Quotes About Duality

What serves on either side, and if you wish to hide, may protect you from your foe, or show him where to go?

Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.

Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas—and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?" "What do you want? Perfection?" "—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.

they have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost— yet search is there image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why - knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way - why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met.

And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites," he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. But observe that most people are creatures cut in half who keep swinging desperately to one side or to the other.

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

Manna used to say that there are two Islamic Republics: the one of words and the one of reality.

Sometimes she felt like she had two personalities. One was shy and wanted to keep things private, and the other was talky and wanted to blabber. (pg. 127)

Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

When I'd killed Ozawa at the sent?, I'd briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I'd figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise r?nin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.

This is the only time you can study both of your shadows. If you sit perfectly still and watch your primary shadow as the sun sets you will be able to hold it long enough to see your other shadow fill up when the moon rises like a porcelain basin with clear water. If you turn carefully to face the south you may regard both of them: to understand the nature of silence you must be able to see into this space between your shadows.

In Platonic thinking, there is a sharp divide between spiritual realities and this world of matter.

humans are made up of two competing entities, the mortal body and the immortal soul

She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.

He passed them out to the class, the picture of the young woman to one side of the room and the picture of the old woman to the other.

You fear both strength and weakness, both power and lack of power.

If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.

Reality, of course, is neither concave nor convex, neither cold nor hot, neither self nor other. If we conceive cold apart from the rest of Reality—not only apart from heat, but apart from ourselves as well—we suffer from it.

To deny a concept is not to embrace its opposite.

W]hen we come up with any concept at all, we simultaneously create one or more opposite concepts.

I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise—beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach.