Quotes About Contradiction

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.

The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert's assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he sat down to write songs of pain he wrote songs of love.

Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.

Sometimes,' she said, 'at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness

Sometimes,' She said, 'at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness. I'm glad you watch everything so carefully, Klara

This is the dilemma, the contradiction we cannot resolve. We do not want to be them. Yet we are fascinated by them, because every detail tugs at a buried memory.

Babies weren't babies—they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep.

He was the richest man in the world, yet he was always broke.

Todo sucede como si de un modo deliberado nos estuvièramos pelliscando dolorosamente a nosotros mismos y pretendièramos, al mismo tiempo, que no es asì.

They most definitely and strongly believed that it is universally true that there is no universal truth.

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

In rational worlds all the hierarchies of our world are reversed.

It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

The heavens, with their everlasting faithfulness, look down on no sadder contradiction than the sluggard and the slattern in their prayers.

Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn't believe in.

Ambivalence is simultaneously wanting and not wanting something, or wanting both of two incompatible things. It has been human nature since the dawn of time.

Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man.

With one auspicious and one dropping eye,With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,In equal scale weighing delight and dole.

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms,The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,Liege of all loiters and malcontents.

I have given suck, and knowHow tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:I would, while it was smiling in my face,Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as youHave done to this.

O thou weed!Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweetThat the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.All men make faults.