Quotes About Contradiction

Pity the theory which sets itself in opposition to the mind! It cannot repair this contradiction by any humility, and the humbler it is so much the sooner will ridicule and contempt drive it from real life.

The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.

Most people do not act consistently.

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?

Si vieras, a veces tengo miedo de sentir el dualismo de fuerzas que me impulsan. Cuando he sido demasiado sublime una temporada, tengo ganas de arañar... De dañar un poco.

Desde que el mundo es mundo, vivir y morir vienen siendo la cara y la cruz de una misma moneda echada al aire, pero si sale cara es todavía más absurdo. Para mí, si quieren que les diga la verdad, lo raro es vivir.

Doesn't everyone have at least two opposing natures warring inside them?

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger's theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,' sir.

What other kid, what other boy, would like The Middle? He says it's great because all the Hecks are smart and stupid at the same time. He says most other shows make you be one or the other.

Like every parent, you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time.

It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.

So maybe this was another example of nothing ever being just one thing. No motive is pure. No one is good or bad—but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.

Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.

Where there is love, there is often also hate. They can exist side by side.

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

There is a commonplace book argument, Which glibly glides from every vulgar tongue When any dare a new light to present: 'If you are right, then everybody's wrong.' Suppose the converse of this precedent So often urged, so loudly and so long: 'If you are wrong, then everybody's right.' Was ever everybody yet so quite?

Life is both much simpler and more complicated than it appears to be.

I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve: And all my sowre-sweet dayes I will lament, and love.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.