Quotes About Contradiction

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

There's nothing wrong with the car except that it's on fire.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, Jesus didn't do it the world's way. He came in and offended the world. He came in and did everything the wrong way.

Wrong fails because it is wrong. The wrongs, the untruths, are inconsistent with each other. They clash against each other and confute each other. They neutralize each other and are lost.

Many of the people who are most considered anti-American would love to partake of the American dream: the unspoken slogan of many protesters outside U.S. embassies abroad is really: 'Yankee go home, but take me with you.'

I've got a statue of St. Francis in my front yard, and I'm not even a practicing Catholic.

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.

People are funny, and in the most tragic situations, when comedy erupts from nowhere, it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You're laughing one minute and you're crying the next and that's just life for me, and that is what people are like.

I use humour a lot. My foundation is tragic, but my appearance is humorous.

We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.

In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.

I live in trainers and baggy clothes, but on the red carpet, I either go for something very pretty from Temperley London or a structured Roland Mouret dress.

To me, it remains incomprehensible that a people who can design the Porsche 911 and sleek, white ice trains, who created the Bauhaus and speak at least three languages at birth, want to own twee Christmas figurines painted in gaudy colours, dress up in Bavarian lederhosen, and eat Haribo gummy bears.

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.

Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.

I'm constantly going through the transition of love and hate at the same time and it just makes me who I am.

I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen are worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog.

What is really baffling about life is that sometimes, despite all our confusion, we can also be really wise!

sometimes, the more you want something, the more the opposite tends to happen.

How can that be? A great sin – a mortal sin – for which I must die and go to hell – but it made me free! One moment I was free! How is that, Father? [...] And that other sin – that other sin – that sin of love – That's all I ever knew of Heaven – heaven on earth! How can that be – a sin – a mortal sin – all I know of heaven?

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do

Being is the greatest paradox of life in front of death.