Quotes About Contradiction

there's a big difference between death threats and love letters--even if the person writing the death threats still claims to actually love you. Of course, considering I once tried to kill someone I loved, maybe I had no right to judge.

Behaviours and feelings rarely line up.

Two contradictory activities. From a company point of view, it makes perfect sense.

Spirit is often lurking in whatever it is you most dislike.

All those religions--they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying.

But that would have left no choice. This was contradiction; at cusp, choice is. By choice, spirit grows.

That old saw about "To understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them. My

He could not afford to believe anything that he was told, or that he read, or that was implicitly assumed to be true about the world around him. No, he could not believe any of it, for the sum total of what be had been told and read and been taught in school was so contradictory, so senseless, so wildly insane that none of it could be believed unless he personally confirmed it.

Strangely, the best can come from this neglected quarter. We will go to almost any length to avoid this painful paradox; but in that refusal we only confine ourselves to the useless experience of contradiction. Contradiction brings the crushing burden of meaninglessness. One can endure any suffering if it has meaning; but meaninglessness is unbearable. Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality.

While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.

The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities. We are taught by Christianity to follow a set of values that are almost entirely disregarded in everyday business life. How is a person to cope?

If a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won't accept it. It is "too simple," "too dull." We are trained to respect only what is inflated, hyperintense, high-pressured, big and complicated.

In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

It is curious, in passing, that the Women's Liberation Movement, the latest and most revolutionary of these waves, is paradoxically more patrist than much of what preceded it

Rewriting in English Prime we find John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office and John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. We have left the realm of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in space-time. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing.

This, of course, is the traditional Buddhist logic — It is X, it is not-X, it is both X and not-X, it is neither X nor not-X

You right," Hawk said. "Couldn't happen. Be like J. Edgar Hoover running around in a dress." "Exactly," I said. "Impossible.

Punk nostalgia, on the other hand, is a grotesque oxymoron. What can it mean to pine for a time when you were young and nihilistic? To look back twenty years to when you believed there was no future?

We are a people who deny publicly that we are even partially in the Balkans, but we admit our Balkan identity privately, among ourselves.

when people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality.

It is the paradox of truly perceiving that the more you do the less effective you are, and the more you hide the more you show.

Credono di vivere in nome di ciò che vogliono. Ma in realtà si fanno guidare da ciò di cui hanno paura, da quello che non vorrebbero assolutamente.

The command to be free is a double bind