Quotes About Contradiction

The Human Contradiction again. The Contradiction, it was more often called among Oankali. Intelligence and hierarchical behavior. It was fascinating, seductive, and lethal. It had brought Humans to their final war.

Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.

How can one be so serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous?

he tried hard to analyse his feelings about the human species, and the causes of his own fluctuation between adoration and contemptuous resentment

Yace aquí el gran Cardenal, que hizo en vida mal y bien, el bien que hizo lo hizo mal, el mal que hizo lo hizo bien.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them - a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

But people almost never say, "Die!", Paltry prudent, hypocrites.

never could think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security. I could sleep soundly.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment-- absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski's mind--no, I still didn't quite see...

Please. Fire can't burn underwater." "Think before you speak, young master. Water contains oxygen, doesn't it? Where there's oxygen, there's no reason you can't have fire.

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water.

To begin with, I believe a fatal contradiction lies between women's right to vote and lipstick. Those guys usually aren't popular with the ladies. Without a doubt, this is a plan for revenge.

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind.

To fall for", "to be fallen for"- I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.

Simple pleasures are always the last refuge of the complex

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

Chastity is the greatest form of perversion.