"Inconsistency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fence, peering into the dark corners made by the zigzag of the rails; and he knew, without looking back, that Margaret, with feminine inconsistency, was following him. Suddenly she darted past him, and flung herself down in the long grass, wailing out a cry that cut Renmark ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... held in abject slavery four millions of human beings; which erected altars to the living God, yet denied to creatures, formed in the image of God and charged with the custody of immortal souls, the common rights of humanity; he declared that the hateful inconsistency should cease to defile the prayers of Christians and stultify the advocates of freedom. No dreamer was he, no mere theorist, but a worker, and a strong one, who did well the work committed to him. He entered upon his self-imposed ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Paget might ever be betrayed into the inconsistency of a truthful assertion, it seemed to his daughter that it was likely to be in this moment. His words sounded like truth; and, on reflection, Diana failed to perceive that she could by any possibility inflict wrong on her friends ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the people; and now that on that very ground General Taylor says that he should use the power given him by the people to do, to the best of his judgment, the will of the people, he is accused of want of principle and of inconsistency ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... having any honour conferred upon me; the Queen's confidence towards me is sufficiently known without any public mark of this nature. I have always disregarded these honours, and there would be an inconsistency in my accepting this. I feel it to be much better for my reputation that I should not have it forced upon me. Mr Pitt never accepted an order, and only the Cinque Ports on being pressed to do so. Lord Grenville accepted a peerage, but never any ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... customary; though all belligerent nations, even in these Christian ages of the world, feel at liberty to seize and confiscate private property when they find it afloat at sea, while, by a strange inconsistency, they respect it on the land. The Cilician pirates considered themselves at war with all mankind, and, whatever merchandise they found passing from port to port along the shores of the Mediterranean, they considered lawful spoil. They intercepted the corn which was going from Sicily to Rome, ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... irrefragable evidence of their senses. Now, let us only suppose the Copernican theory not to have been discovered by human reason, but made known by revelation, and its reception enjoined on faith, leaving the apparent inconsistency with the evidence of the senses just as it was. Thousands, no doubt, would have said, that no such evidence could justify them in disbelieving their own eyes, and that such an insoluble objection was sufficient ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... control the legitimately expressed will of the people; and now that, on that very ground, Gen. Taylor says that he should use the power given him by the people to do, to the best of his judgment, the will of the people, he is accused of want of principle, and of inconsistency in position. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... The inconsistency between the rational professions and the impulsive behavior of men is a matter of common observation. "That's not the logic, reason, or philosophy of it, but it's the human nature of it." It is now generally recognized that the older English conception of the "economic man" and the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... difficult to deny, first, that in so doing she exercises harshly an extreme and hard law; secondly, that her conduct with respect to the navigation of the St. Lawrence is in glaring and discreditable inconsistency with her conduct with respect to the navigation of the Mississippi. On the ground that she possessed a small domain in which the Mississippi took its rise, she insisted on the right to navigate the entire volume of its ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... guilt which they contain is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether; seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if these mistakes as to facts actually exist ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... him by this standard, they have been able to discover in him no one proof or symptom of a commanding genius. They have discovered him never controlling, never creating, events, but always yielding to them with rapid change, and sheltering himself from inconsistency by perpetual indefiniteness. In the Russian war, they saw him abandoning meanly what he had planned weakly, and threatened insolently. In the debates on the Regency, they detected the laxity of his constitutional principles, and received proofs that his eloquence ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... of inconsistency in externals. With his shaggy sandy hair, his great red face, covered with freckles, his long loose figure, clad in red French breeches a size too small, a threadbare brown coat, soiled linen and hose, and enormous hands and feet, he must ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... contrast. He was wont, during his fits of devotion, to assume the dress, and conform to the rules, of the order of Franciscans; and when he had thus done penance for some time in Stirling, to plunge again into the tide of pleasure. Probably, too, with no unusual inconsistency, he sometimes laughed at the superstitions observances to which he at other times subjected himself. There is a very singular poem by Dunbar, seemingly addressed to James IV, on one of these occasions of monastic seclusion. It is a ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... willing to recognize the Unions but being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves taking sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly we take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour. We never know when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly about a new dispute in the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... educated classes can persevere, on the one hand, in declaring belief in a personal God to be an indispensable principle of religion, and, on the other hand, in at the same time rejecting the belief in a personal devil as an exploded superstition of the Middle Ages. This inconsistency on the part of educated Christians is all the more incomprehensible and censurable, inasmuch as both dogmas in equal degree form an integral part of the Christian creed. The personal devil, as "Satan," ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... which reported the happy extinction of the insurrection by the hanging of the last conspirator, William Garner, reported also, with enthusiastic indignation, the massacre of the Greeks at Constantinople and at Scio; and then the Northern editors, breaking from their usual reticence, pointed out the inconsistency of Southern journals in printing, side by side, denunciations of Mohammedan slave-sales, and advertisements of ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just, or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than the time-serving, place-hunting, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of the contemners of evangelical truth, characterized by more active zeal and decided measures. Far from the giddy thoughtlessness of those who hardly reflect upon the subject at all, and from the strange inconsistency of such, as profess to respect what they really despise and hate,—these feel and express a deep interest in religious opinions; devote time and attention to theological studies; and, as the result of their investigations, avow their utter disbelief of the peculiar ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... the entire six years of the Cromwellian Dictatorship and Protectorship. That had not been a "short" interruption, for it had exceeded in length the whole duration of the Commonwealth it had interrupted; and it would be the most marvellous inconsistency on record if Milton could ever have brought himself to call it "scandalous." Who had written the panegyric on Cromwell and his actually established Protectorship in the Defensio Secunda? Who had been Oliver's ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... domestic servants wear, the stockinged foot that peeped at me beneath its hem (her shoes were drying on the hearth) was clad in a silk so fine that I could catch, through it, the gleam of the white flesh beneath. From this apparent inconsistency I deduced that she was of educated tastes, but poor—probably a governess, or, more likely still, taking her hands into consideration, with their long, prehensile fingers, a teacher of music, and was going on to explain to myself her present situation as the outcome of Beauty, Poverty, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... times personal, at times an aspect of the One God, and at times a second independent God. If we take Philo literally, this certainly is the case. But let it be clearly understood, this interpretation not only involves Philo in inconsistency, but it utterly ruins and destroys his religious and philosophical system. It means that the champion of Jewish monotheism wanders into a vague ditheism. And in view of this, the modern commentators of Philo, notably Professor Drummond,[219] ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... rather than real pleasure, and now he perceived its force. He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed, and were trying, in a blundering but persevering way, to obey their consciences. He saw some unselfish thoughts and acts. Many things that he had attributed to irresolution or inconsistency, he perceived were in reality self-sacrifice. He went on in frantic disquiet, distance no longer being of consequence, and in his roaming chanced to pass through the graveyard in which many generations ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... were so certain of his identity that they at once fell on their knees and did him homage. From their care he was transferred to Belleville, the head-quarters of the Vendean army, where with strange inconsistency he was compelled to observe an incognito! Here he passed two months disguised as a lady; and, although known to the chiefs, concealed from ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... concluded by pledging her royal word that she would uphold the Duke in his opposition, as resolutely as ever he had been supported in his former measures by the deceased monarch. More and more bewildered by this apparent inconsistency, Sully respectfully took possession of the document, declaring his perfect willingness to serve both her Majesty and the state by every means in his power; and he then awaited her pleasure upon other matters of more public importance; but on all else Marie was silent, and the disappointed ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... ejaculation of my lips; such, in spite of its seeming inconsistency, was the real belief within my soul. What was it, then, that I did doubt? wherefore, then, the misery, the suspense, the suspicion, which grew and gathered, corroding in my heart, the parent of a thousand unnamed anxieties? It will be difficult to answer. The heart of man is one of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... white, black robes are the indication of mourning; but as, for the generality, the same colour is also used for occasions of commerce, ceremony, religion, and the ordinary affairs of life, the matter remains exactly as it was before. Yet with obtuse inconsistency the garments usually white—in which a change would be really noticeable—remain white throughout the most poignant grief. How much more markedly expressed would be the symbolism if during such a period they wore white ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines {'The Bishop orders his Tomb'}, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice' put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... attempting to establish the priority of Quinones' dictionary, question the existence of one by Plasencia at the Synod of 1582 in the face of his own statement in 1585 that he "was then making a dictionary." [85] To us there seems to be no inconsistency, if Plasencia in 1585 was referring to a revision, unquestionably made with his knowledge and help, by Juan de Oliver. In short, it is reasonable to assume that Plasencia, burdened with administrative duties from 1583 to 1586, during which time he ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... little else than their animality, and who stop as far short of the attainable perfections of their nature as the other attempts to go beyond them. You will discover as many silly affections, as much foppery and futility, as much inconsistency and low artifice in one as in the other. I never met the mad woman at Brentford decked out in old and new rags, and nice and fantastical in the manner of wearing them, without reflecting on many of the profound scholars and sublime philosophers of our ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... mind perceived the inconsistency of Undine's taxing him with having hastened their marriage; but her variations on the eternal ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... will be drowned!" said Miss Mary; and then, with feminine inconsistency, she ran back to the schoolhouse and locked herself in. That night, while seated at supper with her hostess, the blacksmith's wife, it came to Miss Mary to ask, demurely, if her husband ever got drunk. "Abner," responded Mrs. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the Magyar conception of him as the profound and far-sighted conspirator—he would seem, on the contrary, to have been a man easily yielding to the impulses of the moment, and capable of playing contradictory parts with little sense of his own inconsistency. [430] ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... readable of his generation. He has the allurement of his own inconsistency, and the inconsistency of youth is its questing spirit, and, consequently, its ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... in his little brass bowl, but he would loose caste if he took soda water in the same way, so he tramps to the well and at great trouble draws a cup. The tall snub-nosed Mohammedan looks on with scorn at the inconsistency and touches ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... everywhere are discerning the shallow inconsistency between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper in the hearts ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... to admit California as a State of the Union before it had acquired the requisite population, and while it was mainly under the control of a military organization sent from New York during the war with Mexico and disbanded in California upon the restoration of peace. The inconsistency of the argument against the extension of the line was exhibited in the division of the Territory of Texas by that parallel, and payment to the State of money to secure her consent to the partition of her domain. In the case of Texas, the North had everything to gain and ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... idea, but I never before got just the perfect picture, and now I have it, though it's the last word I want to say to you, God made me so that I'm forced to say it, although it furnishes one more example of what is called inconsistency." ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... are never included in the Five-Great-Power series. The fact is, the Chinese have never grasped the idea of principles in history: their annals are mere diaries of events; and when once an apparently definite "period" is named by an annalist, they go on using it, quite regardless of its inconsistency when confronted with facts adverse to ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... generally regarded as illegal, and which the Prince had, in his Declaration, condemned. James himself had, just before his downfall, consented to restore the old municipal franchises. It would surely have been the height of inconsistency in William, after taking up arms for the purpose of vindicating the invaded charters of corporations, to recognise persons chosen in defiance of those charters as the legitimate representatives of the towns ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... necessary about the apparent inconsistency between this feeling of anxiety about strangers and the well-known ancient Italian practice of hospitium, by which two communities, or two individuals, or an individual and a community, entered into relations ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... (says a teacher), came to me one day with a complaint that one of her companions had got her seat. There had been some changes in the seats by my permission, and probably, from some inconsistency in the promises which I had made, there were two claimants for the same desk. The complainant came to me, and appealed to my recollection of ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... why it was that she did not take a more vital interest in the politics of her native country, and after reflecting a moment, she told me that she thought it must be because they were so stupid. On the other hand, with apparent inconsistency, she has many times expressed the hope that I would some day be conspicuously connected with them. I have been conscious for some time that it would suit her admirably to have me round off my professional career as Speaker of the National House of Representatives ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... many men in my employment, but nothing would have more astonished me at any time in my business life than to be told that I was systematically impairing and obstructing the usefulness of the men that I was paying to work for me and from whose labor I expected some profit. It is the most inexplicable inconsistency to me in congregations, which generally include a large percentage of business men. I have used the word systematically, because it seems to me that it is a system which pervades to a greater or less extent all congregations of all denominations, and is ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... they who buy them, and use them as mere beasts for their own convenience, regardless of their spiritual welfare, are fitter to be called demons than christians. He then proposes several queries, which he answers in a clear and forcible manner, showing the great inconsistency of this traffic, and the necessity of treating those then in bondage with tenderness and a due regard to their ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... depression, not fearing ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured. For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... accept it on those terms. She even tempted him to patronize her, but when he ventured upon something elderly and paternal in his monitions, she resented it so fiercely that she was astonished and ashamed. There was an inconsistency in it all that was perplexing, but not so perplexing as to spoil the pleasure ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... do not want to repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so." I produced the following extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law." To this he merely replied that there was "no inconsistency between those two statements." He asserted that "Rufus P. Putnam, fraudulently credited to Washington County, Ohio, never lived in Washington County, Ohio, or in my Congressional district, or in Ohio as far as I know." We produced a letter which, thanks to a beneficent ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... confidence of the mass of the Republican party of the country. He foresaw that they would abandon him, and he therefore made hot haste to abandon them. And, indeed, it must be confessed that there was scarcely more inconsistency in that course on his part, than there would have been in continuing his connection with the men who had elected him. His nomination for the Vice-Presidency was an enthusiastic tribute to his Union sentiments; beyond a knowledge of these, the Convention neither had nor desired to have any information. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... thought her mother might be. "And why do you speak thus to me? You introduced Mr. Wentworth yourself to me; you first invited him here—and why, mother, do you affect this surprise now?" and Pauline's color deepened, and her voice quivered as she thought, with a sense of her mother's inconsistency and injustice. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... be able to congratulate itself on Michael Angelo; never to congratulate the world. It is the spirit that can be seen in those who go bald trying to trace a genealogy; or go bankrupt trying to make out a claim to some remote estate. The Prussian has the inconsistency of the parvenu; he will labour to prove that he is related to some gentleman of the Renaissance, even while he boasts of being able to "buy him up." If the Italians were really great, why—they were really Germans; and if they weren't really Germans, ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... last, there were the lights of St. Louis—and here was the wharf—and those were the steps—and the little woman, covering her face with her hands, and laughing, or seeming to laugh, more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up tight. I have no doubt that, in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears lest she should hear 'him' asking for her; but I didn't see her do it. Then a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, and was staggering ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... part that I could bring her into good-humour. To walk with her on the Mall, or at Ranelagh, to attend her to church at St. James's, to purchase any little present or trinket for her, was enough to coax her. Such is female inconsistency! The next day she would be calling me 'Mr. Barry' probably, and be bemoaning her miserable fate that she ever should have been united to such a monster. So it was she was pleased to call one of the most brilliant men in His Majesty's three kingdoms: and I warrant me OTHER ladies had a ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sinner; that is so both before and after the sinner's repentance. Divine repentance is therefore the same principle acting differently in altered circumstances. If the prospect of punishment answers the same purpose as that intended by the punishment itself, then there is no inconsistency in its remission, for punishment is not an end, it is only a means to goodness, to the reign of the law of righteousness." When God appears to be displeased with anything, or orders it differently from what we expected, we say, after the manner ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... likewise enter a Minute of it in my Collection of Materials. By this means I frequently carry about me a whole Sheetful of Hints, that would look like a Rhapsody of Nonsense to any Body but myself: There is nothing in them but Obscurity and Confusion, Raving and Inconsistency. In short, they are my Speculations in the first Principles, that (like the World in its Chaos) are void of all ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... companionships of the ungodly sort. If you have any joys, delights, and associations which Christ would compel you to resign, they are only such as you ought never to have entered upon. They are self-made difficulties which ought never to have been made; and now, with curious inconsistency, you are urging them as reasons why you cannot serve God. You are using the sinful things which you have done in the past as an excuse for not doing the right and noble ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... inevitable. Everybody recognized that now. Even Samuel and all the hottest partisans of Daniel Povey recognized it. They talked as if they had always foreseen it, directly contradicting all that they had said on only the previous day. Without any sense of any inconsistency or of shame, they took up an absolutely new position. The structure of blind faith had once again crumbled at the assault of realities, and unhealthy, un-English truths, the statement of which would have meant ostracism twenty-four hours earlier, became ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... glittering vacillation of undisciplined enchantment, and left the lustre of its edifices to wither like a startling dream, whose beauty we may indeed feel, and whose instruction we may receive, but must smile at its inconsistency, and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... ahead looked misty and solitary; Guy Seton's eyes were fixed upon her face with an expression at once so wistful and so ardent that it seemed impossible to meet it with her own. In her heart of hearts Rowena knew perfectly well what that look meant; but with the curious inconsistency of her sex the impulse was strong upon her to fly from what she had most longed for and desired. Conversation was the best refuge for the moment, and she plunged hastily into the first subject ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... so?' I asked. 'What do you want of them?'—'What do I want?' He stretched his eyes at me inquiringly. 'How strange,' said I, 'the inconsistency! Here's a true man would try to overtake An untrue mate! If she's not sterling gold And loyal as the loadstone,—not alone In every act, but every thought and throb,— Why should you care who puts her to the proof, Takes her ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... a question like that," I said, and I won my neighbor's easy laugh, "I always like to give my own sex the benefit of the doubt, and I haven't any question but man's inconsistency is ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... which he had confided to me. "A fine mission, indeed!" said he to me. "It is just like the Emperor; he is always suspicious of those who serve him best. Do you think, for example, that you are sure of him? You deceive yourself. If you should involuntarily be guilty of the slightest inconsistency, and he knew it (these words he pronounced in such a way, as to give me to understand, that it was through him the Emperor might be informed of it), nothing more would be wanting to ruin you. But let us have done with princes, and talk together." Leading me to his sofa, he said: "Do you know, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... formula is much the same as another; though Edward Pierson, gently dogmatic, undoubtedly preferred his High-Church statement of the inexpressible to that of, say, the Zoroastrians. The subtleties of change, the modifications by science, left little sense of inconsistency or treason on his soul. Sensitive, charitable, and only combative deep down, he instinctively avoided discussion on matters where he might hurt others or they hurt him. And, since explanation was the last thing which o could be expected ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contact with artisan freethinkers was disgusting to him. From the meeting of emancipated workmen he went away with scorn and detestation in his heart; but in the quiet of his lodgings he could sit down to aid their propaganda. One explanation of this inconsistency lay in the fact that no other channel was open to his literary impulses. Pure science could not serve him, for he had no original results to announce. Pure literature seemed beyond his scope, yet he was constantly endeavouring to express ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... additional moiety by the organism; the organism really does pay something by way of changed habits; this results in variation, in virtue of which the accounts are cooked, cobbled, and passed by a series of those miracles of inconsistency which was call compromises, and after this they cannot be reopened—not till ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... frequently do not do this; because they are so charmed with the happy turn of their expressions, and other elegancies of composition, that they perfer the praise which they may acquire for their style to the censure which may follow from their inconsistency. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... one allow a God, but one scarce good enough to care about his creatures, I will yield him that it were foolish to pray to such a God; but the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the offspring of a cold-hearted devil, is so horrible in its inconsistency, that I would ask that man what hideous and cold-hearted disregard to the truth makes him capable of the supposition! To such a one God's terrors, or, if not his terrors, then God's sorrows yet will speak; the divine something in him will love, and the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... a third criterion proposed for determining the essential differentia of romantic art. First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's part in this continual shifting of his ground. He is apparently presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... extraction respectively. Suffice it to say that the Romance of the Round Table, far less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of childhood. Its political action is less specifically Christian than that of the rival scheme, its individual more so. It is more directly and seriously aimed at the perfection of man. It is more free from gloss ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to adapt the best of their contents to the use of printers' apprentices. Every author has his own set of rules. At first sight, each set appears inconsistent with those given by other writers. This inconsistency, however, is generally more apparent than real. It arises from differences in point of view, method of approach, and ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... wonderful things—things that ordinary people cannot do at all. Sometimes they are not exactly human beings, for they partake of the nature of men and beasts, or of men and gods. I tell you this beforehand, so that you may not ask any questions, or be puzzled by the inconsistency of the ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... swayed by the dangers which the sensualistic teaching presented to all logical minds; dangers which had frightened the chief of that school himself, and who, in wishing to oppose them, had not been able to do so except by contradictions. This young man, by a noble inconsistency, drew back in presence of the moral conclusions of that metaphysical doctrine, but not without culling from the master's thoughts conclusions, such that they leave all that is spiritual and immortal without defense, together with all the legitimate inferences to be derived from the principles ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... our present constitution contains in it the justice and ardor of freedom and the wisdom and vigor of the most absolute system. When the law is the will of the people, it will be uniform and coherent; but fluctuation, contradiction, and inconsistency of councils must be expected under those governments where every revolution in the ministry of a court produces one in the State—such being the folly and pride of all ministers, that they ever pursue measures directly opposite ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... inconsistently fallen of enslaving a portion of their brethren of mankind,—for 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth,'—it is manifestly the duty of all Christians who enjoy the light of the present day, when the inconsistency of slavery both with the dictates of humanity and religion has been demonstrated and is generally seen and acknowledged, to use their honest, earnest, and unwearied endeavors to correct the errors of former times, and as speedily as possible to efface this blot on our holy religion ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... was professedly an unbeliever, I thought I knew a great deal about the Bible, and I used to lay down the law, and talk very big about this inconsistency and that inconsistency in the Scriptures, and I just read those books which supplied me with weapons of attack. But I was in utter ignorance of what the Bible really was; and had I read it from beginning ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... contradictious Cause it proceeds, that Persons thus finished by Nature and by Art, should so often fail in the Management of that which they so well understand, and want the Address to make a right Application of their own Rules. This is certainly a prodigious Inconsistency in Behaviour, and makes much such a Figure in Morals as a monstrous Birth in Naturals, with this Difference only, which greatly aggravates the Wonder, that it happens much more frequently; and what a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... he makes this following unorthodox statement: "We have a right to hate and detest slavery, and should belie our natures, were we not to do so." Elsewhere, however, he dwells rapturously upon the happy lot of the slave. The apparent inconsistency is explained on p. 318: "We will not insult our understandings by doubting the great enormity of so foul a thing as human bondage." "In regard to detestation of slavery, there is no difference between the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a struggle for life began; and this man who had just now sought death so eagerly—with no feeling of inconsistency, with no physical fear of dissolution, with only a vague, blind, dogged determination to live for some unknown purpose—a determination as vague and dogged as his former ideas of self-destruction—summoned all his energies to reach the shore. He struck out ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... are no longer the old Austrians." On the capture of the Saxon army, which surrendered at Pirna, Frederick, who exacted such unlimited allegiance from his subjects and soldiers, gave a strange proof of inconsistency, and of that contempt with which he seemed to treat the feelings of other men; for, without so much as asking their consent, he ordered all the prisoners to be incorporated into the ranks of his army, and expected to make loyal Prussians of them by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... primary in the positive treatment of economic principles, and launched a negative criticism against the older terms and ideas that effectively exposed their unsoundness considered separately and their inconsistency as a system of economic thought. Both the negative criticisms and the proposed amendments taken one by one gained wide acceptance among economists. But when it came to embodying them in a general theory of economics, many economists have balked.[33] Most of the American texts in ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... manuscript does account for this inconsistency, as it would furnish the transcriber with the most intimate knowledge of local habits, names, and usages; while at the same time it would not guard him against mistakes which negligence or haste, or the difficulty of deciphering a manuscript in a language with which the transcriber ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... intensified that hatred between Jew and Samaritan which burned so fiercely during the early part of the first Christian century. Marissa and Dora, the chief cities of the Idumeans, were next conquered. With strange inconsistency, John Hyrcanus, whose ancestors had first taken up the sword in defence of religious liberty, compelled the descendants of their old foes, the Edomites, to give up their national religion or else go into exile. ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... described, whatever may be the meaning of it, as carried by Bacchus to heaven. The story is said to have been painted on a robe, or coverlet; because it was delineated upon a Pharos: that word being equivocal, and to be taken in either sense. And here I cannot but take notice of the inconsistency of the Greeks, who make Theseus a partaker in this history; and suppose him to have been acquainted with Ariadne. If we may credit Plutarch[225], Theseus, as soon as he was advanced towards manhood, went, by the advice of his mother AEthra, from Troezen, in quest of his father AEgeus ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... of him as a man who, in early life, rejected all generalities and abstract propositions, and who became the most strenuous and violent of conservatives. But there is an interval when, as the quarrel with the Colonies went on, Burke was as revolutionary as Washington. The inconsistency is not as flagrant as it seems. He had been brought forward by the party of measured propriety and imperative moderation, of compromise and unfinished thought, who claimed the right of taxing, but refused to employ it. When he urged the differences in every situation and every problem, and shrank ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... which he implored. The opponents of the petitioner, some of whom were of that class of patriots who hunger for the division of the spoils, were aghast, and having counted on Marion's support, now loudly proclaimed his inconsistency. But to these his answer was equally prompt and satisfactory. His reasons were true to his principles. He had been governed in his previous views by the necessity of the case. With the disappearance of ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... make a cleverer hit than in the reading of the Genius Phanor's tragedy in the Palace of Truth. Comically absurd as the inconsistency is of transporting the lecture of a Parisian academician into an enchanted palace, full of genii and fairies of the remotest possible connexion with the Arab jinn, the whole is redeemed by the truth to nature of the sole dupe in the Palace of Truth being the author reading his own works. Ermine ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as a girl. It is the nature of a girl to change with every wind that blows. It is only the female prig who acts consistently under all circumstances. In a world the leading of which is its men, inconsistency is the best nature of a healthy girl made to be loved by men. One doesn't sneer at the weathercock because one hour it points to the north and the next to the east. 'Tis its nature to. 'Tis our nature to change with every breeze of man that bears down on us. That's why they love us and ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable provincial. To be sure, her sentiments were somewhat at variance with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she was going to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... This seems to mean, "he gives oracles at his shrine." Observe the inconsistency of ...
— Egyptian Literature
... Greeks and other nations borrowed was employed to show the connection; in this the apologists followed Philo Judaeus. No attempt was made either by them or by Clement of Alexandria to remove the inconsistency of this theory of borrowing with the doctrine of the Logos; see above, under ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... mine had a sure recipe for success in public life. "Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this earth that I ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... he was the victim instead of being the cause of the dog roast, but the manager dismissed pa by telling him not to let it occur again. Then to show the inconsistency of the manager, he ordered pa to go on ahead of the show to New York, and advertise that the cannibals in our show would give an exhibition of roasting and eating a human being, and to offer a reward for ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... to be an inconsistency; for if we are to think for ourselves we do not need to be instructed by artists any more than by critics. But Sir Thomas Jackson may mean that the artist is to instruct the public only through his works. Still, the question remains, How is the artist ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... guilt; when Claudio, her lover, without remorse or a lingering doubt, consigns her to shame; when the Friar remains silent, and the generous Benedick himself knows not what to say, Beatrice, confident in her affections, and guided only by the impulses of her own feminine heart, sees through the inconsistency, the impossibility of the charge, and exclaims, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the sine ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... certain cases the criminal jurisdiction (C. I. Gr. 1543; Plut. Cim. 2), just as the senate had hitherto done; and that, lastly, the Macedonian provincial era was also in use in Greece. Between these facts there is no inconsistency, or at any rate none further than is involved in the position of the free cities generally, which are spoken of sometimes as if excluded from the province (e. g. Sueton. Cats., 25; Colum. xi. 3, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... significantly. I did not pause to reflect that the Colonel's attitude, from his point of view (yes, and from mine,—had I not adopted it?) was the logical one. In that philosophy every man had his price, or his weakness. Yet, such is the inconsistency of human nature, I was now unable to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... great moment, provided it has a sufficiency of clothing, and be not exposed to currents of air. A large clothes-basket will serve all the purposes of a crib. The mistake is often made of burying the child under too heavy a mass of bed-clothes in a warm room when asleep. And this inconsistency is committed by the very mothers who scantily clad the child during the day in order to inure it to the cold. The great transition from its wrappings by night to those by day is injurious to the health ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... but one among the many distinguished authors of this intellectual nation. They, however, in general, live but for their own fame, or their own pleasures. Their private history presents no lesson to the world, or, perhaps, a humiliating one of human frailty or inconsistency. At best, they are prone to steal away from the bustle and commonplace of busy existence; to indulge in the selfishness of lettered eas; and to revel in scenes of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... His Excellency, in after seasons, with a twinkle in his eye. 'My inconsistency must always have been distasteful to such a ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... influential by permanent inspiration. In their highest moods, and amid their noblest hours of triumph, they were "of the earth earthy." Party; personality; crushing rejoinders, or satirical attacks; a felicitous exposure of inconsistency, or a triumphant self-vindication; brilliant repartees, and logical gladiatorship,—such are among the prominent characteristics which caused parliamentary debates in Burke's day to be so animating and interesting to those who heard, or perused them, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... religion, even in the Church; its immorality—the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every kind of iniquity—its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... bodies, he must have seen that those arguments of his, with regard to the difficulty or impossibility of procuring that fire, can only show the error of his reasoning. I am far from supposing that my theory may be free from inconsistency or error; I am only maintaining that, in all his confident assertions, this author has not hitherto pointed any ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... criminals created at all? Why are idiots created? The deeper we look into the facts of life the more unsatisfactory does the theory of special creation become because we find a thousand things that contradict it and show its inconsistency. If the purpose of God was to create a heaven to be enjoyed by those who reach it we cannot see why He should create a humanity the majority of which is incapable of ever attaining it. If He creates them as they come into the world at birth why are not all of them created wise ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... robbed is transplanted to the other side of the line, as if to make Canadians feel more bitterly how much kinder England is to the children who desert her, than to those who remain faithful. It is the inconsistency of imperial legislation, and not the adoption of one policy rather than another, which is the ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... your child will follow specified acts, follow with like uniformity, he will soon come to respect your laws as he does those of Nature. And this respect once established, will prevent endless domestic evils. Of errors in education one of the worst is inconsistency. As in a community, crimes multiply when there is no certain administration of justice; so in a family, an immense increase of transgressions results from a hesitating or irregular infliction of punishments. A weak mother, who perpetually threatens ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... in their consequences, whilst his reasonings in explanation of them are absurd and childish. A contrasted collection of both would be a most amusing, and at the same time a humiliating picture of the inconsistency ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... consciously assumed, both Horaces were genuine. When Davus the slave reproaches his master for longing, while at Rome, to be back in the country, and for praising the attractions of the city, while in the country, it is not mere discontent or inconsistency in Horace which he is attacking. Horace ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soul like a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smothered shrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of them. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent with Lucy in Villette. It is not ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the secondary qualities of matter, indeed, are known to us only relatively, but that the primary qualities are known to us as they are in themselves, or as they exist objectively, and that they may be even evolved by demonstration a priori—(pp. 19-26, 30). The inconsistency between the two doctrines, professed at different times, and in different works, by Sir W. Hamilton, is certainly manifest. Mr Mill is of opinion that one of the two must be taken 'in a non-natural sense,' and that Sir W. Hamilton either did not hold, or had ceased to hold, the doctrine ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... other works, which produced a deep impression on me in the same autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, each contrary to each, and planting in me the seeds of an intellectual inconsistency which disabled me for a long course of years. I read Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... "Villainous inconsistency!" exclaimed the Elder, in an indistinct voice, his eyes half closed, and the spectacles gradually falling from his nose. "You are scandalising my excellent character, which can't be replaced with gold." Making another attempt to raise a glass of wine to his ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... exactly what Betty should have expected, but she couldn't help being a little disappointed. Eleanor had just shown herself so fine and downright, so willing to make all the reparation in her power for a course whose inconsistency had been proved to her. It was very disheartening to find that she cherished the old, reasonless grudge as warmly as ever. But if Betty had accomplished nothing for herself, she had done all that she hoped for Eleanor, and she tried to ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... seems to be an inconsistency here,—Clara was the mother of Ido,—or, if not an inconsistency (there might be two Claras), at least a useless and confusing ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... yoke. [8] The various tribes of Britain possessed valor without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness; they laid them down, or turned them against each other, with wild inconsistency; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued. Neither the fortitude of Caractacus, nor the despair of Boadicea, nor the fanaticism of the Druids, could avert the slavery of their country, or resist the steady progress of the Imperial generals, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... not at all correct. Lord Chatham detected what he believed to be the mischievous Conservatism in Burke's constitutional doctrines at the very outset. So did the Constitutional Society detect it. So did Mrs. Macaulay, Bishop Watson, and many other people. The story of Burke's inconsistency is, of course, as old as Sheridan. Hazlitt declared that the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely opposite persons, but deadly enemies. Mr. Buckle, who is full of veneration for the early writings, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... sum of ninety pounds. [Footnote: 3 Do., March 7, 1786.] There was already a strong feeling in the western settlements against negro slavery, [Footnote: See Journals of Rev. James Smith.] because of its moral evil, and of its inconsistency with all true standards of humanity and Christianity, a feeling which continued to exist and which later led to resolute efforts to forbid or abolish slave-holding. But the consciences of the majority were too dull, and, from the standpoint of the white race, they were too shortsighted to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... "Don't talk in that way, Loo! Don't look in that way, dear!" he said, taking her hand gently, yet not without a sense of some inconsistency in her conduct that jarred upon his own simple directness. "You know that nothing can part us now. I was wrong to let my little girl worry herself all alone here, but I—I—thought it was all so—so bright and free out on this hill,—looking far away ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... seed in a fertile field, and obtain a fine son from a healthy stock. Lykurgus did not view children as belonging to their parents, but above all to the state; and therefore he wished his citizens to be born of the best possible parents; besides the inconsistency and folly which he noticed in the customs of the rest of mankind, who are willing to pay money, or use their influence with the owners of well-bred stock, to obtain a good breed of horses or dogs, while they ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... neither pen nor ink wherewith to write their report in the bare, dilapidated, cold, and dismal house. Observing persons and the heir might then have noticed a curious inconsistency which may be seen in certain misers. The dread the little old man had of the slightest outlay showed itself in the non-repaired roof which opened its sides to the light and the rain and snow; in the cracks of the walls; in the rotten doors ready to fall ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... enormous drain in the lapse of human history, we are unable to detect a diminution of his store ...."—after reading this, to see the men of science still maintaining their theory of "a hot globe cooling," one may be excused for feeling surprised at such inconsistency. Verily is that great physicist right in viewing the sun itself as "a speck in infinite extension—a mere drop in the Universal sea;" and saying that, "to Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... propound a formulary of her faith, enlarge this formulary from time to time, as further interpretation is wanted, and enforce acquiscence in it by spiritual censures, is consistent with her principles. Whether such a pretension can be avowed, without inconsistency, by any Protestant Church, has been a subject of much discussion. In point of fact, however, no Protestant Church is without her formulary, or abstains from enforcing it by temporal provisions and spiritual censures. To enforce their formularies by civil penalties, is inconsistent ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... explanation, it may appear paradoxical to mention an inconsistency in the mind of Mr. Vincent which never permitted him to discover the above Cainish mark of outlawry upon a wealthy visitor, of whatever country. In fact, it was with him as with many: riches were a splendid and thick robe that concealed all ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... hypocrite, when amatory and bacchanalian choruses would not only have been more consonant with his own feelings, but doubtless more acceptable to the world? She had not yet learned what it often takes the wisest man a lifetime to discover—that every inconsistency of conduct is not hypocrisy, but that it is one of the most common idiosyncrasies of the mind to write and believe one thing, and as self-approvingly to feel and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... appear at first that taking the rider of the horse as a symbolic agent but the killing which he effected as literal, is an inconsistency and a variation from the laws of symbolic language; but such is not necessarily the case. One principle laid down in the beginning was, that the description of an object or event must necessarily be literal when no symbolic object could be found to ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the law of nations, founded neither in justice nor in the usage or acknowledgment of nations. According to these a belligerent takes to itself a commerce with its own enemy which it denies to a neutral on the ground of its aiding that enemy in the war; but reason revolts at such inconsistency, and the neutral having equal right with the belligerent to decide the question, the interests of our constituents and the duty of maintaining the authority of reason, the only umpire between just nations, impose on ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... this point as well as on the other grounds on which he has been attacked, he has defended himself with great vigour and success. The night after the debate, he gave Brougham a heavy fall, and exposed his glaring inconsistency and falseness. Brougham is said to have appeared more annoyed and crestfallen than ever he did before. He certainly made a very poor ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... might be achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement of some of her examples. She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes; but she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would have fancied her own marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured her that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... consistency yourself," Cottsill reminded him. We despatched the past participles, and came also without much disturbance through catalog, demagog, and so forth (vogue and rogue made some trouble, and our fundamental principle of inconsistency had once more to be asserted), but when their blood was roused and the fire of simplification grew hot in them, and they adopted the following with cheers and ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... 74 meditatum; see also a list, Roby, 734), and some of them occur very rarely. Thus periclitatus, arbitratus, depastus as passives are found each in only one passage. — INCONSTANTIA: 'instability', 'inconsistency'. Constantia, unwavering firmness and consistency, is the characteristic of the wise man; cf. Acad. 2, 23 sapientia ... quae ex sese habeat constantiam; also Lael. ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... probably any conscious purpose of according a relative reality to the phenomenal world, but in spite of regarding Brahman as the highest reality they could not ignore the claims of the exterior world, and had to accord a reality to it. The inconsistency of this reality of the phenomenal world with the ultimate and only reality of Brahman was attempted to be reconciled by holding that this world is not beside him but it has come out of him, it is maintained in him and it will ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... referred to, and which I have recently read by reasons of the reference to it in the letter to Dr. Mann, will clearly show that I have not been guilty of inconsistency or a change of opinion —the most pardonable of all offenses—but then insisted, as I now insist, that no discrimination should be made against the note holder, but that until we are ready to pay ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... partial enforcement in Boston compelled a little legislative action and the result was what might have been expected in a State in which religious opinions are allowed to interfere with the credibility of a witness, and in which Diogenes, if he were here, would be struck with the vast inconsistency between the creed of Christendom and its practice, and the vast disparity between the progress of modern knowledge and the effete system of education in our Universities. He would wonder why modern colleges are more interested in the details of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... their country, rather admired than followed, nay, so absolutely renounced by every one that not a trace of that antique worth is now left among us, I cannot but at once marvel and grieve; at this inconsistency; and all the more because I perceive that, in civil disputes between citizens, and in the bodily disorders into which men fall, recourse is always had to the decisions and remedies, pronounced or ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... masking be admitted, it can in no way lessen the inconsistency of the cross questions, which to me appears to have arisen from a most palpable instance of clerical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... many debatable questions to which the Reformation had given rise, and did not always convey the same doctrines to their people, or work harmoniously together. It was not, however, till the year 1868 that this inconsistency was corrected by merging the two offices into one; and in 1883 the measure was supplemented by an Act which abolished the office of Chaplain altogether, and made him who then held it ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... dumb; grant me but this; have nothing made up for her out of the house: you know there is no dressmaker in Barkington can cut like you: and then that will put some limit to our inconsistency." Mrs. Dodd agreed; but she must have a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... King, ceased his pursuit. The conduct of the Russian generals was, throughout this war, often marked by inconsistency. They sometimes left the natural ferocity of their soldiery utterly unrestrained; at others, enforced strict discipline, hesitated in their movements, or spared their opponent. The key to this conduct was their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... for example, who lived at Burlington, professed to believe that the Quaker influences of that town were not strict enough in keeping the Sabbath, so he drove every Sunday in his coach and four to Philadelphia to worship in the Presbyterian Church there and saw no inconsistency in his ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... can't work all day and spend my nights down there," he thought resentfully. When at last he slept, he dreamed of sitting in the lumber yard in the darkness with the gun in his hand. A man came toward him and he discharged the gun and killed the man. With the inconsistency common to the physical aspect of dreams, the darkness passed away and it was daylight. The man he had thought dead was not quite dead. Although the whole side of his head was torn away, he still breathed. His ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... instead of pleasantly receptive; there were so many "points of order," and what not; such complete disregard, among the members, of each other's feelings; and, finally—a thing I could never understand, indeed—such inconsistency and lack of principle in the intercourse of the two parties. How could I feel assured of their sincerity, when I saw the very men chatting and laughing together, in the lobbies, ten minutes after they had been facing each other like angry lions ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... know, would advocate a system of beneficent actions without the heart; others would direct it merely to one or a few favorite objects. But these are views neither broad nor deep enough. It is grafting consistency on inconsistency. True benevolence is a spirit of universality, and hence, of harmony, gushing forth in streams numerous as our relations. No reason can be assigned why one should contribute of his property to save the souls of others, while ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... of the universe. . . . France is undone if the present administration lasts."[4240]—When, under Louis XVI, a new administration proposes and withdraws feeble measures of reform, their criticism shows the same firmness: "Childishness, weakness, constant inconsistency," writes another,[4241] "incessant change; and always worse off than we were before. Monsieur and M. le Comte d'Artois have just made a journey through the provinces, but only as people of that kind travel, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for his philosophic ideal the monochronos hedone of Aristippus—the pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now—there would come, together with that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after all, [155] to retain "what was so transitive." Could ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... probably thought of the announcement I had made at the banquet of my own approaching marriage, and strove to reconcile it with the apparent inconsistency of my present observation. But he was too discreet to utter his ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... is a slight inconsistency here. The conversation is represented as taking place in the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... towards the United States tempers the blandishments of the serenader with the occasional discharge of half-bricks. There is no such inconsistency in the expression of her feelings about England. Articles entitled "Unser Hass gegen England" constantly appear in the German Press, and people are beginning to wonder whether the Hass is not the Kaiser. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... in a jesting manner, and punished him for this jealousy, she, herself, with all the inconsistency of a lover, fell into the same fault, and could not hide from him the jealous fears which the ladies from Brescia, especially the beautiful Madame de Te——, had created within her mind. Bonaparte answered this ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... fall between the acts: and I must yet mention a strange custom, which I thought quite extraordinary; as its inconsistency with art was to me, as a good German boy, quite unendurable. The theatre was considered the greatest sanctuary, and any disturbance occurring there would have been instantly resented as the highest crime against the majesty of the public. Therefore, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can explain away. He also acknowledges that the book of Esther "contains many exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply founded upon one of those same historical tales of which the Persian ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... liberty of those unhappy men, who, alone, in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage; and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men," Annals of ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... The countess, like a brave woman, like a devoted wife and mother, refused to adopt his views. She is willing to shoulder the responsibility of her refusal, and her conduct is an honor to her. As for his changes of doctrine, we are all very much like him in the matter of inconsistency. Only, as very few of us enjoy the renown or the authority of Count Tolstoy, it rarely occurs to us to proclaim our progressive opinions to the world; at most, one or two experiences cure us of that weakness, even if any one thinks it worth while to notice them in the slightest degree. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood |
