Quotes About Contradiction

I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.

He seemed simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew extremely well; there was either an enormous amount to say or nothing at all.

Un uomo? -risposi ridendo- Un uomo è cosa ancor più triste e più orrenda di questo mucchio di carne sfatta. Un uomo è orgolgio, crudeltà, tradimento, viltà, violenza. La carne sfatta è tristezza, pudore, paura, rimorso, speranza. Un uomo, un uomo vivo, è poca cosa, in confronto di un mucchio di carne marcia.

Oggi si soffre e si fa soffrire, si uccide e si muore, si compiono cose meravigliose e cose orrende, non già per salvare la nostra anima, ma per salvare la propria pelle.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

That's the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

He was, in some paralysing way, conscious of his own defencelessness, though he had all the defence of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.

Some sort of perversity in our souls makes us not want, get away from, the very thing we want. We have to fight against that.

But one truth does not displace another. Even apparently contradictory truths do not displace one another. Logic is far too coarse to make the subtle distinctions life demands.

Every half-truth at length produces the contradiction of itself in the opposite half-truth.

Such was the paradox of love: out of fear of losing it, you willingly relinquished it. You inflicted upon yourself the wound you dreaded most of all.

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

I am exact and merciless but I love you.

Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

I contain multitudes

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

It is no contradiction to oppose the criminalization of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, etc., while at the same time declaring that such behavior is immoral and unethical.

Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage? Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars

An irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.

Besides, when a man of talent shows himself an able and useful partisan, his party will continue to protect and accredit him, in spite of conduct the most contradictory to their own principles.

Such a visage, joined to the brawny form of the holy man, spoke rather of sirloins and haunches than of pease and pulse.