Quotes About Contradiction

Goethe describes blue as lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.". Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionallu incapable of loving you back?

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.

She hadn't ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as "slipping away" or "peaceful" has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.

I called her Minnie all the time. She loved our house as much as I hated it.

And in a world desperate to pigeon-hole and categorize and stereotype, she may feel forced to come down on one side or the other. And the truth is, she's both. And the truth is, she's neither.

Hegel further believed that all things owe their existence to their opposites and that all opposites are actually identical.

Y ella no tiene frío? —No, no se acuerda del frío, está como en otro mundo, ensimismada dibujando a la pantera. —Si está ensimismada no está en otro mundo. Ésa es una contradicción. —Sí, es cierto, ella está ensimismada, metida en el mundo que tiene adentro de ella misma, y que apenas si lo está empezando a descubrir.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

Five minutes before his death, Monsieur de La Palisse was still alive.

Pourquoi les filles tombent-elles raides amoureuses d'hommes qui les font souffrir et traitent avec indifférence ceux qui seraient prêts à leur décrocher la lune ?

El amor es a la vez algo triste y maravilloso.

I know compulsive napping sounds like a contradiction in terms but it is not. I also call them panic naps. A panic nap usually comes on with an exacerbated declaration of: "Fuck, I gotta … goddamnit … I can't think about … shit, I'm tired.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

there's no solution, because there's no problem

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

So, by the working of a contradiction that was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfillment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.

One can seldom admire what one loves.