Quotes About Contradiction

a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons.

I don't understand how we can fight the Communist Party under the leadership of the Communist Party ... I don't understand why perestroika is being carried out by the same people who brought the country to the point where it needs perestroika.

Smoking's good for you," said Nightingale. "It's packed with vitamins and minerals and has zero calories and fat." He gestured at the stairs. "It's exercise that's bad for you. Look what it's doing to me.

churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that sourround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply.

That is the paradox of white gold. Hope and despair run together for us.

Springsteen . . . was completely relevant and utterly anomalous at once, by way of a passion on the one hand that matched the punk moment, and a romanticism on the other hand that defied the postmodern moment.

To deny a concept is not to embrace its opposite.

W]hen we come up with any concept at all, we simultaneously create one or more opposite concepts.

Whenever we conceptualise, we create contradictions that we can't escape.

There are two kinds of knowledge … One consists of beliefs, opinions, conjectures – having an idea of something. (…) But this is not the true knowing. (…) We think that our beliefs and ideas can be relied on to give us satisfaction. … In fact, they're … our primary source of anxiety and fear, because they're always subject to contradiction and doubt.

Always...no wait...never.....

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

Porque no hay nada como la pura fuerza de los números para retirar capas de confusión y contradicción.

There is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this poem it ends.

A list of ways in which we're stupid can't explain why we're so smart.

I hate and I love. Perchance you ask why I do that. I know not, but I feel that I do and I am tortured. [Lat., Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.]

Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.

The same love that made me laugh makes my cry.

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

I love everything about the South; I even love hate.