Quotes About Duality

There are two sides to each man's life: his personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental, swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow." Levin

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous occasion, yet both would be right.

The electrons seem eerily to take both paths at once if nothing is watching, but a definite path if someone or something is watching! These are not particles and not waves-they are both and neither-they are something new: They are quantum states.6

A single photon seems to "know" if there are two slits open or only one slit open and it behaves differently accordingly!

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Translation is the other side of a tapestry.

nulla è più delizioso per uno scrittore del divagare, dell'estravagare: lo scrivere sembra diventare pura, trasparente esistenza - notiamo di quanto profitto siano per la letteratura i miti e le cronache dei gemelli, dei sosia, delle usurpazioni e/o contestazioni di identità, delle sostituzioni notturne e degli sdoppiamenti o dimezzamenti tipo Jekyll-Hyde.

Déjese usted llevar por los impulsos de su naturaleza, pero nunca a medias. Si no puede usted ser una mujer buena y honrada, sea usted un demonio.

Gemini....You revere scientists and shamans alike, providing them with what they need to do their good work for the enhancement of the realm." (Rob Brezsny)

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The same, yet not the same

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway.

She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.

I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.

People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Humans have both the urge to create and destroy.

Like so many other young South Asians in America, I am the product of two cultures whose conflicting values pull at me with equal urgency. Never have I felt as torn between the two as I do about the question of marriage.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.