Quotes About Antinomies

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is torn apart by it.

There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.

It is upon the antinomies of reason, upon the scandals of the spirit, upon the ruptures in the universe, that I base my hope and my faith.