Quotes About Contradiction

From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

Një mjek i mirë duhet t'u flasë të dy qenieve kontradiktore brenda pacientit që po vdes – pjesës që e di që po vdes dhe asaj që shpreson se do të rrojë ende.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

Life forgets me but will not let me forget Holds me down and tells me that I'm free.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed.

Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.

One might murder and steal and yet be happy

And yet our existence is so organized that every personal enjoyment is purchased at the price of human suffering contrary to human nature.

Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman's, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile.

It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions.

He prayed for purity, humility, love, and now it seemed to him that God heard his prayers. He had not lagged behind the times in knowledge. He now had neither love nor humility nor purity.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous occasion, yet both would be right.

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me.

The second party was directly opposed to the first; one extreme, as always happens, was met by representatives of the other.

I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.