RRhetoric
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Balance & Opposition

Antithesis

an-TIH-thuh-sis / ænˈtɪθəsɪs

Contrasting ideas placed in balanced, matching grammar, so the contrast shows in the sentence's shape. The symmetry suggests the two options are the only ones — which is why it sounds authoritative even when the split is false.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…" — Dickens

Don't confuse it with Paradox, Oxymoron. Oxymoron compresses contradiction into a two-word phrase; antithesis holds the contrast across balanced clauses. Paradox asserts a contradiction as true rather than balancing alternatives.

Drill this device — 38 excerpts

In the Reader — 38 excerpts

You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (translated by Gregory Hays) · open the passage →
Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet · open the passage →
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice · open the passage →
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights · open the passage →
Than never to have loved at all.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. · open the passage →
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.
— Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address · open the passage →
The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace · open the passage →
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (translated by Constance Garnett) · open the passage →
You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural lawlessness cannot even comprehend.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (translated by Constance Garnett) · open the passage →
And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door—the lady, or the tiger?
— Frank R. Stockton, The Lady, or the Tiger? · open the passage →
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray · open the passage →
The boy stood with his back to the rick, and his eyes fixed on the far horizon, as if he could discern there, in the vast expanse, some promise of happier times; and perhaps he could, for such minds are often the victims of their own imagination.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure · open the passage →
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest · open the passage →
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake.
— Henry James, The Turn of the Screw · open the passage →
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness · open the passage →
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.
— Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie · open the passage →
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
— James Joyce, Dubliners · open the passage →
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring belief that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out," were not.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia · open the passage →
Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence · open the passage →
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes."
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence · open the passage →
below us. He killed not as he had been forced to by the last bull, but as he wanted to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out of the folds of the
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises · open the passage →
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God · open the passage →

…and 14 more. Meet the rest in the quiz →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with antithesis most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 20 Parallelism 16 Personification 11 Metaphor 10 Paradox 9 Passive Voice 8 Asyndeton 8 Irony 8

The rest of the family

Parallelism Isocolon Chiasmus Antimetabole Juxtaposition Oxymoron Paradox