Quotes About Duality

Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

Night and the day, when united, Bring forth the beautiful light.

There are certain natures which cannot have love on one side without hatred on the other.

Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as he grew up, he would devour the other little ones. Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be Javert.

And whatever he did, he always fell back onto this paradox at the core of his thought. To remain in paradise and become a demon! To re-enter hell and become an angel!

We all lead double lives. It's a privilege for the artist and a curse for the ordinary man. One has to get used to it. It's a terrible thing to know too much. In life, our words are improvisations and our actions careless mistakes that end up by becoming habits. Fate beign the distraction of the gods, I distract myself by evading questions that I never asked myself in the past. We are in the hands of the improbable, are we not, my dear Cosette? - Monsieur Verjat-

But no sword is simple. Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.

There are some men apparently born to be the reverse of the coin; their name is a continuation, and is never written except preceded by the conjunction and. Their existence is not their own.

In a calm and even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to make—we will not say to be—what people have agreed to call an honest trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time certain circumstances being given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface, he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in whom there was some taint of the monster.

Todos los actos humanos tienen dos caras!

That which is terror by night is curiosity by day.

CHAPTER II—A DOUBLE QUARTETTE

CHAPTER III—FOUR AND FOUR

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say, two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the other, according to circumstances.

The devil may visit us, but God lives here.

The universe is always in balance, she said - summer and winter, day and night, sustenance and poison, good and evil. To know the light, you must also know the darkness.

Could they all be that evil? Or had they discovered a switch within themselves that allowed them to turn off their civility? Did they go home to their wives at night and simply flip the switches back on, become human once more?

Remember that you control what you choose to believe in," I said. Anyone could look at our farm lives and see toil and squalor, or look at the same lives and see purpose, abundance, and joy. Same plot points, different story. "Very different things can be true simultaneously, and choosing the one with the better narrative is often extremely helpful.

I'm worse at what I do best.

Identical twins are no different from everyone else, except we look and sometimes sound exactly alike.

good can never catch up with evil, because with the gap between good and evil there is no hope whatsoever.

The man who has not lived in the secrecy and intelligence environment—really lived in it and fully experienced it—cannot write accurately about it. There is no substitute for the day to day living of a life in which he tells his best friends and acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one story while he lives another.