Quotes About Duality

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures.

An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to destroy the second.

He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.

You can't hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it.

We are not where we are . . . but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

The mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows itself to be matter as well.

It was the best thing that could have happened to him, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him.

Adesso poteva anche fare certe cose. Prima del 3 novembre sarebbe stato inconcepibile, ma il mondo irreale era molto più grande di quello reale, e c'era spazio abbondante per essere e non essere se stessi.

isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language---the ability to experience the world through symbols---is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one.

I was the best thing that could have happened to him, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him.

For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once.

Germans either want to kill you or fuck you.

This is why good-versus-evil clashes are so much more satisfying than fictions where there is good without evil.

They find man a paradoxical being; one capable of descent into the darkest abysses of evil, and yet equally capable of ascent to the sublimest heights of nobility. They

The Surangama Sutra chooses, as the best meditation method for the present historic cycle, the one used by Avalokitesvara. It disengages bodily hearing from outward sound, then penetrates still deeper into the void beyond this duality, then beyond ego and its object, until all opposites and dualities vanish, leaving absoluteness. Nirvana follows as a natural consequence. In other words, disengage consciousness from the senses and return to pure Consciousness itself.

Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other

aspects of the One and All in which a discrimination between good and evil is entirely lost sight

Unreadability of this world. All doubles. The strong clocks back the fissure-hour, hoarsely. You, wedged into your deepest, climb out of yourself for ever. — Paul Celan, "Unreadability," Paul Celan: Selections . (University of California Press, March 14th 2005)

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

One of the great advantages about being a villain is that you can easily recognise other villains and on rare occasions, recognise a truly good man.

Computation is fundamentally a representational medium, but as we attempt to expand the ways in which we interact with computation, we need to pay attention to the duality of representation and participation.

No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It would be needless to point this out if the unscrupulous were not always saying the opposite. It's so small a thing, the life of man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task. I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot.

Yin and yang are descriptive terms that are used to describe all levels of phenomena. Yin is the stable, unmoving, hidden aspect of an object. Yang is the changing, moving, revealing aspect of an object.