Quotes About Contradiction

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

Her thoughts, loosen by solitude, often burst these days through her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another (...)

Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

but could a man be simultaneously bad and good, we asked ourselves, and the Afghan Moon replied that irreconcilable contradiction and the union of opposites was the deepest mystery of all.

Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory.

someone like Grace. Someone exactly like Grace, with her Ted Bundy rantsand her calming presence and—hello, irony.

That is the Mongolian creation myth: out of two different natures love is born. In contradiction, love grows in strength. In confrontation and transformation, love is preserved.

Remember, what may appear to be the source of one's strength can often also be the source of one's weakness.

My strength is my weakness and weakness is my strength

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success.

It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

What a pathetic creature is man! His senses are awakened by the hope for the very thing whose consummation puts him to sleep.

Here's a man ready to chop another man's self-esteem to pieces with an axe, yet he cries out in pain when his own is pricked with a needle.

Francaise with our own proper pack. This permission, we feel bound to say, was graciously granted; which compels us here to give a public contradiction to the slanderers who pretend that we live

Una alegría más triste que la tristeza.

Mais l'homme au contraire, répugne au sang ; ce ne sont point les lois sociales qui répugnent au meurtre, ce sont les lois naturelles 

Si domandano consigli soltanto per non seguirli, oppure, se si seguono, è per avere qualcuno da rimproverare per averli dati.

En général, on ne demande de conseils, disait-il, que pour ne les pas suivre; ou, si on les a suivis, que pour avoir quelqu'un à qui l'on puisse faire le reproche de les avoir donnés.»