"Paradox" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... world of sensuous images so that they make music to the eye, he need not even enter into the question of their reality, but in order to achieve this transmutation he should know something, at least, of the strange laws of their being, should lend ear to a fairy-tale in which each theorem is a paradox, and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the flowers grow?" said Hugh. But Balbus thought it best not to hear the question. He left the boys to their problem, and, in the silence of his own room, set himself to unravel Hugh's mechanical paradox. ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... them increased with it. It was impossible for me not to feel for them a high degree of respect, admiration, and affection. They were ever gentle, tender, and kind to solicitude. To accuse them of mystery were a paradox; and yet they were a mystery. In conversation, manners and habits, they were frank to singularity. It was just as common an occurrence for a poem to be read and commented on by its author, as to hear it done by another. I have heard a poetess call attention to the beauties of her own production, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... This paradox, however, may, I suppose, be easily over-stated. The change that continually agitates Nature consists in the movements of masses or molecules, and such movements of things are compatible with a considerable persistence of their qualities. Not ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... a message of honeyed sweetness to Flamby, desiring her to call and bring some of her work. Flamby had never forgotten the visit. The honey of Miss Kingsbury was honey of Trebizond, and it poisoned poor Flamby's happiness for many a day. Strange is the paradox of a woman's heart; for Flamby, well knowing that this spinster's venom was a product of jealousy—jealousy of talent, super-jealousy of youth and beauty—yet took hurt from it and hugged the sting of cruel criticism to her breast. In this, for all her engrafted wisdom, she showed herself ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... at the witticism—the eternal petitio principii of childhood, which Billy, secure in his cohort from bloody nose, felt justified in making. And Paul Kegworthy, the rag of a newspaper crumpled tight in his little hand, would watch them disappear and wonder at the paradox of life. In any sphere of human effort, so he dimly and childishly realized, he could wipe out Billy Goodge. He had a soul-reaching contempt for Billy Goodge, a passionate envy of him. Why did Billy hold his position instead of crumbling into dust before him? Assuredly he was a better man than ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... "It is a paradox," was the expert opinion of Archbishop Diepenbrock, "that the more shameful she is, the more beautiful is a courtesan." A "Day of Humiliation," with a special prayer composed by himself, was his suggestion for mending matters; and Madame von Kruedener, not to be outdone in coming ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... He is not moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, 'he only, of all Gods, loves not gifts.' Thus the status of theology does not correspond to what we look for in very low culture. It would scarcely be a paradox to say that the popular Zeus, or Ares, is degenerate from Mungan-ngaur, or the Fuegian being who forbids the slaying of an enemy, and almost literally 'marks ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... too often the result of thoughtlessness; of a wish to get rid of truths unwelcome to the heart; of a vain love of paradox, or perhaps, in many cases, (as a friend of mine said,) of an amiable wish to frighten "mammas and maiden aunts." But let us be assured that a frivolous sceptic,—a sceptic indeed,—after duly pondering and feeling the doubts he professes ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... since he bears so hardly upon the results, I desire to say what may even be a paradox; and let no one, in the name of Heaven, be amazed at the length to which I go, but give a kindly consideration to what I say. Even if what was to come was plain to all beforehand; even if all foreknew it; even if you, Aeschines, had been crying with a loud voice ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... know our mythic history—King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's, I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox, I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus, In conies I can floor peculiarities parabolous. I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies, I know the croaking chorus from the "Frogs" ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... horizontal plane. The second factor is "elevation"—how far up or down it must be pointed in a vertical plane. The latter factor determines how far it will throw its projectile, and up to a certain point the higher the gun is pointed the further will go the shell. A certain paradox seems to enter here. It is a fact that a distant ship presents a target more easily hit if its bow or stern is toward the gunner. If it presents a broadside there is the danger that the shells will go either beyond the ship or will fall short of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... landsmen I had a wholesome prejudice against running aground', so that my mentor's turn for breezy paradox was at first rather exasperating. After lunch the large-scale chart of the estuaries was brought down, and we pored over it together, mapping out work for the next few days. There is no need to ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... as the hydrostatic paradox, according to which a pressure applied at any point of an inclosed mass of liquid is transmitted unaltered to every other point, has been singularly fruitful in practical applications. Mr. Bramah was perhaps the first ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... part of the wealth of the country which is now represented by bank-notes, and also of that which is now deposited in the hands of the bankers. Aladdin's palace, which sprang up in one night at the bidding of the slaves of the lamp, could scarcely have been a greater paradox to the aged Sultan, than this increase of prosperity on the part of Scotland was to our southern legislators. How to explain the metamorphosis seemed for a time a mystery. One thing, at all events, was clear—that English gold had no participation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... taken on weird meaning. It was as if Mata's face looked suddenly upon her with the old abbot's eyes. Fantastic possibilities crouched, ready to spring from every shadow. The low shrubs held themselves in attitudes of flight. This was a world in which she had no part. She knew herself a paradox, the violator of a mood; but the ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... This paradox produces astonishment in inexperienced reformers, and too often produces disillusionment in those who have come to know the difficulty ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... is no paradox; as proven by the prodigies of patient devotion—tenacious, inviolable—every day displayed by women of the lower classes, whose natures, if gross, retain their primitive sincerity. Even with women of the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... trade; whilst its distance from the coast is such as to place it, in a great measure, beyond reach of insult from an enemy. Such an assertion, coming from one who has just detailed the particulars of its capture, may, indeed, appear to partake not slightly of the nature of a paradox; but there is no denying that the fall of Washington ought to be attributed much more to the misconduct of the Americans themselves, than to the skill or enterprise of those who effected it. Had the emergency ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... irregular sallies and trifling conceits. The more extensive therefore your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled the more extensive will be your powers of invention; and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions. But the difficulty on this occasion is to determine who ought to be proposed as models of excellence, and who ought to be considered as ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... my readers or not, there is another side to Dante's character that is most attractive. "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," he was a paradox,—gentle and tender. Failure to see this phase of Dante's nature led Frederick Schlegel to declare that Dante's "chief defect is the want of gentle feelings"—a statement that called forth this exclamation from Lord Byron: "Of gentle feelings. And Francesca of Rimini and the father's feelings ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... of others; he hears with unmoved countenance how people honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has PERCEIVED—or he even conceals his silence by expressly assenting to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with great CONTEMPT, the multitude, the educated, and the visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence—reverence for "great men" and marvelous animals, for the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... paradox Which comforts while it mocks— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, 40 And was not, comforts me; A brute I might have been, but would ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... locks the door of life? It is faith. If you have faith, faith in God, faith in the Saviour, faith in things that are true and pure, you need never fear that your house of life will be broken into by burglars. You are secure if you have the lock of faith. Now here is a strange paradox, namely—you lock your door only by opening it. Open ...
— The Children's Six Minutes • Bruce S. Wright
... "A paradox of literary genius. It is not a history, and yet has more of the stuff of history in it, more of the true national character and fate, than any historical monograph we know. It is not a novel, and yet fascinates us more than any ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... The paradox of George Hazlitt lay in the fact that he was himself a dreamer. Champions of order and champions of disorder share somewhat in a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... me, that word he had used. For a man to know he is weak; it sounds a paradox, but a man must be strong to know that. And dwelling upon this, and upon his patience and his gentleness, there came to me suddenly remembrance of that postscript, the significance of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... strange proposition that the bill against Duncombe was a worse bill than the bill against Fenwick, because the bill against Fenwick struck at life, and the bill against Duncombe struck only at property. Yet this apparent paradox is a sober truth. Life is indeed more precious than property. But the power of arbitrarily taking away the lives of men is infinitely less likely to be abused than the power of arbitrarily taking away their property. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... savages have virtues, candor must own; but only a love of paradox can make any man assert they have more ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... There have been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies Irae is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different opinion. Fortunately there ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Galdos and Valdes—because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches, who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human documents, as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted—the vital power, for example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... attention. Her personality, her toilette, which was superb, and her companion, were all alike interesting to the slowly moving throng of men and women amongst whom they were threading their way. The attitude of her sex towards Berenice was in a certain sense a paradox. She was distinctly the most talented and the most original of all the "petticoat apostles," as the very man who was now walking by her side had scornfully described the little band of women writers who were accused of trying to launch upon society ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... admit or to deny, to seek or to avoid, to believe and to do, to hope and to fear. There is not, in this wide range of spiritual subjects, a proposition held by one as true, which has not been discarded by another as an error; and there is not a paradox or an absurdity that has not found some supporters, who maintained it as a truth. Doubt and error, in abstract and metaphysical questions, are natural and inherent in mankind, so long as reason is their only luminary in ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... 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 ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... future existence for animals and to create a wider interest in it that I have undertaken to compile this book; and my object, I think, can best be achieved in my own way, the way of the investigator of haunted places. The mere fact that there are manifestations of "dead" people (pardon the paradox) proves some kind of life after death for human beings; and happily the same proof is available with regard a future life for animals; indeed there are as many animal phantasms as human—perhaps more; hence, if the human being lives again, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... else, from Italian sympathies. He had to be two things simultaneously, so to speak—emphatically an Italian for the sake of Italy and indeed his own existence in Rome; and emphatically not an Italian for the sake of the rest of Christendom. And can you suggest any other way of accomplishing this paradox? ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... four feet—that is, by two men. The beats are not the same. Secondly, by his motions, and especially the brisk motions of the arms. Thirdly, by this briskness itself; for most animals, except man, move with a slow motion—paradox as it may seem—even when they are going along fast. With them it is usually repose in action. Fourthly, and this is rather curious—experience seems to show that fish, and animals and birds certainly, recognise man by ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... besides, it was finer in them, there was so much eclat in their stooping to charity. But her knowledge of his character would not allow her to think for a moment that he could say aught but from the bottom of his heart—no, it was one of his one- sided views that led him into paradox. "It was just like papa," and so there was no need to attend to it. It was one of his enthusiasms, he was so very fond of Ethel, probably because of her likeness to himself. Flora thought Ethel put almost too forward—they ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... neglected to cultivate this useful art, when boys, rarely acquire it after they grow up to be men; or, if they do, it is only in an indifferent manner. On the sea, though it may appear a paradox, there are far fewer opportunities for practising the art of swimming than upon its shores. Aboard a ship, on her course, the chances of "bathing" are but few and far between; and, while in port, the sailor has usually something else to do than spend ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... "That is a paradox, Charles," said Mr. Malcolm; "the smell of roast-beef never went further than to remind a man of dinner; but sounds ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... its 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 be not the author's ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... neglected in other instances, still stand over. They are not conclusive against certain positions; but they are circumstances which must be fairly met; circumstances which if one writer overlook, others will not; circumstances which the critic will insist on; and circumstances which, if the dazzle of a paradox, or the appeal to the innate and universal sympathy for antiquity keep them in the background for a while, will, sooner or later, rise against the author who ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... paradox to attribute great intelligence to Batrachians; yet certain facts are recorded which show them to be capable of reflection. Among others the case is quoted of a green frog who obtained possession of a small red frog, and who proposed to swallow him. The other ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... curious paradox of the Nineties that while we were discovering Pinero, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading The Prisoner of Zenda and yielding ourselves with luxurious abandon into the arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new, realistic drama was leading ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... less strong, but it had all the old force and the old music. He was in constant action, but never vehement, never declamatory in tone, walking often to and fro, every gesture expressive, art perfectly concealing art. It was all melody and grace and magic, all wit and paradox and power. The apt quotation, the fine metaphor, the careful accumulation of intensive epithet to point an audacious and startling assertion, the pathos, the humor. But why try to describe beauty? It was consummate art, and as noble a display of ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... Drake's poem, Mr. Wilson has, then, found something more real than a "Culprit Fay." Occasionally, a thornless blackberry is heralded, and not a few have reason to recall the "Hoosac," which was generally found, I think, about as free from fruit as thorns. We have, also, the horticultural paradox of white blackberries, in the "Crystal," introduced by Mr. John B. Orange, of Albion, Illinois, and some others. They have little ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... of life a truth which sounds very much like a paradox has often asserted itself; namely, that a man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. So long as a man is struggling with obstacles he has an excuse for failure or shortcoming; ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... Such a fantastic paradox of contradictions has supplied the materials with which the fancies of men of every race and land, and every stage of knowledge and ignorance, have been playing for all these centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that an endless series of variations of the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... secular duties, which produced 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 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 could come, on the other hand, of the ideal systems ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented these terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience. So that nothing can be more superficial than this paradox of the sceptics; and it were well, if, in the abstruser studies of logic and metaphysics, we could as easily obviate the cavils of that sect, as in the practical and more intelligible sciences of politics ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... of thought it might seem that one would arrive at a hopeless paradox. If it be true that the less one hurries the better the work resulting, then it might seem that by sitting still and merely twirling one's thumbs one would arrive at the very greatest activity and efficiency! And indeed ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the foregoing extracts scarcely needs a serious refutation. 'To say that immediate emancipation will only increase the wretchedness of the slaves, and that we must pursue a system of gradual abolition, is to present to us the double paradox, that we must continue to do evil, in order to cure the evil which we are doing; and that we must continue to be unjust, and to do evil, that good may come.' The fatal error of gradualists lies here: They talk as if the friends of abolition contended only for the emancipation ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... me forcibly that I could 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not (rare stoics!), but they set us a brave example. No "blasts that blow the poplar white" can cause the pine-tree to blanch. No frost has power to strip it of a single leaf. Its wood is soft, but how dauntless its spirit!—a truly encouraging paradox, lending itself, at our private need, to endless consolatory moralizings. The great majority of my brothers must be comforted, I think, by any fresh reminder that the battle is ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... success—the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career by actions which are popularly termed showing-off. Method adopted depends in each case upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... position, her strong character, her rare courage, on her knowledge, gifts, and energy, many, especially women, had built up a future for the cause of Woman. Had she not already written fearlessly for it? Her tendency towards eccentricity and paradox would soon have worn off, they thought, as the struggle carried her forward, and at last she might have become one of the first champions of the cause. All that was noblest and best in Kristen must predominate in ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... whole, and a determined criticism of a foreign secretary means the resignation of the Government. Fortunately, our diplomacy has been left for the most part in very able hands. Nevertheless, it is surely a paradox that the English people should know so little about foreign affairs as to be absolutely incapable of any control in questions that affect their life or death. Democracy, though it is supposed to be incompetent to manage foreign relations, could hardly have ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... in groups and show their different kinds, exhibiting first those which are most elementary, then those more complex, and finally those so dark and important that they pass over into a region of mystery and paradox. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... the change which transformed the party. Somebody mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody, it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you got most out of your religion and gave ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... brooks down their faces and flanks. 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
... laughing, thinking it a paradox, or a little piece of affectation, which they excused. To be hailed, like Bongrand, with the name of master—was that not the height of bliss? He, with his arms resting on the back of his chair, listened to them in silence, leisurely puffing his pipe, and renouncing ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... wearisome. The only criticism which applies adversely to Chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often—and I rather fear he likes being so—obscure. He is brilliant in an original manner, he is original in a brilliant way; scarcely any thought of his is not expressed in paradox. What is orthodox to him is heresy to other people; what is heresy to him is orthodox to other people; and the surprising fact is that he is usually right when he is orthodox, and equally right when he is heretical. An essayist naturally has points of view which he expresses in a different way ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... wine; with merry banter 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 it, and with an air of contemptuous ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the most entire intimacy, and likely to be parted for ever to-morrow. They were of the same age, yet the girl was, in experience of life, a world in advance of the boy, who, notwithstanding, had the better of her in a thousand ways. In short, they were a paradox, such as youth, more or less, is always, and the careless close companionship that grew up between them was at once the most natural and the most strange alliance. They told each other everything by degrees, without being ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... ribbons across a desert which isn't a desert, past caravans of camels led by picturesque Mongol horsemen, the Twentieth Century suddenly and violently interjected into the Middle Ages, should be contrast and paradox enough for even the most blase sportsman. I am a naturalist who has wandered into many of the far corners of the earth. I have seen strange men and things, but what I saw on the great Mongolian plateau fairly took my breath away and left ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... exceedingly reactionary, and so apparently assured that royalty is constructed of an entirely different clay than that used for ordinary folks, gave a manifestation of those democratic notions which constitute such a paradox to the remainder of his character by sending forth his three eldest boys each year during their holidays on a pedestrian tour through the length and breadth of his dominions, just as if they were the sons of artisans, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... book may have been a mere paradox,(404) the effort of a young mind going through the process through which all young men of thought pass, and especially in an age like Toland's, of trying to understand and explain what they believe. But students who are thus forming ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... prevent herself from breaking out into a storm of weeping. She loved him so, but was no longer certain of his love. She could give him up almost gladly if he loved her and would always love her—but this was more than she could bear. There seemed to her no paradox in that—it was ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... a thousand times more dangerous; for government then becomes nothing but organized party, and, in the strange vicissitudes of human affairs, it may come at last, perhaps, to exhibit the singular paradox of government itself being in opposition to its own powers, at war with the very elements of its own existence. Such cases are hopeless. As men may be protected against murder, but cannot be guarded against suicide, so government ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Maltravers produced on Evelyn? Perhaps it was of that kind which most flatters us and most deceives. She never dreamed of comparing him with others. To her thoughts he stood aloof and alone from all his kind. It may seem a paradox, but it might be that she admired and venerated him almost too much for love. Still her pleasure in his society was so evident and unequivocal, her deference to his opinion so marked, she sympathized in so many of his objects, she had so much blindness or forbearance for ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 'thinking things together.' Every man, says Hegel, is a philosopher, and in so far as it is the natural tendency of the human mind to connect and unify the manifold phenomena of life, the paradox of the German thinker is not without a measure of truth. But while this is only the occasional pastime of the ordinary individual, it is the conscious and habitual aim of the philosopher. In daily life people are wont to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... more 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 of slavery, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... knowledge. Equally impossible, and for 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 ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... their enjoyment is more exquisite than that of the most refined selfishness; in the language of M. de Rochefoucault, we should therefore be forced to acknowledge, that the most benevolent is always the most selfish person. This seeming paradox is answered, by observing, that the epithet selfish is given to those who prefer pleasures in which other people have no share; we change the meaning of words when we talk of its being selfish to like the pleasures of sympathy or benevolence, because ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the rule of "each man for himself" is invariable, which drove Julie into uttering the protest of "Jackanapes." I believe what she longed to show forth was how the life of an army—as of any other body—depends on whether the individuality of its members is dead; a paradox which may perhaps be hard to understand, save in the light of His teaching, Who said that the saving of a man's life lay in his readiness to lose it. The merging of selfish interests into a common cause is what makes it ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... to music and to dancing and that these should be regarded as of such importance as to influence profoundly the whole constitution of a state, will appear to the majority of modern men an unintelligible paradox. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... with his previous thought—indeed with the whole tenor of his belief. Perhaps the most peaceful man who has been once put in peril of life by an adversary, who has recognized death threatening him in the eye of his antagonist, is by some strange paradox not likely to hold his own life or the life of his adversary as dearly as before. Everything was silent now. The suspense irritated him, he no longer dreaded but even longed for the shot that would precipitate ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... unexplained, and on the course and importance of which he himself would not venture to give an opinion. However, the idea that Marie dreamt her disease, that the fearful sufferings torturing her came from an injury long since healed, appeared such a paradox to Pierre when he gazed at her and saw her in such agony, her limbs already stretched out lifeless on her bed of misery, that he did not even pause to consider it; but at that moment felt simply happy in the thought ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill. Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We've got that to consider." He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate when they had only had the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... marries. If he be a husband, he is looked upon merely as a u shong kha, a begetter. In some of the War villages a newly married man is spoken of by the bride's family as, "u khun ki briew," some one else's son. It is, perhaps, somewhat of a paradox under the circumstances that wives should address their husbands as "kynrad," or lord. There is, however, no gainsaying the fact that the husband, at least in theory, is a stranger in his wife's ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... you know I think you have changed very much since you used to come and see my mother? You have changed; and yet you are the very same: there's a paradox for you, as ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... grown so fond of paradox Perverseness holds us thrall, So what each jester loves the best He mocks the most of all; But as the jest and laugh go round, Each in his neighbor's eyes Reads, while he flouts his heart's desire, ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... general, even supposing that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. In the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... an easily appreciable paradox, possessed, though but 80 per cent. of the Germans in population, a larger available untrained reserve. This was because that empire trained a smaller proportion of its population by far than did the Germans. It is probable that Austria-Hungary was able to train and put forward during the second ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... popular speech. How the short, pithy, sententious sayings cling to the memory like burs! Let almost any of them be commenced, and as Dr. Stalker says, the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, e.g., He said, "Whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also," He was ready to risk the possibility of being misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that He might the more ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... course of publication. Many volumes of poetry put in their claim to immortality every year. Novel after novel appears each to elbow its predecessor out of the public mind, and be in its turn forgotten. It is easy to imagine, that to many it may appear a paradox in the history of the human race, that a people should exist, endowed by nature with a high degree of poetic feeling, having, as Mr Hallam observes, produced more eminent original poets than any other nation can boast, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Either would be the other in the same position, for here (where there is as yet no question of content, but only of being itself) the position is all and the content is nothing. Hence arose that paradox: 'Being is by nothing more real ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... that 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
... and a would-let-well-alone will no longer suffice":—a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of Free-trade between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared to make it compulsory. "All men," he writes in Past and Present, "trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.— "Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!"—Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox,—if he is flighty and empty,—if, instead of striking those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves, in the music of thought,—if, instead of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the same line of thought in the "Discours sur la gloire," where he denies that vice has any part in stimulating social action. It is strange that no one, so far as I know, has observed this proof that Vauvenargues was acquainted with the celebrated paradox of Bernard Mandeville, whose "Fable of the Bees" was in 1747 continuing to cause so scandalous a sensation, and was still so completely misunderstood. There seems, occasionally, a trace of the idealism of Shaftesbury in the colour of Vauvenargues' phrase, but on this it would be ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... woman quoad mere woman; that is to say, unless I loved her for something more than her sex. If she loves, a little pique is not amiss, nor even if she don't; the next thing to a woman's love in a man's favour is her hatred,—a seeming paradox but true. Get them once out of indifference and circumstance, and their passions will do wonders for a dasher which I suppose you are, though I seldom had the impudence or patience to follow ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... to cut out a clear path through an ethical jungle overgrown with the exuberance of human life. I have not succeeded, and it is probably impossible to succeed. In the subject itself there is paradox. Conflicting elements enter into the very constitution of a person. To trace them even imperfectly one must be patient of refinements, accessible to qualifications, and ever ready to admit the opposite of what has been laboriously established. We ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... view is always objective. It might be maintained, though the thing sounds like a paradox, that his very temperament is objective. Certainly it is a temperament averse to any outbursts of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... himself even in thought to open rupture with Catholicism. He held the opinion, so common at that epoch, so inexplicable to us now, that the same man could countermine dogmatic theology as a philosopher, while he maintained it as a Christian. This was the paradox on which Pomponazzo based his apology, which kept Campanella within the pale of the Church, and to which Bruno appealed for his justification when afterwards arraigned before ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... writing last night—do you know why? Because I wanted to write more! This sounds a paradox, but it is true. The fact is that, as I go on telling you of this delightful place, I keep finding out new beauties myself. Broadly speaking, it is all beautiful. In the long view or the little view—as the telescope or ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... the impact of falling meteors, it receives none from outside, the principal source being the tremendous friction and pressure between the cooling and shrinking strata within the great mass of the sun itself. A seeming paradox therefore comes in here, which must be considered: If the sun were composed entirely of gas, it would for a time continue to grow hotter; but the sun is incessantly radiating light and heat, and consequently becoming smaller. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... vivacity and enterprize of youth, without the smallest tincture of libertinism and dissipation. I know not how it is, but I find myself perfectly unable to describe his character without running into paradox. He is at once serious and chearful. His seriousness is so full of enthusiasm and originality, that it is the most unlike in the world to the cold dogmatism of pedantry, or the turgid and monotonous stile of the churchman. His chearfulness is not the gaiety of humour, is not the brilliancy ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... the Dunciad, or anything that is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in "worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judgment, that "personal taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the nineteenth," ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... for 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, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 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
... with the Protagoras, and more in accordance with Plato's predominating views. The professed subject is Rhetoric, which, as an art, Sokrates professes to hold in contempt. The dialogue begins with the position that men are prompted by the desire of good, but proceeds to the great Platonic paradox, that it is a greater evil to do wrong than to suffer wrong. The criminal labours under a mental distemper, and the best thing that can happen to him, is to be punished that so he may be cured. The unpunished wrong-doer is more miserable than if he were punished. Sokrates in this dialogue ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... paradox that the desire for seemliness, the instinct for restraints and fair disciplines, and the impulse to cherish sweet familiar things, that these things of the True God should so readily liberate cruelty and tyranny. It is like a woman going with a light to tend and protect her ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... we see extravagance keeping pace with prosperity, and indeed outstripping it, realizing Archbishop Whately's paradox: "The larger the income, the harder it ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... which "faith" comes to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross". Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a transvaluation of all ancient values—It ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... moderation. No one, says Frank, disputed the statement in the sense in which Amsdorf took it, and its form was so apparently false that it could but be generally disapproved. (2, 176.) The result was that the paradox assertion remained ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Butler would have answered Hume, Butler to whom probability was the guide of life, we cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous argument against miracles was logically valid after all was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... be no doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... at realizing this paradox: the oppression and plunder of the most enterprising, most educated, the richest and most numerous portion of the population by the poorest, most ignorant, most ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Holland the light and air of Europe. He made it his business to break down the narrow prejudices and the still narrower self-satisfaction of his countrymen, without endangering his influence by a mere effusion of paradox. He was a brilliant writer, who would have been admired in any language, but whose appearance in a literature so stiff and dead as that of Holland in the 'fifties was dazzling enough to produce a sort of awe and stupefaction. The posthumous correspondence of Busken-Huet ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who lived their lives and paid the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... are to know by personal experience the love of Christ as it can only be known by those who have fellowship with Him. It is a love that surpasses knowledge, just as His power surpasses everything (ch. i. 19). The paradox of knowing that which surpasses knowledge will not be misunderstood from the standpoint of spiritual experience, because it is the difference between apprehending and comprehending. We know, and know deeply, increasingly, blessedly, and yet all the while there are infinite stretches ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... ask, with wonder, Whence it came? She knows so little of it, knows so much of what obstructed it, what would have rendered it impossible. Such, nevertheless, by necessity or foolish choice, is her rule and practice; whereby that paradox, 'Happy the people whose annals are vacant,' is not ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... medicine, I think nothing is clearer to the Congress than the commitment that the Congress made to end poverty. Congress expressed it well, I think, in 1964, when they said: "It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... she hadn't, the mirror across the room would have enlightened even a woman without vanity; which paradox this thoroughly human young person ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... may form of the comparative populousness of England in different periods, it must be allowed that, abstracting from the national debt, there is a prodigious increase of power in that, more perhaps than in any other European state, since the beginning of the last century. It would be no paradox to affirm, that Ireland alone could, at present, exert a greater force than all the three kingdoms were capable of at the death of Queen Elizabeth. And we might go further, and assert, that one good county in England is able to make, at least to support, a greater effort than the whole ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... 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 his ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... ancient error," observing that until very recent ages the sun was believed to revolve round the earth, and the notion of the antipodes was "a heresy in philosophy"—that to assert the equality of the sexes now was no greater paradox than to advocate either of those theories but a short time ago. "But," she continues, "who shall the matter be tried by?" and here we suspect she has reached the root of the difficulty. Both men and women, she admits, are too much interested to be impartial judges; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of the critical writer are epigram, paradox, and satire. An epigram is a very short phrase or sentence which is so full of implied meaning or suggestion that it catches the attention at once, and remains in the memory easily. The paradox is something of the same sort on a larger scale. It is a statement that we can hardly believe to ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... eagerness for the phrase that came next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kind and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you, sir," he said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching a paradox. "The English people 'ave some common sense, and they'd rather be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable proportion of any given audience, we are ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... haughty advice, depressing sympathy, and malignant prophecy. Review articles, based on no real knowledge of Russia, announced a desire for serf-emancipation, and then, in the modern English way, with plentiful pyrotechnics of antithesis and paradox, threw a gloomy light into the skilfully pictured depths of imperial despotism, official ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... did not improve her pupil, she did improve herself, for the more of love and truth we impart to others, the more we have for ourselves; making the very pretty moral paradox, that the more of love and truth we subtract from our store, the more we have ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... a half-dozen of the days, he willingly parts company, only interested in him as showing a strange state of manners and how religion can be dissociated from conduct. In modern politics he reads the memoirs of Chatham, and Brougham on Colonial Policy, of which he says that 'eccentricity, paradox, fast and loose reasoning and (much more) sentiment, appear to have entered most deeply into the essence of this remarkable man when he wrote his Colonial Policy, as now; with the rarest power of expressing his thoughts, has he any fixed law ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of being there is no sex, and in a sense no death. The organism is immortal because—strange paradox—it is not yet alive enough to die. But as we pass from the lower to the higher, we pass from the less individual to the more individual; from asexual to sexual. And with this change comes that great rhythm by which life and death succeed each other, and death is ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... them delicate," Henriette suggested. But this paradox Hadria could not entertain. "Take care of the colds, and the fresh air will take care of itself," was her ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... made when he returned to the library and found Patricia in tears, was still having its effects upon him, for he did not understand the cause for those tears. He knew only that he had made her cry, that her abandonment of grief was due to his acts, and her father's. By a strange paradox, he pitied himself as deeply as he did the woman he loved. He felt that he had been forced into a second false position by so readily accepting the terms Patricia had insisted upon for their betrothal. ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... simple affirmation of the indestructibility of man's true life; numbers of those who would have been shocked and exasperated to hear questioned the Church dogma of immortality exclaim against this as a ridiculous paradox. Once in a while there is grown a heart so spacious that Nature finds in it room to chant aloud the word God, and set its echoes rolling billowy through one man's being; and he, lifting up his voice to repeat it among men from that inward hearing, invariably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of divinity, in that we cannot ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... writing than half the editors in London put together; but he would ruin any paper in twenty-four hours. His first object would probably be to frighten his readers out of their wits by some monstrous paradox; his next to show them what fools they had been. I don't know how he has been kept on so long where he is, unless it be that he deals with news only. I believe he had to be withdrawn from the gallery of the House; ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... No amount of paradox would induce us to believe that the combining proportions of hydrogen and oxygen had altered, in a specified experimenter's hands, in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... bereaved of the partner of his bosom, can still eat six plates of alamode beef, must have a most excellent stomach. Gentlemen, beware of giving heavy damages in this case, or otherwise you will unconsciously be the promoters of great immorality. This is no paradox, gentlemen; for I am credibly informed that if the man succeed in getting large damages, he will immediately take his wife home to his bosom and his van, and instead of exhibiting her, as he has hitherto done, for one penny, he will, on the strength of the notoriety of this trial, and as a man ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson |
