Quotes About Contradictions

What do you remember—their kisses? All sorts of things…. Men are different with women. Different in what way? Oh, entirely—and quite inexpressibly. Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly inconsistent with me. Brutal men were tender, negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were anything but honorable. For

I think most people are confused about life, because it's not just one thing going on," said Elner. "It's many things going on at the same time. Life is both sad and happy, simple and complex, all at the same time.

Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.

As he put it in 1975, Labour was 'neither in favour of being in Europe on principle, or being out of the Common Market on principle'.130 Unable to commit either to membership or to withdrawal, Labour had contained its contradictions within what might be termed 'Schrödinger's Cabinet': a body that was simultaneously pro-Market and anti-Market, until such time as the wave function of Wilsonian ambiguity was collapsed.

But the most valuable lesson he taught me was this: Every day we get older, and some of us get wiser, but there's no end to our evolution. We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.

No one is every only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they're at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We're all so hard to understand, aren't we? I don't even understand myself.

It's true,' said Rosie. 'No one is ever only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they're at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We're all so hard to understand, aren't we? I don't even understand myself. It'd be so much easier to be a dog, don't you think? Or one of these donkeys? I just wish so much...

The woman I love burns with jealousy, leaps to conclusions, cries, and turns to ice... but when she laughs... the world is mine.

nothing ever happens quickly (except when it does). Nothing is ever, ever easy (except when it is). And, most of all, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan (except in the movies).

Great men have great faults.

Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

Every time we make an assumption—for example, that we understand our spouse—we are exposing ourselves like an open wound. Assumptions and expectations that rely on someone or something else leave us vulnerable. At any moment, one of the uncountable possible contradictions can pop up and sprinkle salt on our assumptions, causing us to flinch and howl.

She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies.

Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers (six if one went to Harvard).

Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies.

Young man, Destiny is less inexorable than it appears. The resources of the great Ruler of the Universe are not so scanty and so stern as to deny to men the divine privilege of Free Will; all of us can carve out our own way, and God can make our very contradictions harmonize with His solemn ends.

Destiny is less inexorable than it appears. The resources of the great Ruler of the Universe are not so scanty and so stern as to deny to men the divine privilege of Free Will; all of us can carve out our own way, and God can make our very contradictions harmonise with His solemn ends.

She was always struggling over what was the best way to react. There were so many contradictions between what she was told and what she saw that she could only hesitatingly move forward, lacking, as she did, power and knowledge. She was a girl trying to make her way.

The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.