"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... talked loudly, kept the two apprentices in a titter with his stories of campaigning, spoke slightingly of the city authorities, and joked the bailie with a freedom and roughness which scandalized her. Andrew was slow to notice the incongruity of his brother's demeanour and bearing with the atmosphere of the house, although he soon became dimly conscious that there was a jarring element in the air. At the end of a week Malcolm broached the subject ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... place it in some worthy centre of civilisation, rather than in this out-of-the-way barbarous region, where for centuries there has been no one to enjoy its beauty. And so, on the other hand, such waste of labour and incongruity of position disposed me to think that there could not be a ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... one fourteen and one ten years of age, found Cheon by far the most entertaining incongruity at the dinner, and when dinner was over—after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had been carried out to the verandah again—they ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... sudden sinister cruelty came over him; he felt a wanton ruthlessness that the sight of ugliness sometimes engenders in natures sensitive to beauty. He went up to the hunchback and looked searchingly into the man's face. It was a strangely handsome face, and its incongruity struck Suvaroff. Had Nature been weary, or merely in a satirical mood, when she fashioned such a thing of horror?—for Suvaroff found that the handsome face seemed even more horrible than the twisted body, so sharp and violent was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... The incongruity of the two elements to each other makes the relation of the spiritual idea to objective reality a negative one. The spiritual as a wholly inner element and as the universal substance of all things, is conceived ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... some extent, on Milton's, "the high-water mark," as it has been termed, "which Horatian translation has attained." I have not, however, sought to imitate his language, feeling that the attempt would be presumptuous in itself, and likely to create a sense of incongruity with the style of the ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... The same incongruity appears also in Innocent VIII., whose bull against witchcraft (1484) systematized the persecution directed against unfortunate old women and idiots. Sprenger, in the Malleus Maleficarum, mentions that in the first year after its publication forty-one witches ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... This incongruity impressed him deeply and occupied his thoughtful leisure on the balcony; and at last it seemed to him that he had detected the error of his method. "This," he reflected, "is an age of generous display: the age of the sandwich-man, of Griffiths, of Pears' legendary soap, and of Eno's fruit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stepped out. He looked about him at the bare walls, the stone floor, and shrugged his shoulders. Erlito was none too well lodged then—soldiering had brought him some brief fame, but little else. Then he suddenly smiled. The incongruity of the thing was ridiculous. His sense of humour, by no means a characteristic trait of the man, was touched. The smile lingered upon his lips. He had come to offer a ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... his dramas and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires. It is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... philosopher arrives at the following conclusion with respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of education and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... be two more before he could attain his goal, which was not to be wondered at, as with every two steps he prostrated himself full length on the ground before the little altar he carried with him. With this primitive mountain world his act was in weird harmony, but there was an incongruity almost stunning in the sight of a Hindu carrying out a similar vow in one of the crowded business streets of Europeanized Calcutta. I nearly stepped on him as I came out one day from the Hong Kong ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Recognizing also the incongruity of giving an absolute veto power to a governor who would be appointed by the President, Douglas proposed a suspensive, in place of an absolute, veto power. A two-thirds vote in each branch of the territorial legislature would override the governor's ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... It should be there only because it belongs there. Therefore all sub-titles should be couched in language that harmonizes with the story. Every word should be weighed. Nothing should ever shock the spectator out of his interest in the picture by its incongruity, extravagance or inanity. Too much in a sub-title is as bad as too little—like seasoning in a pudding. The function of the sub-title is to supplement and correct the action of the picture, to cover lapses in the continuity, and to supply the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... and sparkling. There was a great deal of the feminine in Reade, together with his robust and aggressive masculinity. The fault of his head was its lack of depth; there was not much distance from the ear to the nostril, and the backhead was deficient. It was high above. There was a discord or incongruity in his nature, which made his life not what could be called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and reformer, but not the iron or the impassivity which would have enabled him to endure unmoved the attacks of ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... was already in the midst of a curious weird Roumanian thing, and Norris made straight for the piano. Lena, ethereal in pale blue, was sympathetically listening to perfection. She had lost her look of incongruity with her surroundings. The dreamy eyes and the transparent skin found their setting in her filmy gown and the rich soft light. Dick drew in his breath. He seemed never to get used to her. Naturally he found a seat near her. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... transformation of his own thoughts into the forms of a past epoch. But we can easily see in what sense Pope's work fairly deserves the name. The poets of an older period frankly adopted the classical mythology without any apparent sense of incongruity. They mix heathen deities with Christian saints, and the ancient heroes adopt the manners of chivalrous romance without the slightest difficulty. The freedom was still granted to the writers of the renaissance. Milton makes Phoebus ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The climax of his incongruity was a vehement and rather antiquated Protestantism; he was, for instance, among the few who opposed the alteration of the Coronation oath to a formula less offensive to Catholics. Nobody doubted that his Cornish constituents would endorse whatever he did, for the House held few more popular ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... fibre—delicate, beautiful hands—it seemed odd to her companions to think how they had seen her wring them in woe and clench them in despair. Her black gown with its heavy folds of crape had an element of incongruity with that still, assured, resolved presence, expressing so cheerful a poise, so confident a control of circumstance. She did not expend herself in protest when at ten o'clock they besought her to go to bed, to be called should the telephone-bell ring. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Inundation of the Nile affected by Aquarius as well as Sirius, 468-m. Inventions to account for moral evil, 690-m. Invisible becomes the Visible at the will of God, 845-l. Invisible God, visible in Eden, Sinai, Burning Bush, no incongruity, 514-u. Invisible measured by the visible, 222-u. Invisible only cognizable through the visible, 267-l. Invocation to Ormuzd to combat Evil and make men pure and holy, 613-m. I, O, W, the three-lettered Scandinavian name of Deity, 632-l. Ionic order of architecture ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Katie anew: the incongruity of choosing so well-regulated a place for the performance of so disorderly an act as the taking of one's life. Choosing army headquarters as the place in which to desert from the army of life! Such an infringement of ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... The absolute incongruity between the impression received and the object which roused it, led me to make inquiries, in spite of my friend's jokes ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... more lively and favourable display of the magnificence of fable, of language, and of action, proper to that style of composition. Amid the splendid ornaments of the structure we lose sight of occasional disproportion and incongruity; and, at an early age particularly, there are few poems which make a more deep impression upon the imagination, than the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the merely accidental result of some fact in our nervous organisation which was otherwise useful. Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habit and association and individual variation, that it is extraordinarily difficult to forecast whether any particular act will seem ridiculous to any particular class, or how long the ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... one word from Dick, Amaryllis had given her credence and trust to the Lizard, she yet felt that he suited so ill with any English surroundings that his incongruity would show up any boggled stitch in their two disguises. So, while she nibbled the biscuit which Dick had taken from the paper in his pocket and ordered her to eat, and listened to the unintelligible valedictory advice ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... and disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the incongruity of the word as applied to such a passion as mine did not vex or wound me; it made ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... him angrily, and went upstairs. And old Jamie waited. He dared not smoke his pipe in the parlor, nor even on the doorstep (which was a pleasant place; there was a little park, with trees, in front), for Mercedes thought it ungenteel. The present incongruity of this regard for appearances never struck Jamie, and he waited there. After eleven o'clock he fancied he might venture; the neighbors were not likely to be up to notice it. So he lit his pipe and listened. There was still a light in her ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Lincoln's failure. He was keen enough to grasp the difference, to perceive the clue to his failure. In a thousand ways, large and small, the difference came home to him. It may all be symbolized by a closing detail of his stay. An odd bit of incongruity was the inclusion of his name in the list of managers of the Inaugural Ball of 1849. Nothing of the sort had hitherto entered into his experience. As Mrs. Lincoln was not with him he joined "a small party of mutual friends" who attended the ball ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... But as often it is remorseless. Broken health and empty purses, desperation, mute suffering and madness, we saw at Monte Carlo. Where the world flocks for pleasure, agony of soul reveals itself more readily than elsewhere because of its incongruity. Nice is full of tragedy, and none takes the pains to conceal it as at Monte Carlo. The casual visitor creates his own atmosphere in Nice, and he goes away with the most pleasant memory, having found what he sought. But you cannot stroll day after day on ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... the British Quarterly has not vision microscopic enough to discern you; you like to know how you would feel in a certain contingency, even if it should never happen. Besides, so many strange things arise every day, that incongruity seems to have lost its force. Nothing surprises. Cause and effect are continually dissolving partnership. Merit and reward do not hunt in couples. If the Tycoon should send a deputation requesting me to come over at once and settle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would—they, no doubt, thought—be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... too quickly for me; since that day, for the first time in my life, I was having my fill of the pleasure of the eyes without any of that sense of incongruity, that dread of approaching ruin, which had always beset me hitherto when I had been amongst the beautiful works of art of the past, mingled with the lovely nature of the present; both of them, in fact, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... under great excitement myself, for as a private agent with no official authority such as he evidently attributed to me in the blindness of his passion, I felt the incongruity of my position in the face of a matter of such tragic consequence. Besides, I agreed with her that he was in a distempered state of mind, and I hardly knew how to deal with one so fixed in his hallucination and with so much intelligence to support ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... and such pretty-pretty names, with no meaning and no character to them. Take my own name, Ruth. If I wanted to be noble or heroic I could be; my name would not be an anomalous nightmare to attract attention to the incongruity. We cannot be too thankful to our mothers who named us Mary and Dorothy and Constance. What an inspiration to be "faithful over a few things" such a name ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... Incongruity may be frequently observed in the adoption of colours without reference to their accordance with the complexion or stature of the wearer. We continually see a light-blue bonnet and flowers surrounding a sallow countenance, or a pink opposed to one of a glowing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... the enquiry regarding the grounds upon which he suspected the approach of thieves, so as to induce him to fire, had overcome him with fear, being a countryman unused to similar proceedings, and produced the apparent incongruity in his deposition, but that the true meaning and intent was to express his absolute uncertainty whether the alarm arose from thieves or wild beasts and nothing farther, and that from such deposition he had never intentionally swerved in the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... their swollen bulks back to shape. Eternally he puttered about, mending and patching them. He used to sit for hours at a desk which he had rescued from the ship's furniture. The others never became accustomed to the comic incongruity of this picture—especially when, later, he virtually boxed himself in with ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... The incongruity of the Esher organization had, it may be mentioned, been well illustrated by an episode that occurred very shortly after the reconstitution of the War Office had been carried into effect in the spring ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... sleep. Hence, as the trains of ideas are passing in our imaginations in dreams, we cannot compare them with our previous knowledge of things, as we do in our waking hours; for this is a voluntary exertion; and thus we cannot perceive their incongruity. Thus we are deprived in sleep of the only two means by which we can distinguish the trains of ideas passing in our imaginations, from those excited by our sensations; and are led by their vivacity to believe them to belong to the latter. For the vivacity of these trains of ideas, passing ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Neither history nor geography affords a parallel. It resembles neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has something or other in common with all of these. There is all the incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the Grand Canal—the silent highway of the City of the Sea—is ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... that I returned home resolved to do some building at Riversdale—a gate lodge," and he talked to her of the gate lodge he had in mind, until he became aware of the incongruity. "But I didn't come here to talk to you of gate lodges. Tell me, Evelyn, how do ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... a certain extent they do. But such is the influence of habit upon the eye, that we fully apprehend the effect of such incongruity as that of which I spoke only in the costumes of past generations, or when there is a very violent, instead of a gradual change in the fashion of our own day. Look at these full-length portraits of Catherine de Medicis and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... intelligence," grunted Iff. "I was wondering when you'd wake up to the incongruity of knight-erranting it after damsels in distress in an open-faced ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... recognizable while the instrumentation throughout is meagre and wanting in colour. Chopin is out of his element, and even the beauty of his melodies and harmonies cannot wholly banish the impression of incongruity. Fortunately he himself knew the limits of his power, and with very few exceptions his works belong to that class of minor compositions of which he was an unrivalled master. Barring a collection ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... recovered consciousness, seemed to entertain an unaccountable repugnance. She consented, indeed, to lie down for an hour or two, but could not conceal a wild, restless anxiety to depart as soon as possible. Something more than the obvious astonishment of the servants, something more than the incongruity of the situation, seemed prompting her to leave Lady Bearwarden's house without delay and fly from the presence of almost the first friend she had ever ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... the niece, and the young clergymen that made their fortune by matrimony, were none of them in unison with the open and just dealing which was requisite to my success. The forebodings at which people have so often marvelled are, when they happen, nothing more than perceptions of incongruity, that disturb the mind. Of this kind of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... later in sitting, likened Member for West Belfast to; charming simile, with just that mixture of graphicness and incongruity that only Irish wit could flash upon. Not meant to be uncomplimentary, for SAUNDERSON, like the rest, acknowledges capacity of SEXTON in debate; his clear insight, his capacity for grasping a subject, his aptness of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... to be wholly unaware of any incongruity. Perhaps she had not seen enough of the world to feel it, or perhaps she was wilfully blind to the things she ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced a reaction ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Beulah, my wife is one of the happiest spirits I ever knew; she is a consistent Christian. When we were married, I watched her very closely. I tell you, child, I hoped very much that I should find some glaring incongruity in her conduct which would have sanctioned my skepticism. I was continually on the lookout for defects of character that might cast contempt on the religion she professed. I did not expect her to prove so pure-hearted, unselfish, humble, and genuinely pious as I found her. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... this argument on contemporary theories, may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future—no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... you have now four of my Irish engagement. In my by-past songs I dislike one thing, the name Chloris—I meant it as the fictitious name of a certain lady: but, on second thoughts, it is a high incongruity to have a Greek appellation to a Scottish pastoral ballad. Of this, and some things else, in my next: I have more amendments to propose. What you once mentioned of "flaxen locks" is just: they cannot enter into ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... it distinctly mars the "order and movement" of M. Garnier's thought, which is fundamentally opposed to spontaneity. But imagine the devotion to style of a milieu in which a person who would throw ink on a confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an impersonal dislike of incongruity! Dislike of the incongruous is almost a French passion, and, like all qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for example, that one of the freest of French critics of art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... cannot be denied that in this undertaking an opportunity is presented that would be eagerly seized, with all its attendant labor and expense, by any one of the States, and that it was with great difficulty, and only because of the self-evident incongruity of holding it elsewhere, that we were permitted by the national authorities to celebrate the anniversary in Philadelphia. It is in connection with this, and as a part thereof, that the Zoological Gardens deserve immediate attention, as an additional, and next to the grand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... victim of a hoax, and were the verses not original? No; they were distinctly original, local in color, and even local in the use of certain old English words that were common in the Southwest. He had before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text, and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the mental habit of its author? Was it ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... splendour of colour. The heads are full of character; that of the Virgin in particular, who seems, with half-closed eyes, in act to breathe away her soul in rapture. The altar near the bed, having on it figures of Moses and Aaron, is, however, a serious fault and incongruity ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... facade has Corinthian columns of the XVII century; the nave is said to be "transition Gothic," the choir is decorated with mural paintings, and the High Altar, a work of Revoil, adds to the banalities of the XVII and XVIII centuries a rich incongruity of which the XIX has no reason to be proud. The whole interior is so full of naves of unequal length, and radiating chapels, of arches of differing forms, tastes, and styles, that it defies concise description and is unworthy of serious ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... may really have lived before the Christian era, swear stoutly by St. John and St. Paul and the other medieval Christian divinities. The frank coarseness of the plays is often merely disgusting, and suggests how superficial, in most cases, was the medieval religious sense. With no thought of incongruity, too, these writers brought God the Father onto the stage in bodily form, and then, attempting in all sincerity to show him reverence, gilded his face and put into his mouth long speeches of exceedingly tedious declamation. The whole emphasis, as generally in the religion of the times, was ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... recognize his own influence, and the incongruity of it against the gentle, colourless background of the tale was in truth amusing. A more ludicrous effect could hardly have been obtained, if Miss Bibby herself, clad in the limp lavender muslin, had been encountered lashing about with a stockwhip or hurling blue metal ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... of the Legislature last winter, there were three women in the House. We met the other members upon terms of absolute equality. No thought of incongruity or unfitness seems to have arisen, and at the same time those little courtesies which gentlemen instinctively pay to ladies were never omitted. Each of the ladies was given a chairmanship, one of them that of the Printing Committee, and the printing bill was lower by thousands ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... years, and, interspersed with private acts, are scattered through numerous volumes, and, from the cost of the whole, have become almost inaccessible to the great mass of the community. They also exhibit much of the incongruity and imperfection of hasty legislation. As it seems to be generally conceded that there is no "common law" of the United States to supply the defects of their legislation, it is most important that that legislation should be as perfect as possible, defining every power ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... stomachs with food, and then, like the inferior animals, to stretch themselves in the sun until again aroused by hunger. There is no quarter of the city exempt from this pest of beggary. The palace and the hovel join each other in strange incongruity; starvation and abundance are close together; elegance and rags are in juxtaposition; the city has nearly half a million population, and this condition applies to all its streets. There are many fine public buildings, and yet they can lay no special claim to architectural ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... fat man—a German he must be—who pushed against me, does he know whom he pushed? There's a peasant woman with a baby, begging. It's curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might give her something, for the incongruity of it. Here's a five copeck piece left in my pocket, where did I get it? Here, here... take it, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and infinitesimally ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... fastened themselves on his father's companion. With amazement, he recognised the queer figure of the lanky, gangling Droom; but too kind-hearted and well-bred to allow his features in the slightest degree to express the astonishment which he felt at sight of such a comic incongruity, the young man voiced a few kindly words to the old man, while from the table in the alcove, where the smart, little supper party were seating themselves, Miss Cable was smiling her cheery recognition to her prospective father-in-law; then Graydon made his way back ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... other hand, was regarded as the cold-blooded and cruel warrior who despised the pleasures of love and rejoiced in warfare: Ishtar thus combined in her person chastity and lasciviousness, kindness and ferocity, and a peaceful and warlike disposition, but this incongruity in her characteristics did not seem to disconcert the devotion of her worshippers. The three other planets would have had a wretched part to play in comparison with Nebo and Ishtar, if they had not been placed under new patronage. The secondary solar gods, Merodach, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Lying,' Mr. Tutt," said Tutt thoughtfully, as he dropped in for a moment's chat after lunch, "Oscar Wilde says, 'There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.'" ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... enemies?... Is not this hypothesis of transmitted fragments of instincts in accord with the strangely anomalous fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two worlds, egotistic and altruistic, without conscious sense of incongruity?" (F.L. Burk, "Teasing and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fallen into the hands of the police two or three times, he impersonated a policeman. The latter was such a remarkable occurrence and led to such a peculiar situation that much notice of it was taken in the newspapers. The incongruity between apperception of his own faults and his continued lying, considering his good mental endowment, seemed very strange. One day he sobbed and clung to my arm and begged me to be a friend to him and help him from telling ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... see only some fifty years; before that the cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is still venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a monument ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... writ by my Lord Orrery; wherein Betterton, Harris, and Ianthe's parts are most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most full of height and raptures of wit and sense, that ever I heard; having but one incongruity, or what did, not please me in it, that is, that King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their Mistresse, Princesse Katherine of France, more than when it comes to it he seems to do; and Tudor refused by her with some kind of indignity, not with a difficulty ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... scarecrow. As is common in men stricken suddenly down by accident in the fullness of life, the clothes asserted themselves before all else with a hideous ludicrousness, obliterating even the majesty of death in their helpless yet ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the wearer, but to have been assumed in ghastly jocularity,—a boot half off the swollen foot, a ripped waistcoat thrown over the shoulder, were like the properties of some low comedian. At first the body appeared to be headless; but as ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Christmas dinner with us to-morrow. We live in the plainest way, and cannot entertain in the ordinary acceptation of the term. We only ask you to our ordinary home-dinner," he added, with a sudden sense of the incongruity between the atmosphere of refined elegance which pervaded Mercy's simple, little room, and the expression which all his efforts had never been able to banish from ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... people, she bewailed herself with exaggerated lamentations whenever anything was the matter with her. But even on these occasions she defied what she called "coddling." Once I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort of incongruity very characteristic of her, "Oh! none of your hot bottles for me!" In her last hours of consciousness she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have a fire in her bedroom, and her children had ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... judgment are common among us. We all know the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is the reason he includes ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... defensible—if it violates no true principle among men, no human right bestowed by the Creator—if it can be tolerated and perpetuated in harmony with republican institutions and our Declaration of Independence—if its existence in the bosom of the Confederacy involves no incongruity, and is calculated to promote the prosperity and stability of the Union, or the welfare of the slaveholding States themselves—these are facts which can be made evident to the world, by the unsurpassed abilities of southern statesmen. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... ran northeast, through a landscape so English that there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road. Even the villages look English: the same plum-red brick of tidy self-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, the gardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed and willowed and fed with water-courses, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... far take you into my confidence as to tell you that I have never felt any satisfaction in Marian's union with Mr. Conolly. Though he is unquestionably a remarkable man, yet there was a certain degree of incongruity in the match—you will understand me—which placed Marian apart from her family whilst she was with him. I have never entered my daughter's house without a feeling that I was more or less a stranger there. Had she married you in the first instance, the case would have been different: ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... men who delighted in quoting it took as an additional evidence of the wise dispensation of the God of Nature, rather inconsistently overlooking its incongruity with the teachings of Him in whose name they ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... windows, and occasionally spattered and hissed in the hearth of the broad chimney, and Mr. David Fairley, somewhat assuaged by the internal administration of whiskey, grew more loquacious. The genius of incongruity and inconsistency which generally ruled his conduct came out with freshened vigor under the gentle stimulation of spirit. "On an evening like this," he began, comfortably settling himself on the floor beside the chimney, "ye might rig yerself out in them new duds and fancy fixin's that ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the soiled tablecloth of a public restaurant, but neither of them felt it to be strange or even fanciful. They were dealing with the simple serious issues, and they had reached a point where they could not be affected by any incongruity in their surroundings. Lieutenant Sutch did not speak for some while after Harry Feversham had done, and in the end Harry looked up at his companion, prepared for almost a word of ridicule; but he saw Sutch's right ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the Dutch to their churches is in fact very much that of Quakers to their meeting-houses—even to the retention of hats. But whereas it is reasonable for a Quaker, having made for himself as plain a rectangular building as he can, to attach no sanctity to it, there is an incongruity when the same attitude is maintained amid beautiful Gothic arches. The result is that Dutch churches are more than chilling. In the simplest English village church one receives some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland—of course I ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... she came from the dressing tent and stopped to gaze at the nearby church steeple. The incongruity of the slang, that soon came from her delicately formed lips, was lost upon him as she turned ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... the incongruity and the fact that the automobile was a glaring anachronism did not prevent my abandoning my horse to the mafu and stretching out comfortably on the cushions of the rear seat. There I had nothing to do but collect the remains of my shattered dream-castles ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... the expression "torturing hour," by discovering an impropriety and incongruity. He says, "consistency of figure rather required some material image, like iron scourge and adamantine chain." It is curious to observe a verbal critic lecture such a poet as Gray! The poet probably would never have replied, or, in a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the parlor windows, illuminating exquisitely stained pictures of the Apostles. Strains from a select orchestra greeted them as they entered the house, and Hubert recognized with a queer feeling of incongruity the overture from a well-known opera. The appealing notes of the violins drew his memory instantly to the production he had lately enjoyed, but he thrust the mental vision from him as unworthy of Christ, and tried not to ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... your horses are started in the course with the single object of determining which is the best runner, nothing is more natural than that their burdens should be equalized. But if your object were to send an important and critical piece of intelligence, could you without incongruity place obstacles to the speed of that one whose fleetness would secure you the best means of attaining your end? And yet this is your course in relation to industry. You forget the end aimed at, which is the well-being of the community; ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... extermination against the whole race of German musicians. This was the unanimous explanation of my intentions which he had heard in Germany. Nothing could be more astounding, he said, than the surprising incongruity between the fictitious form in which I appeared to these people, and my real nature, which he had recognised at once on seeing me again. We joked about this, and came to a closer understanding. I was glad to see that he valued as much as I did the works of Schopenhauer, which had become ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... mind in surroundings so alien to their ideals as England was in the last decades of the seventeenth century. They, still more than the Puritans in the time of Laud or the churchmen in the time of Cromwell, suffered because of the incongruity of the ordinary law and custom with their ideals. It was the realization of this incompatibility, along with the attraction of a community under Quaker government, cheap and abundant land, a promise of a growing population and lucrative business opportunities ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... The incongruity of the Lutheran doctrine of justification becomes fully apparent from the consequences which it involves, to wit: (1) all Christians without distinction would possess exactly the same degree of sanctity and justice; (2) justification once obtained by fiduciary faith could not be lost except ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... time ago, I was forcibly struck with the incongruity of the terms "sipp'd" and "industrious" as applied to "bug;" and it occurred to me that Pope may have originally written the passage with the words "free" and "bee," as the rhymes of the two last lines. My reasons for this conjecture are these: 1st. Because Pope is known to have been very ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... Clement felt a certain incongruity every time he put on his miner's dress and went through the mine. "I'm too rough for her, too old," he kept thinking—trying to conceal the real cause of ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... And observing the incongruity of his surroundings, he laughed lightly, while his glance, turning inquiringly if not insolently, from one to the other, lingered in some surprise upon the young woman. He had heard that in far-away France the motley was not confined to men. Had not Jeanne, queen of Charles I, possessed her ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... enough for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned, met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the young people of to-day is obtrusiveness and exaggeration. By obtrusiveness I mean a style of speech and manners that attracts attention and remark; by exaggeration I mean the too constant use of the superlative in conversation, and a certain incongruity and inappropriateness of expression which is very offensive to the cultivated taste. Such expressions as "perfectly awful," "perfectly beautiful," "too lovely for anything," "hateful," "horrible," may constantly ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... Evangelists. We may well believe that much more was said than any or all of them have recorded. The angels' question is half a rebuke, wholly a revelation, of the essential nature of 'the Living One,' who was so from all eternity, but is declared to be so by His rising, of the incongruity of supposing that He could be gathered to, and remain with, the dim company of the dead, and a blessed word, which turns sorrow into hope, and diverts sad eyes from the grave to the skies, for all the ages since and to come. The angels recall Christ's prophecies of death ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... door of a closed shop. A dingy barber's pole gave a clue to the nature of the industry formerly carried on, and the card—which was written upon in fair and even scholarly Hebrew characters—supplied particulars. I had stopped to read the inscription, faintly amused at the incongruity between the recondite Oriental lettering and the matter-of-fact references to 'eligible premises' and 'fixtures and goodwill,' when the door opened and two men came out. One was a typical English Jew, smart, chubby and prosperous; the other was ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... only, only set it down!—for whose eyes? Those of a wandering hawk? God knows. But never mind. I should have spoken—once; should have said the great Word for which the World since the evening and the morning of the First Day has listened. God knows. God knows. What a whirl is this? Monstrous incongruity. Philosophy and fighting troopers. The Infinite and dead horses. There's humour for you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... there can be no doubt as to the vast superiority of Lincoln. Lincoln has sacrificed a great deal to the enormous pitch of its roofs, but it has its reward in the distant view of the outside. The outline of York is spoiled by the incongruity between the low roofs of the nave and choir and the high roofs of the transepts. The dumpiness of the central tower of York—which is, in truth, the original Norman tower cased—can not be wholly made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is clear that some ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... shillings on the spot, ten from the lad Raphael Leon. In vain Pinchas reminded the President they would need Collectors to make house to house calls; three other members were chosen to trisect the Ghetto. All felt the incongruity of hanging money bags at the saddle-bow of Pegasus. Whereupon Pinchas re-lit his cigar and muttering that they were all ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... two I read oftenest or admired most. Again, among the prose writers, Addison was his especial favourite, and Swift he detested; whereas I liked Addison and Swift almost equally well, and passed without sense of incongruity, from the Vision of Mirza, or the paper on Westminster Abbey, to the true account of the death of Partridge, or the Tale of a Tub. If, however, he could wonder at the latitudinarian laxity of my taste, there was at least one special ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... warriors are also made to shield themselves with the white war whoop, which should undoubtedly be the red war whoop, consistent with the red war club, white being the color emblematic of peace, which is evidently an incongruity. The war whoop is believed to have a positive magic power for the protection of the warrior, as well as for ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from them. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... diastole, they would then, and for two opposite purposes, be receiving both blood and air, and heat and cold, which is improbable. Further when it is affirmed that the diastole of the heart and arteries is simultaneous, and the systole of the two is also concurrent, there is another incongruity. For how can two bodies mutually connected, which are simultaneously distended, attract or draw anything from one another? or being simultaneously contracted, receive anything from each other? And then it seems impossible that one body can ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... shaft, more manifest to the eye, the old builders made the shaft shorter as well as thicker, increasing the depth both of its capital and the base, with what is to the thoughtless spectator ridiculous incongruity, and to the observant one a most beautiful expression of constructive genius. Nor is this all. Observe: the whole strength of this angle depends on accuracy of poise, not on breadth or strength of foundation. It is a balanced, not a propped structure: if the balance fails, it must fall ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... reader, however, that it would be dangerous to form any opinion upon the religious sincerity or insincerity of Cromwell, upon extracts from his letters and speeches, or even upon any single letter or speech. From the incongruity we feel between the solemnity of the subject of religion, and the manner and occasion in which it is introduced, and from the use of certain expressions long since consecrated to ridicule, it is impossible for a modern reader, on falling upon some isolated passages, not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the Scriptures or elsewhere we should find a banquet denominated a marriage feast, while from the circumstances it appeared that no marriage had taken place, we should experience no difficulty in explaining the apparent incongruity. But in this case there is no reason for adopting the exceptional, and the strongest reason for retaining what is confessedly the ordinary and natural signification of the term. The conception of the Redeemer as the bridegroom, and his redeemed people as the bride, lies too deep in Scripture ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... to be proud of; and yet, such is the incongruity of things, the sobriquet stuck to me from that day to this, following me about from ship to ship while I have been on ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... how utterly and finally she had been silenced by her. Incredulity, exasperation, amazement had succeeded each other while Miss Erroll was speaking; chagrin, shame, helplessness followed as bitter residue. But, in the end, the very incongruity of the situation came to her aid; for Rosamund very easily fell a prey to the absurd—even when the amusement was furnished at her own expense; and a keen sense of the ridiculous had more than once saved her dainty skirts from a rumpling that ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... in the tonneau detached him to the spectator's gaze and singled him out of the concourse with an effect almost ludicrous in its incongruity. The hair was dark, lustrous and thick, the forehead broad and finely modelled, and certain other ruinous vestiges of youth and good looks remained; but whatever the features might once have shown of honour, worth, or kindly semblance had disappeared ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... years ago, to make his way as he could, without any alliances but in trade, or any thing to recommend him to notice but his situation and his civility.—But he had fancied her in love with him; that evidently must have been his dependence; and after raving a little about the seeming incongruity of gentle manners and a conceited head, Emma was obliged in common honesty to stop and admit that her own behaviour to him had been so complaisant and obliging, so full of courtesy and attention, as (supposing her real motive unperceived) might warrant a man of ordinary ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... it; there was no question of money. According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age—and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... created no small stir, and it was said that the offers for the highlander ran up to a surprising figure. He was bought ultimately by a neighbouring furnishing firm, and now stands on duty not far from his ancient post, though no passer-by can help feeling the incongruity between the time-honoured emblem of the snuff-taker and his present surroundings ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... called from its vicinity to the Thermes of Diocletian, is the next remarkable fountain. Here is a colossal statue of Moses striking the rock and causing the water to gush forth. The grandeur and majesty of this statue would be more striking but for the incongruity of the arcades on each side of the rock, and the two lions in black basalt who spout water. Moses and the rock would have been sufficient. Simplicity is, in my opinion, the soul of architecture, and where is there ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... carried his travels a step farther and described the life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people, had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries in time of peril. {65} No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form (accidentally conditioned here into ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... watching the leopard's furious fight the strains of the Maharajah's orchestra practising "The Gondoliers," floated down-wind to us quite clearly. I remember it well, for as we dismounted to look at the dead beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it gave a curious sense of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... through and through with a large theme, which, since it belongs to tragedy, is universal and unhampered by time or place or people. To them it had something of the sweep, dignity, and solemnity and also something of the dramatic incongruity and lack of cohesion of a Shakespearian drama as contradistinguished from the coherence of purpose and manner of a ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... lamps, without altar, candles or cross, without religious symbol of any sort. Only Jacqueline followed the service, kneeling where the congregation should have knelt, making the responses in her clear young voice, joining him in the prayers. But Philip was aware of no incongruity. He gave them what he had to give, and felt none the less a priest because of his flannel shirt and his shabby riding-trousers. Cathedral or log-cabin, it was all one to him. He knew that with Jacqueline's ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... suburbs,—the Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... relation,—a notoriety due chiefly to the reckless singleness of heart which was not ashamed to own its love, but rather gloried in the public exhibition of a faith in the worthiness of its object, and a constancy, which never wavered to the hour of his death.[14] The pitifulness of it is to see the incongruity between such faith, such devotion, and the distasteful inadequacy ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have been seen, have had some other interest and occupation in life than that of 'making wit:' some have been authors, some statesmen, some soldiers, some wild-rakes, and some players of tricks: Selwyn had no profession ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... enemies; sometimes they fought in one camp, sometimes in another. They were susceptible of hatred, jealousy, sensual passion. It would be strange indeed if their worshippers were not like unto them. The conduct of the Homeric heroes was, however, better than their creed. And there is this strange incongruity and inconsistency in the conduct of the Homeric gods,—they punish mortals for crimes of which they themselves are guilty, and reward virtues in men which they do not themselves always practise. "They punish with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the situation, and the strange incongruity between the senses and the mind in these poor fellows! The day had ripened its beauty; beneath a purple heaven shone, sparkled, and laughed a blue sea, in whose waves the tropical sun seemed to have fused his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... find. In her eyes, what was that but the threat of disaster to come? Had not her aunt told her that this extraordinary luck that she must ever bring was part of the curse shadowing her life? Then the coincidence of her nickname. It was truly hideous. The very incongruity of it made it seem the most terrible disaster of all. Surely, more than anything else, it pointed the hand of Fate. It was her father's nickname for her, and he—he had been the worst sufferer at ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... that, as to Michael Angelo, we do not pretend to assign the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings, after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an impression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is complete; it rests upon the following principle: In all ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Roland had invited him to enter it. That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity of it ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... itself to me. With the last note of the sixteenth bar a veil is drawn suddenly across the scene, and with a sense almost of some catastrophe it vanishes. This I attribute to the fact that the second subject must be inferior in conception to the first, and by some sense of incongruity destroys the fabric which the fascination of ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... ever posed as the inconsolable widow, carrying her husband's soul about with her, packed in straw, like her Venetian crystal goblets and eastern pottery. In the centre of the room, upon a veined marble pedestal, stood, in strange incongruity, a replica of the great bronze of Goujou, that faced her chateau of Anet. In this Diane was represented nude, reclining upon a stag, a bow in her hand, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... monopoly of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes of humorous ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... been said that citizenship was precipitated upon the Negro before he was fit for its exercise. Without discussing the incongruity of this, when applied to the ignorant native Negro and not to the ignorant alien emigrant, it may be conceded that keeping them in abject bondage with no opportunity to protest, made slavery anything but a preparatory school for the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Bacteriaceae to that of the blue-green Cyanophyceae is regarded as sufficient ground for excluding Bacteriaceae from algae altogether, notwithstanding their acknowledged morphological affinity with Cyanophyceae, or, in recognition of the incongruity of effecting such a separation, the whole group of the Schizophyta —that is to say, the Cyanophyceae in the narrow sense, together with Bacteriaceae, is included or excluded together. Again, while Conjugatae ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... passed away. And then his mind began to be filled with strange and weird fancies. What grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency of the worldly minded congregation sitting around him, and the probable smiling carelessness of the reckless rover—the cause of all—even now idly pacing the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Von Barwig, who evidently enjoyed the incongruity of the combination. Then noticing that Ryan was standing he said with a smile, "Brother artist, be seated!" Pinac and Fico roared with laughter. Mr. Ryan sat down, mumbling to himself that that sort ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... Incongruity in Dress.—A man must avoid incongruities in dress. Tan shoes are inadmissible with formal afternoon dress. They do not accompany a silk hat. A lawn tie is never worn save with evening clothes, nor a turn-down collar with them. Gloves should be inconspicuous. A man's hands ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... had, perhaps, strengthened his solitary habit. His speech was voluble and incoherent, complimentary and tactless, kindly and aggressive, courteous and dogmatic. It was left to Senor Perkins to translate it to the eye and ear of his host without incongruity or offense. This he did so admirably as to elicit not only the applause of the foreigners who did not understand English, but of his own countrymen who did ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... exception to this. In his criticism of Paradise Lost (Works, vii. 136), he says:—'The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of Heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... practical application of the new doctrine, the people of the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracy ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is the enormous cathedral, at the time of my visit in course of erection directly above the gambling rooms. The millions of francs expended on this sumptuous basilica were supplied by the proprietors of the Casino and the Prince of Monaco. Nothing can strike the stranger with a stronger sense of incongruity—a church rising from the very ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... character assumed by virtue of a transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting into a costume, absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and associations of the actor, largely accounts for the incongruity and ridiculousness of most of our modern acting. Whether what is called the "legitimate drama" ever was legitimate we do not know, but the advocates of it appear to think that the theatre was some time cast in a mould, once for all, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it often happens, even among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments which cannot be played in concert. In ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up was stiff and ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in the social unit—the family. And while he was Europeanizing the surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment—an incongruity which in time must bring disorder, and compel radical ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... have not been deterred by some petty incongruity of metaphor from quoting this noble sentence. Mr. Hume had, perhaps, this sentence in his recollection, when he wrote a remarkable passage of his works. See Hume's Essays, vol. ii. p. 352. ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... raison d'etre for this facsimile, which to name with approbation will no doubt seem impiety to many, but which, as a personal predilection, I venture to risk—there is no Cotton! The relation between Walton and Cotton is a charming incongruity to contemplate, and one stands by their little fishing-house in Dovedale as before an altar of friendship. Happy and pleasant in their lives, it is good to see them still undivided in their deaths—but, ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... debate to discuss the rights of man, or into the field to battle for them, he were a bold man who dare smile at them. Yet in their religious acts they were often bigoted, intolerant and puerile. The same incongruity is seen in their tastes. Men of deep poetical sentiment, they often murdered poetry for conscience sake. A man who could write a defence of the colonies with a pen that fairly glowed with the burning Saxon that fell from it, would not ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the piano on the last afternoon, all these slumbering forces wakened in him found vent in a rhapsody of synagogue melody to which he abandoned himself, for once forgetting his audience. When gradually he became aware of the incongruity, it did but intensify his inspiration. Let the heathen rats wallow in Hebrew music! But soon all self-consciousness passed away again, drowned in his ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... not been carried out in corresponding style. It might be palace without, but it was wigwam within; so that, between the stateliness of his mansion and the squalidness of his furniture, the gallant White Plume presented some such whimsical incongruity as we see in the gala equipments of an Indian chief on a treaty-making embassy at Washington, who has been generously decked out in cocked hat and military coat, in contrast to his breech-clout and leathern legging; being grand officer at top, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving |
