Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Paradox   Listen
noun
paradox  n.  (pl. paradoxes)  A tenet or proposition contrary to received opinion; an assertion or sentiment seemingly contradictory, or opposed to common sense; that which in appearance or terms is absurd, but yet may be true in fact. "A gloss there is to color that paradox, and make it appear in show not to be altogether unreasonable." "This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof."
Hydrostatic paradox. See under Hydrostatic.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books



... with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of philosophes, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it is called—yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... whether in the form of colonial enterprises, armament competition, or actual warfare, find a common origin in economic and commercial interests. Commerce and quick communications have drawn the world into closer unity, yet by a kind of paradox have increased the possibilities of conflict. Both by their common origin and by their far-reaching consequences, it is thus possible to connect the story of naval events from the Spanish-American to the World War, and to gather them up under ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... letters show nothing of the kind. On literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased judgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... who allege that the lower orders, at least, have nothing more to require. We are told by the former, that the Catholics never will be contented: by the latter, that they are already too happy. The last paradox is sufficiently refuted by the present as by all past petitions; it might as well be said, that the negroes did not desire to be emancipated, but this is an unfortunate comparison, for you have already delivered ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... and his great contemporary Cervantes died on April 23 of the year 1616, it strangely happens that Cervantes had been dead ten days when Shakespeare expired. This apparent paradox is due to the fact that while in Spain the Gregorian calendar had already been introduced, the "Old Style", or Julian reckoning, was still used in England; indeed, it was not totally abandoned until 1752, in the reign of George II, 170 years after the first use of the Gregorian ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... nothing. Point is to prepare immense assortment of entirely irrelevant epigrams. "Epigram, my dear Duke, is the refuge of the dullard, who imagines that he obtains truth by inverting a truism." That sounds well; must lay it by for use. Take "Virtue," for instance. "Virtue" offers a fine field for paradox, brought strictly up to date. Must jot down stray thoughts. (Good idea in the expression "Stray Thoughts." Will think over it, and work it up either for impromptu or future play.) Here are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various

... this swell is caused by distant westerly gales in the Atlantic, which force an undue quantity of water into the North Sea, and thus produce the apparent paradox of great rolling breakers ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... mutilated corpses, the ghastly price of glory. The trenches at Port Arthur were filled level-full with the bodies of self-sacrificed martyrs, and upon this gruesome slope the final charges were made. Stripped of all sentiment, war is organized and wholesale murder, a savage and awful paradox which proclaims the shallowness of civilization. Said General Sherman: "Only those who have never heard a shot, only those who have never heard the shrieks of the wounded nor the groans of the dying, can cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... is interested in them, but those who have found religion intellectualized beyond endurance and transformed either by materialism or rationalism, seek for the mysticism they know to be a reality (to employ a paradox) in the ultra mysticism of Oriental cults; those who revolt against the exaggeration of evil and its exaltation to eminence that rivals that of God Himself, which is the legacy of one powerful movement in the Reformation, rush ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... that paradox of impossibilities—silence become vocal—must traverse the vast wastes of the prairie by night. As a mother quiets a fretful child, so the illimitable calm lulls tumultuous thoughts. The wind moving through empty solitudes comes with a sigh of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... not be denied in spite of resolute resistance to it! For Strindberg does hold us, even when we regret his power of doing so. And no one familiar with the conclusions of modern psychology could imagine such a paradox possible did not the object of our sorely divided feelings provide us with something that our minds instinctively recognise as true to life in some way, and for that reason valuable to the ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... Kock, and protesting against those English critics who call him the first writer of his time and country, he says that it is as ridiculous as it would be in Frenchmen to exalt the novels of Charles Dickens above Ivanhoe, Philip Augustus and Eugene Aram, The idea of a Frenchman thinking it a paradox to rank Dickens above James, or even Bulwer, shows how difficult it is for a foreigner, especially a Frenchman, to pass beyond the external ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... among some people, over-fond of paradox, that this tower is in reality a Hindoo building, and not, as commonly supposed, a Muhammadan one. Never was paradox supported upon more frail, I might say absurd, foundations. They are these: 1st, that there is only one Minar, whereas there ought to have been two— had the unfinished one been intended ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... another Part of his Learning, as it related to the Knowledge of History and Books, I shall advance something, that, at first sight, will very much wear the Appearance of a Paradox. For I shall find it no hard Matter to prove, that from the grossest Blunders in History, we are not to infer his real Ignorance of it: Nor from a greater Use of Latin Words, than ever any other English Author used, must we infer ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald

... perhaps understand such an opinion, if you would or could be entirely isolated from Europe; but as you are not isolated, as you cannot be, as you cannot even have the will to be (for that very will would be a paradox, a logical absurdity, impossible to be carried out, being contrary to the eternal laws of God, which he for nobody's sake will change); therefore to believe that you can go on to be connected with Europe in a thousand respects, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth

... at home.' He was much pleased with Lord Monboddo to-day. He said, he would have pardoned him for a few paradoxes, when he found he had so much that was good: but that, from his appearance in London, he thought him all paradox; which would not do. He observed that his lordship had talked no paradoxes to-day. 'And as to the savage and the London shopkeeper, (said he,) I don't know but I might have taken the side of the savage equally, had any body else taken the side of the shopkeeper.[261]' He had said to my lord, in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... follow him into the street and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the general condition of things, let them not be thereby disheartened. Let them carry in their minds this divine paradox, that it is far more important to every man that he should do his utmost for Humanity than it ever can be for Humanity that any one man should do ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... content," she said hastily, "and pull me no more lugubrious faces to fright me. Lord! What a vexing paradox is this young man who sits and glowers and gnaws his lips in the very moment of his victory, while I, his victim, tranquil and happy in defeat, sit calmly telling my thoughts like holy beads to salve my new-born soul. Ai-me! There are many things yet to be learned ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... paradox!" exclaimed Albert. "Not so paradoxical as you imagine," I replied. "You allow that we designate a disease as mortal when nature is so severely attacked, and her strength so far exhausted, that she cannot possibly recover her former condition under ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... Flame-broidered trance and starless cold confusion Of slain and flying dreams shall not destroy The radiant oath to that bright Suzerain Whose lightning-lovely succour ambushed lies Even in the most impossible strait of pain. Mystical paradox, divine surprise Of rapture! By intensities alone Their spirits enter in to exultation For whom the burning winds of their sad zone Bear down the Dove of the Imagination, Who suffer superbly, in scarlet violetted, As the Sacred Kings of ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... when he thought of losing Corydon, that he realized to the full how much he loved her. Then all their consecrations and their pledges would come back to him; he would hold her as the greatest human soul that he had ever met. But it was a strange paradox, that precisely the depth of his love for her made him willing to think of losing her. He loved her for herself, and not for anything she gave him; he wanted her to be happy, he wanted her to grow and achieve, and ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... dispassionate consideration of the whole matter. Macaulay in one of his essays has observed that "the moral principle of a woman is frequently more impaired by a single lapse from virtue than that of a man by twenty years of intrigue." He explains this seeming paradox by asserting that "a vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice, while a vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on the whole character." "One," says Macaulay, "is a local malady, the other is a ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... from Carnaby, professing to despise a man who knew nothing of game but its taste. The conversation reverted to technicalities of sport, full of terms and phrases unintelligible to Harvey; recounting feats with 'Empress' and 'Paradox', the deadly results of a 'treble A', or of 'treble-nesting slugs', and boasting of a 'right and left with No. 6'. Hugh appeared to forget all about his domestic calamity; only when his guests rose did he recur to ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... earliest admirers—is no longer, in any sense, a book "under review." The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and compass, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first place, if Esmond ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... peasant's cottage or farmhouse. In bright sunlight they will perish in from three to six hours; in bright daylight in less than half a day. This is one of the factors that helps to explain the apparent paradox, that the dust collected from the floors and walls of tents and cottages in which consumptives were treated was almost entirely free from tuberculous bacilli, while dust taken from the walls of tenement houses, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... best policy in general not to explain any remark he had made, but to say the right thing better next time instead. I suppose he believed, with another friend of mine, that "when explanations become necessary, they become impossible," a paradox well worth the consideration of those who write letters to newspapers. But Lady Bernard understood him well enough, and was only unwinding the clew ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... is another advantage if this bill is passed. The very strength at which we are aiming necessarily renders us pacific. This sounds like a paradox, but it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... same. Meat's cast away upon him; It never thrives. He holds this paradox, Who eats not well, can ne'er do justice well. His stomach's as insatiate as ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... — N. absurdity, absurdness &c. adj.; imbecility &c. 499; alogy|, nonsense, utter nonsense; paradox, inconsistency; stultiloquy[obs3], stultiloquence[obs3]; nugacity[obs3]. blunder, muddle, bull; Irishism|!, Hibernicism|!; slipslop[obs3]; anticlimax, bathos; sophism &c. 477. farce, galimathias[obs3], amphigouri[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... that things are fixed, that conditions are permanent, and that, as there is no apparent place for you as circumstances now exist, there never will be. Fix in your mind this dreadful and glorious paradox, that even the most permanent things are transient. Study the clouds, those visible emblems of human experience and institutions. A twist, a curve, a change in the shape and outline, and final disappearance into the universal blue—such ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... the most essential symbol to More's expression of infinitude and extension. The figure first appears in Antipsychopannychia (II.9) where his purpose is to reconcile the world Soul with Christian eschatology. In Democritus Platonissans, the cone enables More to adapt the familiar Hermetic paradox: ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... of his compositions, teeming with mazurkas, valses, polonaises, and other forms of national dance music, one could hardly suppose that here one of the most melancholy natures has revealed itself. This seeming paradox is solved by the type of Chopin's nationality, of which it has justly been said that its very dances are sadness intensified. But notwithstanding this strongly pronounced national type of his compositions, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... thought of war, and yet the mass of their citizens was a teeming democracy as heedless of and unfitted for fighting, mentally, morally, physically, as any population has ever been—or, one ventures to add, could ever be. That was the paradox of the time. It was a period altogether unique in the world's history. The apparatus of warfare, the art and method of fighting, changed absolutely every dozen years in a stupendous progress towards perfection, and people grew less and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... This paradox produces astonishment in inexperienced reformers, and too often produces disillusionment in those who have come to know the difficulty of ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell

... opposed its re-establishment in Montgomery, or rather refused the previous State aid. Having been for many years on the Board of Trustees of Atlanta University, and being personally acquainted with a number of the members of the Georgia Legislature, yet I am prepared to state this astonishing paradox—that even the legislators who voted for the Glenn Bill have a much higher regard for the colored race and for the A.M.A. schools than they formerly had. I cannot take time to explain this singular phenomenon, but it is true. One of the prominent members of the Georgia Legislature said ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various

... She lets the hydrant water run: He hearkens Father Sebastian cooking and spreading homely themes over an inept-looking clavier confounding the wits of his children and all men's children down to the last generation. He marvels at the paradox, drums his head with the tattoo: how can a thing as small as he shape and maintain an art out of himself universal enough to carry her daily vigil to crystalled immortality? She lets ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... a moment that the present volume is Miss Austen's greatest, as it was her first published, novel, would be a mere exercise in paradox. There are, who swear by Persuasion; there are, who prefer Emma and Mansfield Park; there is a large contingent for Pride and Prejudice; and there is even a section which advocates the pre-eminence of Northanger Abbey. But no one, as far as we can remember, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... the Pelz limousine drew up between an aisle of bales, its door immediately flung open. First, Mr. Pelz emerging, with an immediate arm held back for Mrs. Pelz. Last, Miss Pelz, a delightful paradox of sheer summer silk and white-fox furs, her small face flushed and carefully powdered up ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... release of its nutritive elements. Lime added to the peat will break it down rapidly and make it more available as a fertilizer, but until the decomposition reaches a certain point; its effect is to impoverish rather than to enrich the mixture. This seeming paradox can perhaps best be explained by some experiments I have been making with sawdust. A number of plots were prepared and given various treatments, including mixing one surface-inch of sawdust with the soil, and wheat was ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various

... the Fox From dewy Morn till Day grows dim; At Home he finds a Paradox, From Noon till ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the same reason, is any place for faith on the opposite hypothesis; for if man is to believe nothing but what his reason can comprehend, and to act only upon evidence which amounts to certainly, the same paradox is true; for when there is no reason to doubt, there can be none to believe. Faith ever stands between conflicting probabilities; but her position is (if we may use the metaphor) the centre of gravity between them, and will be proportionally nearer ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... point of view, it is a power to be used. We must never lose sight of the fact that obedience to any natural law in its generic tendency necessarily carries with it a corresponding power of using that law in specific application. This is the old proverb that knowledge is power. It is the old paradox with which Jesus posed the ignorant scribes as to how David's Lord could also be his Son. The word "David" means "Beloved" and to be beloved implies that reciprocal sympathy which is intuitive knowledge. ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... the world, the secession heresy, fatal to all government, that we had no right to repel force by force, on the part of a State seeking, by armed secession, to destroy the Union. The absurd political paradox was then announced by the President, that a State has no right to secede, but that the Government has no right to prevent its secession. It was this wretched dogma, that paralyzed our energies when they were most needed, gave immunity ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... so far as to assert that the mechanical arts, with engineering and fortification, nay, even the minor arts of decoration and costume, owe their existence to design. The more we reflect upon this apparent paradox, the more shall we feel it to be true. At any rate, there are no products of human thought and feeling capable of being expressed by form which do not find their common denominator in a linear drawing. The simplicity of a sketch, the comparative rapidity with which it ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... air of New York City is in certain respects the purest air a man can breathe. This may seem a paradox. New York City is not often quoted as an example of purity. To the philosopher her atmosphere is cleaner than that of a country village. As the air of a contracted space may grow poisonous by respiration, while pure air rests over the entire surface of the earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let us leave ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... that shrouded her aunt's secret being now withdrawn, by a strange paradox a heavy cloud of darkness descended upon Sophy; she seemed to have suddenly passed from a warm glow of sunlight into a cold shadow-land of mystery and fear. Before Herr Krauss and the outer world she still carried a buoyant standard ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... most strange fashion cavilled at, called in question, and denied. We specify the Gospel, instinctively, as that part of the Inspired Word which chiefly concerns ourselves, as Christian men; but the entire deposit shares the same fate. I do not think I am delivering a paradox when I say that the Bible is generally very little read. That the amount of study commonly bestowed upon it bears no proportion whatever to its transcendent importance and paramount value, shall not be any paradox at all; ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... position of the seventeenth in respect of letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance, hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... tender passion—Adelaida—was written by Frau Beethoven; whether it was the Fornarina, or Raphael, who painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one such heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the ark itself, so to speak, and to defend the startling paradox that, even in physical beauty, man is the superior. He admitted, indeed, that there was a brief period of early youth when it might be hard to say whether the prize should be awarded to the graceful undulations ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of the counter strokes of the wild wood-rangers, the Indian ravages speedily wrapped the frontier in fire and blood. In such a war the small parties were really the most dangerous, and in the aggregate caused most damage. It is less of a paradox than it seems, to say that one reason why the Indians were so formidable in warfare was because they were so few in numbers. Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... certaine kynde of line that brenneth not if it bee cast in ye fyre, but loketh more whiter then any water coulde haue made it, & therefore it is called Linum asbestinum, a kynde of lynen, whyche canne neither bee quenched with water nor brent with fyre. Spu. Nowe in good faith you bring a paradox more woderful then all the maruailous and profound thynges of the Stoickes: lyue thei pleasasauntly whom Chryst calleth blessed for that they mourne & lament? Hedonius. Thei seme too the worlde too ...
— A Very Pleasaunt & Fruitful Diologe Called the Epicure • Desiderius Erasmus

... paradox, in which self-denial and humility are proposed as tenets, in direct contradiction ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Ontology should bring into doubt the foundations of Revealed as well as of Natural Theology. It was a bold thing to do, for since he was come to Berlin, and had read more of his books, he had gathered that Mendelssohn still professed Orthodox Judaism. A paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato—such a man a creature of the Ghetto! ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... dear author, yet it true is, That down from Pharamond to Louis All covet life, yet call it pain: All feel the ill, yet shun the cure; Can sense this paradox endure? Resolve me ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... compass was not publicly accepted as authoritative till the reformation of Ezra—declared themselves convinced by Wellhausen's arguments. Before 1878 the Grafian hypothesis was neglected or treated as a paradox in most German universities, although some individual scholars of great name were known to have reached by independent inquiry similar views to those for which Graf was the recognised sponsor, and although in Holland the writings of Professor Kuenen, who has been ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... his report. He was only twenty-four; and he had not been in Coralio long enough for his enthusiasm to cool in the heat of the tropics—a paradox that may be allowed ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... seems a paradox to many, that a man should live to the law, that is, devote himself to the works of the ten commandments, the most perfect rule of life; and yet not be counted one changed, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... "Atlantic," of course, have universal knowledge (with few exceptions) at their fingers' ends,—that is, they possess an Encyclopaedia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by assaulting a Boston cracker; and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured disease before they knew medicine. Art came before aesthetics, and righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other. Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox—and sometimes he realised it—his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, that, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity, be ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... better public men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that university which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun. And, paradox as this may seem, still if results be the test of systems, the influence of the public schools and colleges of England, in the course of the last century, at least will bear out one side of the contrast as I have drawn it. What would come, on the other hand, of the ideal systems of education which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... right as well as a wrong method of philosophising. The one leads, it may be, but to a few modest results, of no very brilliant or original character, yet of sterling value and importance. The other may conduct to startling paradox, to applauded subtleties, to bold and novel speculations, but baseless, transient, treacherous. It evidently requires something more than intellectual keenness; it requires the virtue of forbearance, and a temperate spirit, to adhere to sober rectitude of thought, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... farther than this. All that the formal doctrine of the Incarnation—as expressed, for example, in such a formulary as the Athanasian Creed—can truly be said to amount to is just the double insistence that Christ is at once truly and completely man, and also truly and completely GOD. The paradox is left unreconciled—"yet He is not two, but one Christ." The Godhead is expressed in manhood: in the manhood ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... was, in truth, something of a paradox. He was an artist, and yet was rich; he had inherited large wealth, and yet had formed habits of careful industry. The majority of his young acquaintances, who had been launched from homes like his own, were known only as sons of their fathers, and degenerate sons ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... Wilde was the son of parents who were both of unusual ability and somewhat eccentric. Both these tendencies became in him more concentrated. He was born with, as it were, a congenital antipathy to the commonplace, a natural love of paradox, and he possessed the skill to embody the characteristic in finished literary form. At the same time, it must not be forgotten, beneath this natural attitude of paradox, his essential judgments on life and literature were usually sound and reasonable. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... not distinguish a star with nearly as much precision, when I gazed on it with earnest, direct and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone. I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the center of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... looked unhappy and discomfited. It is a funny paradox that that good and holy priest, who, his parishioners declared, "said Mass like an angel," so that not one of his congregation could read a line of their prayer-books, so absorbed were they in watching him, couldn't explain in ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... outside Orleans, where Ogilvie, of the British Royal Artillery, had met his fate by his side, and there was something soldierly in the way he bore himself in his vanity of dress. Not that I think the dandies are the best soldiers—that is merest popular paradox. To me it is as ridiculous for a man to array himself in fine clothes when he is going to kill or be killed, as it would be for him to put on gewgaws when he was going to be hanged. As Leader disappears from my account of Carlist doings after ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... War.—It is a travesty on human progress, a social paradox, that war and science go hand in hand. On one side are all of the machines of destruction, the battleships, bombing-planes, huge guns, high explosives, and poisonous gases, products of scientific experiment and inventive ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... Another paradox remains to be noted. Anthropologists have now proved beyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led to the use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of the gradual adoption of apparel as a protection. They have also shown[10] that the earliest forms of dress were ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... philo-Semite, but truly a Semite in spirit. We have so thoroughly confused, distorted and forgotten all the holy and true traditions, we have so thoroughly lost the habit of applying our reason to the lucid, old truths learned by heart, that this statement may sound like a paradox. ...
— The Shield • Various

... the maxims for the enforcement of which, in Modern Painters, long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily. But it is in that kind of ease with which ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... Vere Young and Old Charles Kingsley The Isle of the Long Ago Benjamin Franklin Taylor Growing Old Matthew Arnold Past John Galsworthy Twilight A. Mary F. Robinson Youth and Age George Arnold Forty Years On Edward Ernest Bowen Dregs Ernest Dowson The Paradox of Time Austin Dobson Age William Winter Omnia Sonmia Rosamund Marriott Watson The Year's End Timothy Cole An Old Man's Song Richard Le Gallienne Songs of Seven Jean ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... circumstance upon his reader at the end. Thus, if a friend were to ask me to guess who dined with him yesterday, it would be fatuous if he had in mind somebody of whom he knew I had never heard. The only person who has ever solved "The Big Bow Mystery" is myself. This is not paradox but plain fact. For long before the book was written, I said to myself one night that no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access. The puzzle was scarcely propounded ere the solution flew up and the idea lay stored ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... it the promise of a fine poet.... In 'The Wandering Soul,' the verse describing Socrates has that highest note of critical poetry, that in it epigram becomes vivid with life, and life reveals its inherent paradox. It would be difficult to describe the famous irony of Socrates in more poetical and more accurate words than by saying that he doubted men's doubts away."—Spectator, February ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... childish diminution of her affection for her convalescent dove, whilst at the same time something whispered to her that it possessed a stronger interest in her heart than it had ever done before. This may seem a paradox to such of our readers as have never been in love; but it is not at all irreconcilable to the analogous and often conflicting states of feeling produced by that strange and mysterious passion. The innocent girl was wont, as frequently as she could without exciting notice, to ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... A paradox, but a paradox that is a truth in the case of Christians whose memory is of a God that has loved and blessed them whose hope is in a God that changes never; whose memory is charged with 'every good and perfect gift that came down from the Father of Lights,' whose hope is in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... tread are written with our deeds, and the leaves of the forest are but undeveloped negatives where our summers stand self-recorded for transfer into the imperishable record? And what a metaphysical puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! Is motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this picture of universal movement. Take ten thousand instantaneous photographs of the great thoroughfare in a day; every one of them will be as still as the tableau in the "Enchanted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... time of political and intellectual reaction in France was marked by the rise of the greatest of her modern institutions. There is the chief paradox of that age. While barren of literary activity and of truly civic developments, yet it was unequalled in the growth of institutions. This is generally the characteristic of epochs when the human ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... she shall be of the world? Little misses who can waltz before they know the 'Our Father,' who are taught manners before morals, and are given for their absolute standard 'what others will say.' Can they become good women? It would be a paradox to suppose so. And our boys in knickerbockers who smoke cigars and buy ten cent novels, who speculate in the market of experience with ill-gotten gain, who form opinions of life from dime shows and contact with veterans in vice; can they grow in ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... radiant presence. He pictured the successful Stocks welcomed by her, and words of praise for which he would have given his immortal soul, meted out lavishly to that owl-like being. It was a dismal business, and ruefully, but half-humorously, he caught at the paradox of ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... Paradox serves to dislodge prejudice; and blasphemy may rudely but effectually bring to their senses those who have mistaken the hardness of their hearts for loyalty, and their easy default for success. But practical ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... philosophy of one has forced its way into general approbation, that of the other has carried no conviction and scarce any information to those who have misspent their time about it. To speak the truth, though it may seem a paradox, our knowledge on many subjects, and particularly on those which we intend here, must be superficial to be real. This is the condition of humanity. We are placed, as it were, in an intellectual twilight, where we discover ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke

... strange paradox that in traveling, the most observant of all pursuits, one should have to encounter ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... plot or the composition of a single scene. The memorandum-book alluded to—on the first leaf of which he had written in his neatest hand (as if to encourage himself to begin) "Affectation"— contains, besides the names of three of the intended personages, Sir Babble Bore, Sir Peregrine Paradox, and Feignwit, nothing but unembodied sketches of character, and scattered particles of wit, which seem waiting, like the imperfect forms and seeds in chaos, for the brooding of genius to nurse them into ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... persons; yet it is improbable that they are exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction, where—despite the apparent paradox—a character must be exaggerated to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his actions, his words, his very thoughts must ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... Island signalled that they had run short of provisions. The message was rather a paradox: " Food done, but otherwise all right." However, on August 11, we were reassured to hear that the 'Tutanekai', a New Zealand Government steamer, had been commissioned to relieve the party, and that Sawyer through ill-health had been obliged ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... unreserved in his manner, his frankness was strictly limited to the surface. He observed everything, thought ever, but avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion, he took refuge in raillery, or threw out some grave paradox with which it was not easy ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... [Footnote 66: The paradox of P. Daniel, that the Franks never obtained any permanent settlement on this side of the Rhine before the time of Clovis, is refuted with much learning and good sense by M. Biet, who has proved by a chain of evidence, their uninterrupted possession of Toxandria, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... arrived at her fortieth mile-stone; and she effected the paradox of looking both younger and older than her age. Younger, because she had always taken excellent care of herself. Her form had still much of the roundness of youth, and her step was sprightly and firm. She looked older than her age, because of the strong lines in her face, the determined ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... of this war, as the master mind of all the ages said of adversity, that "its uses are sweet," even though they be as a precious jewel shining in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. While the world-war has brutalized men, it has as a moral paradox added immeasurably to the sum of human nobility. Its epic grandeur is only beginning to reveal itself, and in it the human soul has reached the high water marker of courage ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... the sourest look yet on his face.] Slavery ... not quite the same thing. And the paradox of such slavery is that they're ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker

... will think that the attempting gravely to controvert so absurd a paradox as the immortality of man on earth, or indeed, even the perfectibility of man and society, is a waste of time and words, and that such unfounded conjectures are best answered by neglect. I profess, however, to be of a different opinion. When paradoxes of this kind are advanced by ingenious ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus

... have been a paradox!" exclaimed Mr. Bitterworth. "Lionel Verner should inherit before all, or not inherit at all. What your ground of complaint against him is, I know not; but whatever it may be, it can be no excuse for your willing away from him ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... dogma of the message, that while a State has no right to secede, the Union has no right to coerce, has been universally condemned as a paradox. The popular estimate of Mr. Buchanan's proposition and arguments was forcibly presented at the time by a jesting criticism attributed to Mr. Seward. "I think," said the New York Senator, "the President has conclusively proved two things: (1) That no State has the right to secede unless it wishes ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... this cry against cheap loaves. It seems strange that Conservatives, people who profess to hold new theories in abhorrence, people who are always talking about the wisdom of our ancestors, should insist on our receiving as an undoubted truth a strange paradox never heard of from the creation of the world till the nineteenth century. Begin with the most ancient book extant, the Book of Genesis, and come down to the parliamentary debates of 1815; and I will venture to say that you will find ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... affecting the lengthy quaintnesses of some obsolete modes of speech. The article which it attacks was 'A Dissertation on Debt and Debtors', where the subject was, I imagine, treated in the orthodox way: and he expends all his paradox in showing that indebtedness is a necessary condition of human life, and all his sophistry in confusing it with the abstract sense of obligation. It is, perhaps, scarcely fair to call attention to such a mere argumentative and literary freak; but there is something so comical ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... but he could not quite conceal his contempt for that sort of paradox; in fact. Dr. Monygham was not liked by the Europeans of Sulaco. His outward aspect of an outcast, which he preserved even in Mrs. Gould's drawing-room, provoked unfavourable criticism. There could be no doubt of his intelligence; and as he had lived for ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... in Europe. It has twenty-four arches, its length is 1700 feet and its breadth 35. Among several statues on this bridge is a very remarkable one of Jesus Christ, made of bronze gilt, which cost a large sum of money to its founder, a Jew! There is a Latin inscription on it which explains the paradox. There stood on the same spot a wooden statue of Christ in the XVI century. One day an opulent Jew, on passing by, made some scoffing or contemptuous remark on it. He was overheard by some of the people, accused ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... influential friends; who had few books and little time to read; who knew no formal religion; who never traveled out of his own country; who had no helpmeet, but who walked solitary—alone, a man of sorrows; down whose homely, furrowed face the tears of pity often ran, and yet whose name, strange paradox! stands in many minds as a symbol ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... differs in different orders of kinship, becoming smaller as they are more remote. When the kinship is so distant that its effects are not worth taking into account, the peculiarity of the man, however remarkable it may have been, is reduced to zero in his kinsmen. This apparent paradox is fundamentally due to the greater frequency of mediocre deviations than of extreme ones, occurring between limits ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... Where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument, or by exaggerated statements of facts. But, if while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... Holland and Miss Ayrton, one of them—he was a man—smiled and said, when she had gone away, that she was a singularly unobservant woman, or she would have known that the best way of bringing two people together is to keep them as much apart as possible. There was wisdom in the paradox, he declared; for everyone should know that it was only when a man and a woman were far apart that they came to appreciate ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words that Basil's friend had said to him—words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them—had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... began with the break-up of classic form and the gradual dissolution of the classic spirit. Indeed this is such a commonplace of criticism, that we can only treat M. Taine's inversion of it as a not very happy paradox. It was in literature that this genius of innovation, which afterwards extended over the whole social structure, showed itself first of all. Rousseau, not merely in the judgment of a foreigner like myself, but in that of the very highest ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley

... always command, even without the prestige of force:—a picture drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be gainsaid. Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern States means retrogression, a paradox which has passed now from the friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly formulates. Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... of the argument as stated by the idealists can be understood only save through the element in our nature from which art draws its vitality. Its deduction is thus bluntly expressed; "the nearest to nature, the farther from art," an apparent paradox paralleled by the epigram, "the nearer the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... proper place to explain the paradox of method in a critique of practical reason, namely, that the concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law (of which it seems as if it must be the foundation), but only after it and by means of it. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action in one place on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation. Poe's paradox that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred lines in length under penalty of ceasing to be one poem and breaking into a string of poems, may serve to suggest the precise difference between the Short-story and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... of the old Russian communal institutions. It was quite easy to understand the change that came with Russia's industrial awakening, how the development of factory production gave an impetus to the Marxian theories. And, though it presents a strange paradox, in that it comes at a time when, despite everything, Russian capitalism continues to develop, it is really not difficult to understand how and why pre-Marxian conceptions reappear in that great land ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... principles, ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the rule of emotions and passions in practical action."[250] "Man's language developed because he could make, not merely passive and mechanical associative and reproductive combinations of notions, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... normande, in Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes, second series, vol. iii, p. 116. D. Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, p. vi, proofs and illustrations. G. Save, Jehanne des Armoises, pp. 6, 7. It is well known that Gabriel Naude maintained the paradox that Jeanne was only burned in effigy. Considerations politiques sur les coups d'etat, Rome, 1639, in 4to. G. Lefevre-Pontalis, La fausse Jeanne ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... been accustomed to look upon as undiscoverable, were bandied about like the merest commonplaces of education. The absurdity of individuality and the subjectivity of the emotions were alike insisted on without notice of the paradox, which to me appeared extreme. The Associates were altruistic for the sake of altruism, not for the sake of its beneficiaries. They were not pantheists, for they saw neither universal good nor God, but rather ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... alarmed by thus becoming the subject of universal conversation; that thus many a reputation had been saved by this charitable slander. There were some malignant philosophers, indeed, doubtless from that silly love of paradox in all ages too prevalent, who pretended that all this Elysian morality was one great delusion, and that this scrupulous anxiety about the conduct of others arose from a principle, not of Purity, but of Corruption. The woman who ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli

... by this attitude. There was no applause, except now and then from those skeleton ranks that lay behind Lord Rosebery, but then there was in the whole air that curious and almost audible silence—to use a conscious paradox—which conveys to the trained ear clearer sounds of absorption and attention than the loudest cheers. And then you began to forget the badinage of the earlier sentences—you forgave the frigidity and self-repression—you became strongly fascinated by the mobile face, inscrutable ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... paradox! then are you truly conquerors, when you bow as captives before our self-conceit. Shall I confess, Fiesco? It was my vice alone that could protect my virtue—my pride alone defied your artifices—thus far, my principles prevailed, and all your arts ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... strange feature of our age that the highest walk of the real-life drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance should be the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and imaginative. What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce here. The greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a railroad contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that magnetic captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than any one I ever listened to. He scorned the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her, it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to feel that the land belonged to you—to see your own flowers growing, your own calves being born—to feel yourself surrounded by your own people, for ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... whilst he inclines it, he will see that the bottom of the stick has no motion on the ground, and that the middle has only half the motion of the top. This property of the pulley has been dwelt upon, because it elucidates the motion of a wheel rolling upon the ground; and it explains a common paradox, which appears at first inexplicable. "The bottom of a rolling wheel never moves upon the road." This is asserted only of a wheel moving over hard ground, which, in fact, may be considered rather as laying down its circumference upon ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... Joan understood all this and its paradox, looked all the way back along the faithful, unappreciated years, and being no longer a child was stirred with a strange maternal fellow feeling that started her tears. Nature is merciless. Everything is sacrificed to youth. Birds build their nests and rear their young and are left ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... dangerous by becoming freemen? Are we alarmed, lest by being admitted into the enjoyment of civil rights, they will be inspired with a deadly enmity against the rights of others? Strange, unaccountable paradox! How much more rational would it be, to argue that the natural enemy of the privileges of a freeman, is he who is robbed of them himself! Dishonorable to the species is the idea that they would ever prove injurious to our interests—released from the shackles ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... fairly be hoped for in this way under this prospective regime of peace at large. But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class—and there is neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase—should be patterned on the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... thought it?) have I ventured upon a strange paradox, that even this strongest instance of his debasing himself, is not the weakest of his pride: and he ventured once at Sir Simon Darnford's to say, in your hearing, as you may remember, that, in his conscience, he thought he should hardly have made a tolerable husband ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... The paradox, that there is more good land on the Trinity than on the Mississippi, is one which will be readily sustained by those who are acquainted ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... so easily attacked," I remarked. "It eludes definition and rejects political paradox. No one ever connects our republic with the fashionable liberty-fraternity-and-equality doctrines of European emancipation; still less with the communistic idea that, although men have very different capacities for originating things, all ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... New York Times: "Paradox worked up with intense dramatic effect is the salient feature of 'The Gadfly'; ... shows a wonderfully strong hand, and descriptive powers which are rare; ... a very ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... pictures should have been carried on in the city which shared the factions of the Baglioni—that Raphael should have been painting Pietas while Astorre and Simonetto were being murdered by the beautiful young Grifonetto—is a paradox of the purest water ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... a paradox, Pierre Philibert!" replied she, with a smile. "But it means, I suppose, that you painted a universal portrait of me which will be like through all my seven ages. Such a picture might be true of the soul, Pierre, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... nation, appeared to them, to present an awful and doubtful state of things, respecting which no certain calculations could be made; and the idea that a republic was to be introduced and supported by force, was, to them, a paradox in politics. Under the influence of these appearances, the apprehension was entertained that, if the ancient monarchy should not be restored, a military despotism would be established. By the many, these unpopular doubts were ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall

... your credit with the more captions and scrutinizing, give, at some convenient interval, such an explanation or modification as will show that, after all, you were as wise as your reader. State your paradox in all the startling force of unmitigated diction, and refute it yourself afterwards, or say enough to prove that you could have done so. This, well managed, gives two occasions for brilliant display; a sober statement has been converted into a couple of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... his profession or his temperament, was a man who, if the paradox may be allowed, was not surprised at surprises. Accordingly when he himself emerged from the bedroom to which he had retired, took the path across the meadow from the inn towards the river, and directed his course to the stepping-stones which ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope

... pass that, ruled by this ideal until less than fifty years ago, Japan is now facing quite the other way? The passion of the nation to-day is to make the greatest possible progress in every direction. Here is an anomaly, a paradox; progress made in spite of its rejection; and, recently, a total volte-face. How shall we explain ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The essence of true nobility, is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy; and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there have been those so zealous ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... to strike at the root of all these injuries—the political impotence of the injured. What diplomatic protests will never accomplish, a fair measure of Uitlander representation would gradually but surely bring about. It seems a paradox, but it is true, that the only effective way of protecting our subjects is to help them to cease to be our subjects. The admission of the Uitlanders to a fair share of political power would no doubt give stability to the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... and demanded that the whole body of European States should at once meet in open Congress. The four Courts held to their determination, and began their preliminary sittings without Talleyrand. But the French statesman had, under the form of a paradox, really stated the true political situation. The greater Powers were so deeply divided in their aims that their old bond of common interest, the interest of union against France, was now less powerful than the impulse that made them seek the support of France against one another. Two men had come ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... improvement or that of others, just as if we could do nothing ourselves, we must do every thing that is possible ourselves, just us if nothing was to be expected from Divine power—may be called the Christian paradox. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do." It would seem, it might be thought, much more logical to say, "Work out your own salvation, for there is nobody to help you;" or, "It is not necessary to make any ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... the swift flight; the fierce pursuit of men wild as Bedouins and as fleet, the willingness to deal sudden death, the pain of poison thorn, the stinging tear of lead through flesh; and that strange paradox of the burning desert, the cold at night, the piercing icy wind, the dew that penetrated to the marrow, the numbing desert ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... of life than at other times, are due only to the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower." This reasoning, however, seemed to end in a paradox, and lead to the further consideration:—"What matter though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... are written in careful prose. M. De Banville is not only a poet, but in his "Petit Traite de Poesie Francaise" (Bibliotheque de l'Echo de la Sorbonne, s.d.) a teacher of the mechanical part of poetry. He does not, of course, advance a paradox like that of Baudelaire, "that poetry can be taught in thirty lessons." He merely instructs his pupil in the material part—the scansion, metres, and so on—of French poetry. In this little work he introduces ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... grand, a stirring thing, the exalting paradox of Christianity, and the sad want of it in our own time is, we believe, what really makes us think life dull, like a cynic, instead of marvellous, like a child. With this, however, we have at present nothing to do. What we have to do with is the unfortunate fact that among no persons is it more ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... at the matter most superficially regard paradox as something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of this kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy, "Life is much too important to be taken seriously." Those who look at the matter a little more deeply or delicately see that paradox is ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... is abundant opportunity here for the study of rhetorical features: the orderly arrangement of thought in the paragraphs, the series of short sentences, the long sentences, biblical language, epigram, paradox, rhetorical question, figurative language, etc. A comparison with Macaulay's essays will add interest and ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... and stepped back a pace, his expression one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie's admission ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... a Paradox walnut each supposed to be grafted trees with scions from Burbank's original trees, bloomed this year, and the Royal has a number of nuts on it. The Paradox has been here a very much shorter time, not over two or three years; so perhaps it ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... mean anything, or is it only a pretty paradox?" asked the lady, observing that Claudius had thrown himself boldly into a crucial position. Upon his answer would probably depend her opinion of him as being either intelligent or banal It is an easy matter to frame paradoxical questions implying a compliment, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... that will be very material; and I wish to get some account of a book that was once sold at Osborn's, that exists perhaps at Cambridge, and of which I found a memorandum t'other day in my note-book. It is called A Paradox, or Apology for Richard the Third, by Sir William Cornwallis.(1015) If you could discover it, I should be much ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... danger of discovery was increased in staggering ratio. To-day, the police hunted the Gray Seal as they hunted a mad dog; the papers stormed and raved against him: in every detective bureau of two continents he was catalogued as the most notorious criminal of the age—and yet, strange paradox, no single crime ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... of late, arrived at such an extreme as to advocate the study to the exclusion of all others, with the exception of modern languages. My paradox is this, that which is downright indispensable for everyday life, do not teach us; for then, in spite of ourselves, we must, in these subjects, become our own instructors. If, in a few years after we have left ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.

... institution in which two casual persons lived together, for the support of one and the material comfort of the other. Without love it was the most natural thing that husband and wife should seek all manner of protection from each other; with love none was needed. It harmonised well with the paradox that a marriage of passion was rather indecent, while lukewarm affection and paltry motives of ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... to Spain but disappointment and Dead Sea ashes—that he dragged out a miserable old age in rotten and unseaworthy ships, lying ill in the torrid heats of the West Indies, racked with excruciating pain, and in absolute penury and want—all this but adds point to a life so full of paradox that we may almost pardon him for believing in miracles. After so much glory and so much fame, his life darkened down to its dreary and pathetic close. His ardent soul went at last where wicked governments cease from troubling, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was but dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical inferiority to the other men assailed him; his appreciation of their muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to which he held failed to offer him a refuge, his ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... differed from him in this, that while he is a man of color, they were not. For in America the man of Aryan blood, however dark he may be, is always "off" color, while the lightest-hued quadroon is always on it. Which is not the only paradox connected with the descendants of Africans of ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland



Words linked to "Paradox" :   contradiction in terms, paradoxical, logic



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com