"Tautology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if it were a mere tautology: it required repetition to make this nation, so steeped in crime against humanity, understand. She then spoke of the awful lie of this nation, in naming itself Civilized, Republican, Christian, while it had made barter of men and women, bought and sold ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... affectedly called, authorizes the national legislature to pass all NECESSARY and PROPER laws. If there is any thing exceptionable, it must be sought for in the specific powers upon which this general declaration is predicated. The declaration itself, though it may be chargeable with tautology or redundancy, is at least ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... must exert more than ordinary activity. The attorney's clerk I also thought out of his province. I dare believe that he finds cultivating his own land not half so easy a task as he formerly found that of stringing together volumes of tautology to encumber, or convey away, that of his neighbour. Hubbard's farm, and Kelly's also, deserve regard, from being better managed than most of the others. The people here complain sadly of a destructive grub which destroys the ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,—when in the highest degree—in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology—"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead,"—and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... not know what she was saying—for wicked young men. Above all things it seemed necessary to be in a passion; to be as irritated and bitter against him as possible. The copiousness of her vocabulary of abuse surprised herself, and she did not shrink from tautology. She only stopped at last for want of breath, and even then, as though she knew how dangerous was silence, she bemoaned herself with sobs ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... erat: the Platonic [Greek: en], was, as we said. In ratione et disserendo: an instance of Cicero's fondness for tautology, cf. D.F. I. 22 quaerendi ac disserendi. Quamquam oriretur: the sentence is inexact, it is knowledge which takes its rise in the senses, not the criterion of truth, which is the mind itself; cf. however II. 30 and n. Iudicium: ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... with facts," said Lettice, "but I'm always marked 'weak' for composition. Miss Farrar says I use tautology and repeat myself, and that my grammar is shaky and my general style poor. She told me to take Macaulay as a model, but I can no more copy other people's ways of writing than I could improve my features by staring at the Venus ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... life repeating the same thought in different words? and why should we be more lenient to the parrot-painter who has learned one lesson from the page of nature, and keeps stammering it out with eternal repetition without turning the leaf? Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and over again with lines, than it is with words? The teaching of nature is as varied and infinite as it is constant; and the duty of the painter is to watch for every one of her lessons, and to give (for human life ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... hour runs through the roughest day] I suppose every reader is disgusted at the tautology in this passage, Time and the hour, and will therefore willingly believe that Shakespeare wrote ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... principles. It was passed upon, section by section. You will find it printed elsewhere in this volume, and you must read it if you would get a true view of the principles underlying the Legion. It is as plain as a lesson in a school reader. Any comment on it from me would be editorial tautology, so I don't want to say anything more than that its framing was one of the cleverest and most comprehensive bits of work done since the very ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... statements that occur more than once in the course of the work. But I found that in dealing with so many distinct subjects the same fact became sometimes an indispensable illustration of more than one topic; and hence repetition was unavoidable even at the risk of tautology. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... note, I also remarked that, strictly speaking, I recognize no distinction between appetite and desire. For whether a man be conscious of his appetite or not, it remains one and the same appetite. Thus, in order to avoid the appearance of tautology, I have refrained from explaining desire by appetite; but I have take care to define it in such a manner, as to comprehend, under one head, all those endeavours of human nature, which we distinguish by the terms appetite, will, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... purpose only of avoiding Dick, and of finding a still spot where she might think her thoughts undisturbed, wandered away over the eastern bridge, and down to the river's brink. It was a moody place; such a one as only apathetic or healthy natures (I wonder if that is tautology!) can healthfully yield to. The bank sloped steeply; a fringe of stunted aspens and willows sprang from the frozen sand: it was a sickening, airless place in summer,—it was damp and desolate now. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Mr. Warburton prefers to the rest; but I know not for what reason. To crown with reflection is surely a mode of speech approaching to nonsense. Opening virtues blooming round, is something like tautology; the six following lines are poor and prosaick Art is, in another couplet, used for arts, that a rhyme may be had to heart. The six last lines are the best, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... a gas [Footnote: For this reason the expression, "acetylene gas," which is frequently met with, would be objectionable on the ground of tautology, even if it were not grammatically and technically incorrect. "Acetylene-gas" is perhaps somewhat more permissible, but it is equally redundant and unnecessary.] of which the most important application at the present time is for illuminating purposes, for which its ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution—all these topics, we say, would, if we were so inclined, supply us, as they have supplied Mr. Macaulay, with abundant opportunities of grave tautology and commonplace; but we decline to raise sham debates on points where there is no contest. We can have little historic difference, properly so called, with one who has no historical difference on the main facts with anybody else: instead, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... within us, that all the ideal of life dies with it, and nothing remains save the dull reality of our daily cares and occupations. "I have lived and have loved," saith Schiller; and if it were not that there seems some tautology in the phrase, I should say, such is my own motto. If Lady Jane but prove true—if I have really succeeded—if, in a word—but why speculate upon such chances?—what pretensions have I?—what reasons to look ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... just got under way. Willoughby was trying to yoke Dixon's leaders, while Dixon, owing to his screwmatics, could do nothing but sit on his horse, cursing with wearisome tautology, and casting glances of frantic apprehension toward the ram-paddock. His anxiety was not unreasonable, for there had just come into sight an upright speck, too small to be a horseman; and it was ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... "snatch." When we wish to express strong emotion or to describe action resulting from excitement, we only weaken the impression by using unnecessary words. Simple, direct sentences are most forceful. In aiming to secure sentence emphasis, then, we should avoid circumlocution, redundancy, tautology, and verbosity. (Look up these terms in ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... general inferiority in the ideas, plan, manners, and style. They miss the poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, rhetorical declamation, pedantry, egotism, uncouth forms of sentences, and peculiarities in the use of words and idioms. They are unable to discover any unity ...
— Laws • Plato
... for which electric baths may be made available, and the indications for which are furnished by so great a number of pathological conditions, that omitting special reference to them would have led to a great deal of tautology in the ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... leave the reader with the idea that the Chanson de Geste as such is merely monotonous and dull. The intensity of the appeal of Roland is no doubt helped by that approach to bareness—even by a certain tautology—which has been mentioned. Aliscans, which few could reject as faithless to the type, contains, even without the family of dependent poems which cluster round it, a vivid picture of the valiant insubordinate warrior in William ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or prose-works, that—pardon our tautology—are popular with the people. The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... brought out the whole mystery respecting Waverley's deliverance from the bondage in which he left Cairnvreckan. Never did music sound sweeter to an amateur, than the drowsy tautology, with which old Janet detailed every circumstance, thrilled upon the ears of Waverley. But my reader is not a lover, and I must spare his patience, by attempting to condense within reasonable compass the narrative which old Janet spread through a ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... two understand his father's meaning, and hold ten acres of land by half-an-acre of parchment. Nay, I hope to see the time when that there is indeed some progress made in, shall be wholly affected; and by the improvement of the noble art of tautology, every Inn in Holborn an Inn of Court. Let others think of logic, rhetoric, and I know not what impertinence, but mind thou tautology. What's the first excellence in a lawyer? Tautology. What's the second? Tautology. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... silver rings, which noticeably impeded the childish freedom of his steps. When he has begun to understand what the word "wife" means, these must be laid aside. In his manners, likewise, little Karlee was the very tautology of his namesake with the gray moustache,—the same wary self-possession, the same immovable gravity and nice decorum. Like a little courtier, he made his small salaam, and through his grandfather replied to some playful questions I addressed to him, with good emphasis and discretion, without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various |
