Quotes About Duality

"We want in so many different ways to be," he began again. "This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to be so…" He moved his hand up, then down… "He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil..."

Every large family has its angel and its demon.

Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other. When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.

Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.

Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human.

You are my Avis," he said, "and you are also some one else. You are two women, and therefore you are my harem. At any rate, we are safe now. If the United States becomes too hot for us, why, I have qualified for citizenship in Turkey.

My lord. It is too much, and not enough

Young men, Melisande murmured after they had left, smiling faintly. Such a sense of honor. Is he a little bit in love with you, do you think? Joscelin quite despises me, I said. My lady. Oh, love and hate are two sides of the same blade, she said cheerily enough, motioning for a servant to take my cloak, and an edge finer honed than yon Cassiline's dagger divides them.

The edge between love and hate is honed finer than the keenest fletchett. She told me something like that, once, but I dared not think on such things, with her name so close to my tongue. She told me too that it was not my acquiescence that interested her, but my rebellion. That was the thing that set her apart from the others, who failed to see where it lay. That was the thing that terrified me. -Chapter 67

Amore e odio sono due lati di una stessa lama. A dividerli è un filo più tagliente di quelli del pugnale del tuo cassiliano.

Extremes live within us all. The joy of association resides alongside the anticipation of loss. What is given will be taken, what we have is often only of value to us when it is gone." He paused, his face now held to the light once more.

Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.

Half there, and half not, Grimalkin said, having suddenly appeared over Burton's shoulder. Sounds implausible to me.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play; and it is not always easy—in fact, it is always extremely hard—to maintain a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to the white world and the relationship, not a whit less painful or dangerous, in which they stood to each other. He was suggesting that in the acceptance of this duality lay their strength, that in this, precisely, lay their means of defining and controlling the world in which they lived.

It's very hard to live with that,' said Eric. 'I mean, with the sense that one is never what one seems—never—and yet, what one seems to be is probably, in some sense, almost exactly what one is.

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one of the other and most people are both.

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward, but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. To quickly grasp this concept, think of United States

A culture of discipline involves a duality. On the one hand, it requires people who adhere to a consistent system; yet, on the other hand, it gives people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system.

All gods bear witness! The Jade Gate and the One-Eyed Monk are truly yin and yang, truly everlasting, truly godlike, both insatiable however much one consumes the other.

Death and life are the same thing. This is the immutable law of nature.

But generally there's good in evil people and evil in good people. You must choose the good and get rid of the evil without sacrificing the good. There's no waste in my domains to be cast away lightly.