequence. Believing this, it ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... arm the whip still dangled; In my left hand the reins for an instant slackened. Suddenly I woke and turned to question my groom: "We have gone a hundred paces since you fell asleep." Body and spirit for a while had exchanged place; Swift and slow had turned to their contraries. For these few steps that my horse had carried me Had taken in my dream countless aeons of time! True indeed is that saying of Wise Men "A hundred years are ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various

... heavenly love,) he would not only be in all requisite knowledge, but likewise in all intelligence and wisdom; for these [qualities] would inflow into those loves from heaven, that is, from the Divine through heaven. As, however, man is not born into those loves, but into their contraries, that is to say, into the loves of self and of the world, therefore he cannot but be born in complete ignorance and want of knowledge But by Divine means he is brought to something of intelligence and wisdom, yet not actually into any, unless the loves of self and of the world are removed, ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg

... and planets revolved around it, each fastened in a crystalline ring; the moon and sun revolved in the same manner, only at a farther distance. The generation of the universe was by the action of contraries, by heat and cold, the moist and the dry. From the moisture all things were originally generated by heat. Animals and men came from fishes by a process of evolution. There is evidence in his philosophy of a belief in the development of the universe by the action of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... the disregard of decency and justice. What rendered this assumption and exercise of power the more intolerable, was, that the persons the most unfit were selected; and as if, it would appear, from a "hateful love of contraries," the man learned in law being sent to preside over the business of equity, of which he knew nothing, and the man learned in equity being entrusted with the direction of law of which he knew worse than nothing; being obliged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... same in play, and the same in the search for truth. In disputes we like to see the clash of opinions, but not at all to contemplate truth when found. To observe it with pleasure, we have to see it emerge out of strife. So in the passions, there is pleasure in seeing the collision of two contraries; but when one acquires the mastery, it becomes only brutality. We never seek things for themselves, but for the search. Likewise in plays, scenes which do not rouse the emotion of fear are worthless, so are extreme and hopeless misery, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... head en say, sezee, dat, fur ez his 'membunce go back, he aint come 'cross nothin' in de lawyer-book ter de contraries er dat, en den dey all 'gree dat Brer ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris

... for the king's. Lan. Fie, Mortimer, dishonour not thyself! Can this be true, 'twas good to banish him? And is this true, to call him home again? Such reasons make white black, and dark night day. Y. Mor. My Lord of Lancaster, mark the respect. Lan. In no respect can contraries be true. Q. Isab. Yet, good my lord, hear what he can allege. War. All that he speaks is nothing; we are resolv'd. Y. Mor. Do you not wish that Gaveston were dead? Pem. I would he were! Y. Mor. Why, then, my lord, give me but leave to speak. E. Mor. But, nephew, do not play ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe

... water, their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away." "Satque superque satis"—we cannot go on. There is nothing like calling things by their contraries—it is truly startling. Whenever you speak of water, treat it as fire—of fire, vice versa, as water; and be sure to send them all shattering out of reach and discrimination of all sense; and look into a dictionary for some such word as "chrysoprase," which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... failures, but by the opposite course even more successes, and greater, were attained. If he had merely followed this method without complications, he would have had no protection against such as had come to know him; they would have taken everything by contraries and would have deemed his saying that he did not wish something to be equivalent to his ardently desiring it, and that he was eager for something equivalent to his not being concerned about it. It happened, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... within outward. ... For the bedsore, he must be put in a fresh, soft bed, with clean shirt and sheets... Having discoursed of the causes and complications of his malady, I said we must cure them by their contraries; and must first ease the pain, making openings in the thigh to let out the matter. ... Secondly, having regard to the great swelling and coldness of the limb, we must apply hot bricks round it, and sprinkle them with a decoction of nerval herbs in wine and vinegar, and wrap them in napkins; and ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... yesterday, we did set out, and after a good passage of four hours and a half, landed at Dover. I begin to count my comforts, for I find their contraries thicken on my apprehension. I have, at least, done for a while with postchaises. My trunks were a little opened at Calais, and they would have stopped my medals, but with much ado and much three louis's they let them pass. At Dover I found the benefit of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... with all her waywardness, "but yet a woman!" There was only the one man that I have ever known who could have developed the best that was in Angelica, and him she had just missed, as so often happens in this world of contraries. I am thinking of our poor Julian, known to her as the Tenor, whom she had met when it was too late, and in an evil hour for us and for herself apparently, the consequences having been his death and her own desolation. Yet I don't know. Those ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... by contraries with Jo. Her first book, laboured over for years, and launched full of the high hopes and ambitious dreams of youth, foundered on its voyage, though the wreck continued to float long afterward, to the profit of the publisher ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... still jogging on homewards, I thought that a great many were called their Graces, not for any grace or favour they had truly deserved with God or man, but for the same reason of contraries, that the Parcae or Destinies, were so called, because they spared none, or were not truly the Parcae, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... Nature needs to pin upon oak-trees an affirmation that the idea of an oak dwells in her formative thought. Nature affirms the oak-idea by oaks; the consummate poet exhibits the same realism. He embodies. He lends a soul to forms. The real and ideal in Art are indeed often opposed to each other as contraries, but it is a false opposition. Let the artist represent reality, and all that is in him, though it were the faith of seraphs, will go into the representation. The sole condition is that he shall select his subject from native, spontaneous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... very confusing game of contraries for five players. Four of them hold each the corner of a handkerchief. The other, who stands by to give orders, then shouts either "Let go!" or "Hold fast!" When "Let go!" is called, the handkerchief must be held as firmly as ever; but when "Hold ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries; he could divide the mother's part from the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate; he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... her infinite soul is Love, And he her lodestar. Passion in her is A glass facing his fire, where the bright bliss Is mirrored, and the heat returned. Yet move That glass, a stranger's amorous flame to prove, And it shall turn, by instant contraries, Ice to the moon; while her pure fire to his For whom it burns, clings ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... write a book of Parallels, and has furnished a specimen in that of Petrarch and Rousseau, and intended for another that of Erasmus with Cicero. It is amusing to observe how a lively and subtle mind can strike out resemblances, and make contraries accord, and at the same time it may show the pinching difficulties through which a parallel is pushed, till it ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... the soul, which indeed, can only be truly sensible of either fear or grief; to which only it belongs according to its different imaginations and opinions, to admit of either of these, or of their contraries; thou mayst look to that thyself, that it suffer nothing. Induce her not to any such opinion or persuasion. The understanding is of itself sufficient unto itself, and needs not (if itself doth not bring itself to need) any other ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... Captain's Production because 'tis scandalous and malicious; others will disapprove of it for the very same Reasons; for the Tasts of Mankind being as different as their Constitutions, they must of Consequence be often as opposite as the most absolute Contraries in Nature: A Knave loves and delights in Scandal, Detraction, Infamy, in blasting, ruining his Neighbour's Character, because these are consonant to the Depravity of humane Nature, and in themselves vile: Upon the very same Account an honest ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous

... origin of Good and Evil alike, that God and the devil, in short, are but two sides of the same Force. We have seen how this is worked out by Boehme, and that the central point of his philosophy is that all manifestation necessitates opposition. In like manner, Blake's statement, "Without Contraries is no progression," is, in truth, the keynote to all ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... words, "This shall be called Woman, because from man was she taken" sheds light upon many a mysterious chapter in life, reconciles the union of contraries in accordance with the law of God, and fills wide realms of life with the radiance of hope, which otherwise would remain mantled in perpetual gloom. If we depended upon those who are like ourselves to sympathize ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... Profane, is usually taken in the Scripture for the same with Common; and consequently their contraries, Holy, and Proper, in the Kingdome of God must be the same also. But figuratively, those men also are called Holy, that led such godly lives, as if they had forsaken all worldly designes, and wholly devoted, and given themselves to God. In the proper ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... asphalt in stony soil, or bitumen in marshes, and speculate in projected railways. The stupidity of the Paris commercial world is conspicuous in these attempts to do the same thing twice, for success lies in contraries; and in Paris, of all places in the world, success spoils success. So beneath the title of Strelitz, or Russia a Hundred Years Ago, Fendant and Cavalier rashly added in big letters the words, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... retorted his Majesty; "plenty of other countries have had to afford it before now. But it was only when England did it that we took up with the notion. We are always imitating England: the attraction of contraries, I suppose, because we are surrounded by land as they are by water. Why else did they start turning me into a commercial traveler, sending me all over Europe and round the world to visit colonies that no longer really belong to us? ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... depends upon circumstances. I suppose," he added, "if, as is said, one's sin is sure to find one out, the same rule goes by contraries. It seems poor Cliffe once spoke of me to a district visitor, the only visitor he ever had; and this gentleman, hearing of the inquest, came yesterday to inquire about him of me; and the end was that he offered me a situation with a person he ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... is manifested by comparing contraries, and so, as I have above spoken of the suppression of menstruation, it is now necessary that I should treat of excessive menstruation, which is no less dangerous than the former. This immoderate monthly flow is defined as a sanguineous discharge, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... so," observed the neighbour, "because I have marked that men and women do mostly wed with their contraries." ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... said, "Dreams go by contraries, dear heart; but tell me your dream, and your sweet voice will speed the time till I ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel

... "By contraries!" said Richard, smiling. "That is what I was afraid of. I don't half understand or follow her, and when I think a thing nonsense, I see you all calling it very fine, and I don't know ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... his fellow-creatures would never have inspired, had he himself remained without the verge of misfortune, were now produced from the sensation of his own calamities; and, for the first time, his cheeks were bedewed with the drops of penitence and sorrow. "Contraries," saith Plato, "are productive of each other." Reformation is oftentimes generated from unsuccessful vice; and our adventurer was, at this juncture, very well disposed to turn over a new leaf in consequence of those ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... of so many women here who don't look at all like her that has reminded me by the law of contraries of my charming friend at Saint-Germain and my promise to introduce you to her," she wrote. "I believe I spoke to you of her rather blighted state, and I wondered afterwards whether I hadn't been guilty of a breach of confidence. But you ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... avowed neglect forces him into indolence and hopelessness, we shall see the same result in masses as we do in single persons; and the causes which may have generated hatred and despair will everywhere and everywhen find cures in their contraries, honour being accorded in the place of contempt, and kindly care instead of cold indifference. Thus, the far too common phrase, 'No Irish need apply,' has doubtless wrought infinite ill-feeling; and the Levite's chilling ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... not my spleen to behold the multitude in their proper humours; that is, in their fits of folly and madness, as well under- standing that wisdom is not profaned unto the world; and it is the privilege of a few to be virtuous. They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue; for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another. Thus virtue (abolish vice) is an idea. Again, the community of sin doth not dis- parage goodness; for, when vice gains upon the major ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... manifest, differences must be produced in Unity; these differences in the world are the "pairs of opposites"—the contraries. These ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... when positive, have the least contrariety; but there are also opposites, namely, negatives, contradictories and fuller contraries. These may be regarded as either co-ordinate genera or the species of co-ordinate genera. Thus, repose being a genus, not-repose is by dichotomy a co-ordinate genus and is a negative and contradictory; then activity (implying an end in view), motion (limited to matter), disturbance ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... customs and traditions in which both had been brought up. She was wise enough to know, too, that after such an unlucky beginning, it would be better for Gianluca if a long time passed before he had another chance of pouring out his heart to the young girl. Things might go by contraries, she thought. Contempt might turn to familiarity, familiarity to friendship, and friendship to love. The first change had already taken place, and the ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... Diversion. When we talk of these as Instances of Inexistence, we do not mean, that in order to live it is necessary we should always be in Jovial Crews, or crowned with Chaplets of Roses, as the merry Fellows among the Ancients are described; but it is intended by considering these Contraries to Pleasure, Indolence, and too much Delicacy, to shew that it is Prudence to preserve a Disposition in our selves to receive a certain Delight in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily, I say to you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me." It should be noticed that the terms of this award are the exact contraries of those of the award to the righteous. On the one hand, the King says, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit {70} the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;" on the other, he says, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis

... time to be used to finding that everything goes by contraries in these days," I said, "but really, by what inversion of common sense, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, do you make out that by accepting a pecuniary provision from the nation I oblige it ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... All religions contain the Absolute Religion, says Mr. Parker: Just, I reply, as all philosophies contain the absolute philosophy. The philosophy of Plato, of Aristotle of Bacon, of Locke, of Leibnitz, of Reid, are all philosophies, no doubt; but that is all that is to be said. Even contraries must resemble one another in one point, or they could not be contrasted. In truth, there is, I think, a striking analogy between man's spiritual and intellectual condition; only his intellect is a little less variable than his "spiritual faculty"; far more so, however, than ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... his house, with a view of making up the dish himself. I came home, rolling the magic words 'as a sweet morsel under my tongue,' and immediately sought out a curious dictionary, in which various strange things are expounded; and failing in that, looked into CRABBE'S Synonymes, (by the rule of contraries, I suppose, for there certainly could be nothing like Zounds and Sounds,) but as LONGFELLOW says, 'All in vain!' FANNY having retired, I got into my slippers and sat down by the fire to ruminate ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... "it be true, as certain mystics maintain, that the world is an effect of the antagonisms of spiritual beings, having their stations in opposite quarters of the heavens, then, I think, MacCarthy and myself must represent such a pair of contraries, and move in an antithetic balance through the cycle of experience. I, perhaps, am the Urthona of his prophet Blake, and he the Urizen, or vice versa, it may be, I cannot tell. But our opposition ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... cannot be reasonably hoped by him that dares always to hover over the precipice of destruction, or delights to approach the pleasures which he knows it fatal to partake. Austerity is the proper antidote to indulgence; the diseases of mind as well as body are cured by contraries, and to contraries we should readily have recourse, if we dreaded guilt as ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... the government, as usual, has chosen the course of eclecticism; it has taken a part of the administration for itself and left the rest to the corporations; that is, instead of reconciling the contraries, it has placed them exactly in conflict. And the press, which in all things is precisely on a par with power in the matter of wit,—the press, dividing itself into three fractions, has decided, one for the ministerial compromise, another for the exclusion ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... rules, it is a Kingdom; where more than one rule according to Reason and Fight, it is an Aristocracy; where the government is according to Desire and offices depend on money, that constitution is called a Timocracy. The contraries are: to Kingdom tyranny, for Kingdom does all things with the guidance of reason and tyranny nothing; to Aristocracy oligarchy, when not the best people but a few of the worst are rulers; to Timocracy democracy, when not the rich but the common folk possess ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... with fairies, (And I know they're true fairies!) One lifts laughing eyes In a way I most admire. Truth goes by contraries, For you don't know they're fairies Till there isn't any firelight, ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet

... faith consist less in the dogmatism of the head than in the motions of the heart; he would bring the doctrine away from the angry disputes of the schools and incorporate it into practical life. He was thoroughly united with the Reformers as to the real signification of justifying faith, but these contraries which were sought to be reestablished he rejected.... From Spener's view a new phase of spiritual life began to pervade the heart. The orthodoxy of the State Church had been accustomed to consider all baptized persons as true believers if only they had been educated in ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... that this their disloiall resistance sprang rather by others incitement, than of their owne seeking. Thus we se what alterations happen in the actions of men, and that euill things manie times (though naturallie bad) doo inferre their contraries, as one aptlie saith, Discordia fit ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (5 of 12) - Henrie the Second • Raphael Holinshed

... morsel of engaging caprice and naughtiness that a quiet spinster could well have lit upon. It really sometimes seemed to Honora as if there were scarcely a fault in the range of possibilities that she had not committed; and indeed a bit of good advice generally seemed to act by contraries, and served to suggest mischief. Softness and warmth of feeling seemed to have been lost with her father; she did not show any particular affection towards her brother or Honora. Perhaps she liked Miss Wells, but that might be only opposition; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... happiness, your highness," laughingly responded Munnich, "for dreams are always interpreted by contraries. You saw yourself as a beggar because you were to become our ruler—because a purple mantle will this day be placed ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... elected, would modestly withdraw from their employment, to avoid the scandal of his nomination[6]. The sharpness of his satire, next to himself, falls most heavily on his friends, and they ought never to forgive him for commending them perpetually the wrong way, and sometimes by contraries. If he have a friend, whose hastiness in writing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought, and a flowing fancy; for friendship will allow a man to christen ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... medicines now in use, for the terrible and often fatal drugs employed by the Greek and Roman physicians. The fanciful classification of diseases into four kinds—hot, cold, moist and dry, with the corresponding arbitrary classification of remedies to be administered by contraries, continued to be the only recognized theory of medicine for many ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... either mental satisfactions or gayeties, but rather corporeal gratifications, they being at best but the simperings and effeminacies of the mind. But now such as justly deserve the names of complacencies and joys are wholly refined from their contraries, and are immixed with neither vexation, remorse, nor repentance; and their good is congenial to the mind and truly mental and genuine, and not superinduced. Nor is it devoid of reason, but most rational, as springing either from that in the mind that is contemplative and inquiring, or else ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... always expect her to sheer off to Damascus or San Francisco; she's a bird of paradise. God knows what she's got to do with Beldover. It goes by contraries, like dreams.' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... supposed that Australia is topsey-turvey mad, but in India it seems that matters also go by contraries, when compared with their mode of procedure at home. A lawsuit has been occasioned in Calcutta through white ants devouring a will. In England our Aunts (who are generally whites) make wills (bless them!) and we devour them, or at least ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various

... myself with my unthankful temper, and how I had repined at my solitary condition; and now what would I give to be on shore there again? Thus we never see the true state of our condition, till it is illustrated to us by its contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it. It is scarce possible to imagine the consternation I was now in, being driven from my beloved island (for so it appeared to me now to be) into the wide ocean, almost two leagues, and in the utmost despair of ever recovering ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... tails is, that comets are non-luminous, transparent bodies; that they transmit the light of the sun; that the transmitted light reflected by the particles of matter in space constitutes the tails of comets. "Like causes produce like effects." By contraries, then, like effects must be produced by similar causes; for, if an effect produced by a cause which is known is similar to an effect produced by a cause which is not known, the cause which is known must be similar to the cause which is not known. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various

... traes A bale of flat cater traes A bale of fulhams A bale of light graniers A bale of langrets contrary to the ventage A bale of gordes, with as many highmen as lowmen, for passage A bale of demies A bale of long dice for even and odd A bale of bristles A bale of direct contraries. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.

... fact of sex, because it is right in there that we find the root and the germ of permanent social relations. And I wish you to note another very significant fact. You hear people talking about selfishness and unselfishness, as though they were direct contraries, mutually exclusive of each other, as though, in order to make a selfish man unselfish, you must completely reverse his nature, so to speak. I do not think this is true at all. Unselfishness naturally and necessarily springs out of selfishness, and, in the deepest sense of the word, is not at ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... domestic affairs, so that when they marry they know no more of a housewife's duties than their husbands. No wonder men of moderate means shrink from marriage when wives have become a source of discomfort and expense, instead of their contraries, and have lost the name of helpmate. How can they be in a position to teach their servants when they themselves are grossly ignorant of what they would have them learn? There are certain village schools, indeed, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... important than dispatch and exactness in doing so, although writing even the simplest message is now the ordinary and very proper practice. Dean Swift, among his other quaint directions, all of which are to be read by contraries, recommends a perusal of all such epistles, in order that you may be the more able to fulfil your duty to your master. An old lady of Forfarshire had one of those odd old Caleb Balderston sort of servants, who ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... in his eyes that sometimes does exist between men, Carrick saw the thought with the weird prescience of the dying. "Dreams go by contraries, sir," he said and attempted ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... lin'd crutch from thy old limping sire, And with it beat his brains out! Fear and piety, Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, Instructions, manners, mysteries and trades, Degrees, observances, customs and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries; And let confusion live!—Plagues, incident to men, Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners! Lust and liberty Creep in the minds and manners of our youth, That 'gainst the ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... the meaning ought to govern the term, the term in effect governeth the meaning. There be also two false peaces, or unities: the one, when the peace is grounded, but upon an implicit ignorance; for all colors will agree in the dark: the other, when it is pieced up, upon a direct admission of contraries, in fundamental points. For truth and falsehood, in such things, are like the iron and clay, in the toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image; they may cleave, but ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... exemplify the separative spirit of the Greek arts than their comedy as opposed to their tragedy. But as the immediate struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were alike ideal; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great a distance above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles above its tragic events and passions,—and it is in this one point, of absolute ideality, that the comedy ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... brought out of sin? And if so, why permit sin in order to the good of the creation? Are not the perfect holiness and happiness of each and every part of the moral world better for each and every part thereof than are their contraries? And if so, are they not better for the whole? By this reply, the theist is, in our opinion, disarmed, and the sceptic victorious. Hence we say, that the former should have conceded the major, and denied the minor, premiss of the above argument; that is, he should have admitted, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... your honor's honor, and your ladyship's honor,—to be sure I was not dreaming of you last night; I dreamt that your honor's honor gave me a pound of tobacco, and her ladyship gave me a pound of taa." "Aye, my good woman," says the general, "but you know dreams always go by contraries." "Do they so?" replied she, "then it must be that your honor will give me the taa, and her ladyship ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... not very sharp, be cured only with diet and tendering. Celsus[53] could never have spoken it as a physician, had he not been a wise man withal, when he giveth it for one of the great precepts of health and lasting, that a man do vary and interchange contraries, but with an inclination to the more benign extreme: use fasting and full eating, but rather full eating; watching and sleep, but rather sleep; sitting and exercise, but rather exercise; and the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... and indivisible. "God is the totality of all things which are and are not, which can and cannot be. He is the similarity of the similar, the dissimilarity of the dissimilar, the opposition of opposites, and the contrariety of contraries. All discords are resolved when they are considered as parts of the universal harmony." All things begin from unity and end in unity: the Absolute can contain nothing self-contradictory. And so God cannot ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... wisely adopted the Corean text, published in accordance with a royal rescript in 1726, so far as I can make out; but the different readings of the other texts are all given in top-notes, instead of foot-notes as with us, this being one of the points in which customs in the East and West go by contraries. Very occasionally, the editor indicates by a single character, equivalent to "right" or "wrong," which reading in his opinion ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... a path which has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life, and life out of death,—that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... about Mr. Sloane. His attitude toward the bonhomme quite passes my comprehension. It's the queerest jumble of contraries. He penetrates him, disapproves of him—yet respects and admires him. It all comes of the poor boy's shrinking New England conscience. He's afraid to give his perceptions a fair chance, lest, forsooth, they should look over his neighbor's wall. He'll not understand that he may as ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... from an internal principle. The other is natural necessity, resulting from the natural principles—either the form (as it is necessary for fire to heat), or the matter (as it is necessary for a body composed of contraries to be dissolved). Hence, with this necessity, which results from the matter, Christ's body was subject to the necessity of death and other like defects, since, as was said (A. 1, ad 2), "it was by the consent of the Divine will that the flesh was allowed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... displayed the strange contraries of being an ardent admirer of the virtues of classic times, while he was cheating at chuck and all-fours; and though he affected every species of irreligion, was, in fact, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... foundation, and not in penance. Nay, in weakness the virtue of patience may be tested; in vexing conflicts with devils, fortitude and long perseverance; and in adversities suffered from our fellow-beings, humility, patience, and charity. So as to all other virtues—God lets them be tested by many contraries, but never taken from us, unless we choose. Herein must we make our foundation, and not in penance. The soul cannot have two foundations: either the one or the other must be overthrown. Let the thing which is not the ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... we do not mean, that in order to live it is necessary we should always be in jovial crews, or crowned with chaplets of roses, as the merry fellows among the ancients are described; but it is intended by considering these contraries to pleasure, indolence and too much delicacy, to shew that it is prudent to preserve a disposition in ourselves, to receive a certain delight in all ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... TANS. Because both the contraries in excess—that is, in so far as they exceed—are vices, because they pass the line; and the same, in so far as they diminish, come to be virtues, because they are contained ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... objects and phenomena, were always in the way of contraries and offsets. Good weather was enough to ensure forthcoming bad; a full crop this year meant a poor one next year. If every kernel of corn sprouted, look out for plenty of crows and a poor yield. Thus he comforted ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... emotions I mean those which draw a man in different directions, though they are of the same kind, such as luxury and avarice, which are both species of love, and are contraries, not ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... their leaders deserve a whole chapter of description for themselves. Fancy a brass-bound peaked pack-saddle rising a foot above the animal's back, with a crupper-strap slanting down to clasp the tail. The oft-bandied slur, that in Japan everything goes by contraries, has a varnish of truth on it when we notice that the most gorgeous piece of Japanese saddlery is the crupper, which, even on a pack-horse, is painted crimson and gilded gloriously. The man who leads the horse is an animal that by long contact and companionship ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... Angelico received it from his monastic forefathers, the illuminators of Missals, or as he applied it in its strictest and most usual acceptation. Yes, if we admit the law of antagonism, the rules of inversion, and if we know that symbolism authorizes the system of contraries, allowing the use of the hues which are appropriated to certain virtues to indicate ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... tell about a Pye," said Mrs. Rachel cautiously. "They go by contraries, like dreams, often as not. As for that DonNELL woman, she'll get no DonNELLing from me, I can assure you. The name is DONnell and always has been. The woman is crazy, that's what. She has a pug dog she calls Queenie and it has its meals at the table along with the family, eating off ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,—a wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... generic passion, having for its species desire and delight, the contraries of which are abhorrence and pain. Desire is of absent good; abhorrence is of absent evil; delight is in present good; pain is at present evil. The good and the evil which is the object of any passion must be apprehended by sense, or by imagination in a sensible way, whether ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... might ask them again without their trouble, she might take them from them, not pull them: to keep always a distance between her and themselves. He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity. Heaven prepares good men with crosses; but no ill can happen to a good man. Contraries are not mixed. Yet that which happens to any man may to every man. But it is in his reason, what he accounts it and ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson

... opinion of your daughter," said the latter, "we shall hardly agree. Now I maintain that Donna Beatrice is the contrary of insufferable—the most extreme of contraries. In the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford

... commonplace and merely physical as it was in itself, had a certain effect upon Camilla; it might be an effect of fear. I do not say, for I do not know, what her feelings towards Vaudemont exactly were. As the calmest natures are often those the most hurried away by their contraries, so, perhaps, he awed and dazzled rather than pleased her;—at least, he certainly forced himself on her interest. Still she would have started in terror if any one had said to her, "Do you love your betrothed less than when you met by that happy lake?"—and her heart ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... of France. [E] 175 This threw me first out of the pale of love; Soured and corrupted, upwards to the source, My sentiments; was not, as hitherto, A swallowing up of lesser things in great, But change of them into their contraries; 180 And thus a way was opened for mistakes And false conclusions, in degree as gross, In kind more dangerous. What had been a pride, Was now a shame; my likings and my loves Ran in new channels, leaving old ones dry; 185 And hence a blow that, in maturer age, Would but have touched ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... same thing is not the cause of contraries. Now fear and hope are contraries, as stated above (I-II, Q. 23, A. 2): and faith begets hope, as a gloss observes on Matt. 1:2. Therefore fear is not an ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... How dare you dream such a thing as that? Didn't we have a letter from her just two days ago saying she would reach here on to-day's train? And anyway, dreams always go by contraries, you know." ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown

... papa,' said Paula, whose advocacy went much by the rule of contraries, 'it must be a good thing to give people books to read. I dare say it prevents them ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... It is usually by contraries that the truth is determined. Even in the midst of the apparent plenty of fish, fishing crews sometimes came home empty-handed after continued effort. ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... nature, which often gives a bigot a rake for a daughter, and makes a frivolous woman the mother of a narrow pietist; that rule of contraries, which, in all probability, is the "resultant" of the law of similarities, drew Victurnien to Paris by a desire to which he must sooner or later have yielded. Brought up as he had been in the old-fashioned provincial house, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... contraries, and I am, therefore, a very brave man. But come, it is eleven o'clock. Let us see what this place looks like in ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon

... naval service writes to me, that being in distress for a sum of money by which he might transport himself to Columbia, to offer his services in assisting to free that province, he had dreamed I generously made him a present of it. I can tell him his dream by contraries. I begin to find, like Joseph Surface, that too good a character is inconvenient. I don't know what I have done to gain so much credit for generosity, but I suspect I owe it to being supposed, as Puff[44] says, one of those "whom ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... Browning disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment; and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth of genius—that out of the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the saint—was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... you ought to make a good magazine story—not one of those comic ghost -tales that can be dashed off in a minute, and ultimately get published in a book at the author's expense. You stir so little that, as things go by contraries, you'll make a stirring tale. You're long enough, I might say, for a three-volume novel—but—ah— I can't do you unless I see you. You must be seen to be appreciated. I can't imagine you, you know. ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... element of natural and proper good in rank and power, they would never come to the utterly bad, since opposites are not wont to be associated. Nature brooks not the union of contraries. So, seeing there is no doubt that wicked wretches are oftentimes set in high places, it is also clear that things which suffer association with the worst of men cannot be good in their own nature. Indeed, this judgment may with some reason be passed concerning all the gifts of fortune ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... half-obscene, half-mournful, wholly melodious. But Theophile Gautier tarried in Venice, and, as for M. Charles, the man of pronounced tastes and keen nose, stuck in the main to Paris. Failing them as guides, go you first to the Piazza del Campo where horses race in August—all roads lead thither. Contraries again! A square? It is a cup. A field? It is a Gabbatha: a place of burning pavements. Were red brick and Gothic ever so superbly compounded before, to be so strong and yet so lithe? That is the Palazzo Publico, the shrine of Aristotle's ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... procrastination be forgotten. I am always reserving for the future what is great, serious, and important, and meanwhile, I am eager to exhaust what is pretty and trifling. Sure of my devotion to things that are vast and profound, I am always lingering in their contraries lest I should neglect them. Serious at bottom, I am frivolous in appearance. A lover of thought, I seem to care above all, for expression; I keep the substance for myself, and reserve the form for others. So that the net result of my timidity is ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... philosophy, congruously with the proper vocation of the [60] people of art, of art as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the formless. Those famous systoichiai ton enantion, or parallel columns of contraries: the One and the Many: Odd and Even, and the like: Good and Evil: are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe that Plato's "theory of ideas" is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... the following story, that an old man's prayers are sometimes reversed in response, as dreams are said to "go by contraries": An old Arab left his house one morning, intending to go to a village at some distance, and coming to the foot of a hill which he had to cross he exclaimed: "O Allah! send some one to help me over this hill." Scarcely ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... distrust, and jealousie, And those two, give these Lessons, not good meaning, What trial is there of my honestie, When I am mew'd at home? to what end Husband, Serves all the vertuous thoughts, and chast behaviours Without their uses? Then they are known most excellent When by their contraries they are set off, and burnish'd. If ye both hold me fair, and chast, and vertuous, Let me goe fearless out, and win that greatness: These seeds grow not in shades, and conceal'd places: Set 'em i'th' heat of all, then they ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... identical and the non-identical are identical;" and this proposition passes for nonsense. Perhaps if he had said: "May become identical," it would be understood that he meant to speak, in general, of that reconciliation of contraries which united the calm genius of Delsarte and the bristling, prickly spirit of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various



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