Quotes About Contradiction

We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth. Proverbs 13:7

British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable Paradise

Austerity has always made me happy, and its opposite, miserable. I find it strange that, knowing this, I should so often have inflicted upon myself the nausea of over-indulgence, and had to fight off the black dogs of satiety. Human beings, as Pascal points out, are peculiar in that they avidly pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction; gorge themselves with food which cannot nourish and with pleasures which cannot please. I am a prize example.

The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

There are three (3) principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.

it seemed to me exceedingly peculiar that a man should love flowers as well as opium - and yet I see now that there is no contradiction in this, for are they not perhaps both a means to a kind of intoxication ? Could it not even be said that one might lead inevitably to the other ?

So to say that you don't believe in the supernatural is a contradiction in terms - because it means that you also don't believe in the natural. Neither can exist without the other.' 'Oh come on', I said impatiently. 'That's just semantics'. 'Yes, you're right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are modern.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I'm essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale of relying on proof through fact.

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale on relying on proof through fact.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god.

Economy. Pleasure-pain bunkum.

She says she is Irish—Nell O'Connor, but she was born in Latvia and talks like a Greek.

You are really strong. I like even your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers.

Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.