Quotes About Duality

There is no idea so right that there is nothing wrong about it, And nothing so wrong that there isn't something right about it. ~William Blake~

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

really believed what he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties . . . but right through every human heart" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973]).

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.

The head and the heart, you know, they don't always see eye to eye.

Life, she thought. Always a clash of opposites. Was there ever any real end to that great conflict?

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

Es gibt keine gute Nachricht. Nur weil es eine schlechte Nachricht gibt, muss es nicht zwangsläufig gute Nachrichten geben.

Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.

He realized that Lili and he shared something: a pair of oyster-blue lungs; a chugging heart; their eyes, often rimmed pink with fatigue. But in the skull it was almost as if there were two brains, a walnut halved: his and hers.

Elle veut lui dire qu'on peut être à la fois heureux et perdu.

this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

The Tao doesn't take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil.

Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or—to put it better—the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent.22

In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.

Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the Good and the Bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

La connaissance est neutre , mais elle peut être utilisée avec de bonnes ou de mauvaises intentions.

It is important to realise that two conflicting statements can both be equally true depending on the level from which you observe the same situation.