Quotes About Contradiction

Though Hegel constructs a totalizing system, its airtight structure does not produce a perfectly harmonious whole in which nothing is out of place. Instead, the totality renders visible the ontological necessity of contradiction. This is the reason that Hegel insists on thinking the absolute idea... on their own, particulars create the illusion of the possibility of avoiding contradiction. This is, for Hegel, the great danger of the failure to think absolutely.

If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid - but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

Robin Hood is often seen as the hands-on-hips, archetypal, tally-ho hero. But, realistically, the one calling the shots wouldn't be at the front shouting about it. He'd be the one you don't expect.

Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal.

I can't decide if I'm a hippie or elegant older woman, a farmer's wife, a crazy person.

No one is any one thing.

The one time I shot a gun, the feelings I felt, I was guilty for feeling them. There is an exhilaration and a glamour, and I felt awful for feeling that.

Sometimes, the unnecessary is necessary.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

The well bred contradict other people. the wise contradict themselves.

What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.

My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.

Los ingleses tienen 3 cosas de las que mostrarse orgullosos: El té, el whisky y un escritor como yo. Pero resulta que el té es chino; el whisky, escocés; y yo soy irlandés.

When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then

I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life. 

wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. 

Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.