Quotes About Contradiction

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

I have seen people who practice yoga and Buddhism who are scared to death of the sorcery powers of others. This is absurd.

The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter-thought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear.

In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But—often with tears in their eyes—they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

With this contradictory parentage of mine: solid English earth and French water goddess, one could expect anything from me. An enchantress or an ordinary girl. There are some who will say I am both.

A ficção como sempre, ocupa um lugar secundário face à História; as mulheres reais são sempre mais complexas e mais contraditórias do que as heroínas de um romance, tal como as mulheres reais dos nossos tempos, como as de então, são muitas vezes maiores do que o retrato que delas se faz, por vezes maiores do que o mundo quer que sejam.

What a strange thing that which men call pleasure seems to be, and how astonishing the relation it has with what is thought to be its opposite, namely pain! A man cannot have both at the same time. Yet if he pursues and catches the one, he is almost always bound to catch the other also, like two creatures with one head.

In my opinion it's preferable for me to be a musician with an out-of-tune lyre or a choir-leader with a cacophonous choir, and it's preferable for almost everyone in the world to find my beliefs misguided and wrong, rather than for just one person - me - to contradict and clash with myself.

el placer y el dolor no se encuentran nunca a un mismo tiempo; y sin embargo, cuando se experimenta el uno, es preciso aceptar el otro, como

Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...

Es necesario estar desilusionado y, sin embargo, apasionadamente enamorado de la vida, aun cuando se haya descubierto su gran futilidad.

I know, not what you were expecting am I? Everybody says that. Including my own family.

not only do the edges not fit, they're not even from the same damn puzzle.

People are people. Hateful and peaceful. Content and miserable. Honest and deceitful. With all of that inside fighting for control every minute of the day, it's a wonder everybody's not banging their heads against the wall.

It's a paradox, isn't it? The people you know the most, the people you love the most-you're also going to feel the parts of them you don't know the most

A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don't even realize it. They're opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They're opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world's gone weird.

Freud would have had a grand time analyzing my have-to-die-clean complex. But then Freud was an ass.

So the peacemakers were bomb makers." "A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don't even realize it. They're opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They're opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world's gone weird.