Quotes About Duality

We are simultaneously gods and worms."—Abraham Maslow

Things in Excess Become Their Opposite. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. In excess, most endeavors and possessions take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus: Pacifists become militants. Freedom fighters become tyrants. Blessings become curses. Help becomes hindrance. More becomes less.4 Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don't want.

A hypocrite is a person who—but who isn't? —DON MARQUIS I

This idea that we're either courageous or chicken shit is just not true, because most of us are afraid and brave at the exact same moment, all day long.

to judge darkness as bad or wrong is akin to judging whether up is better than down, or whether blue is better than red

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.

In the one hand he is carrying a stone, while he shows the bread in the other.

Tu come va? - Bene. A parte che sto male, bene.

he knows that it's impossible to tell a wolf from a man if he keeps his chin up and his teeth clean.

I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist.'158

The person I am on the court is not who I am off the court.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person.

So being two different people in one day unnerved me to no end.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

I have had my eyes opened to a different side to me. I'm a much happier person. There was always this Jekyll and Hyde thing with me.

There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand.  To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell.

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.