Quotes About Contrast

I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.

I've finally figured out what's wrong with Washington D.C. It's that all the buildings are more or less the same height and there's absolutely no skyline, save for the Washington Monument touching the night sky, like a giant middle finger to the world.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

And so, for benign masochism to work, certain conditions must be met. The pain has to be relatively brief. It has to quickly fade, providing the space for pleasurable contrast. And the damage cannot be severe.

We scream when we are in pain. But, weirdly, we also scream for the opposite of pain—intense pleasure, joyous surprise, great excitement. Have you seen the videos of fangirls in the sixties in the presence of the Beatles? They positively shriek. Crying is also triggered by opposites. You might cry on the worst day of your life and on the best. Weddings and funerals; the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

It turns out, then, that if you think something is really going to hurt and it hurts just mildly, the magic of contrast can cause this mild hurt to transform into pleasure.

In the spirit of reciprocity, our church began receiving teams and leaders from the Moldovan church as long ago as 1991. In sharp contrast to the Moldovan pattern-and I say this to my own shame, as I helped shape the relationship-it was many years before a Moldovan pastor preached from our pulpit.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other

When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.

This shitty world sometimes produces a rose The scent of it lingers and then it just goes

The thing about The Dubliners is - line'em up, the hardest rock'n'roll bands in the world, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Oasis, Nirvana, U2 - we're all a bunch of girls next to The Dubliners.

One way God establishes beauty is by putting things that are different next to each other.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Yin and yang are descriptive terms that are used to describe all levels of phenomena. Yin is the stable, unmoving, hidden aspect of an object. Yang is the changing, moving, revealing aspect of an object.

If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?

Think of how strange the colours and sights of the world would be for a blind man abruptly made to see or a man deaf from birth hearing the playing of a hundred flutes

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

He liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.

In America the machine is invading all branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.

he said "Miami" left the impression of Sodom-by-the-Sea.

Hey, it's Florida. Toss a beach ball at me, I'll empty my .45 into you and be home in time for Jimmy Kimmel.

Sadness isn't sadness. It's happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They're balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It's life that's jumped off a tall cliff.