Quotes About Contradictions

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Secrets make for good drama, and revealing the hidden truths and contradictions of life is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of making movies.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

The point of what we are all doing, wherever we are doing it, whether or not we see our actions in exactly the same framework, is to create spaces in which humans and nature can thrive, to make demands on the present system and force it to respond, to find contradictions in it and heighten them, to bend it until it either gives way or snaps.

Songwriters such as Alanis Morissette write about the constant balance of contradictions, and that's something I adhere to in my life and work.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.

On an island of paradoxes, the Quaker whalemen were perhaps the most paradoxical. At once pacifist whalehunters, plain-dressed millionaires, abolitionist floggers of common seamen, and devoted family men who were never home, these "Quakers with a vengeance" embodied a truly mind-boggling array of contradictions.

One thing yo learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.

High Blade Xenocrates was a bloated bundle of contradictions. He wore a robe of rich baroque brocades, yet on his feet were frayed, treadworn slippers. He lived in a simple log cabin—yet the cabin had been reassembled on the rooftop of Fulcrum City's tallest building. His furniture was mismatched and thrift-store shabby, yet on the floor beneath them were museum-quality tapestries that could have been priceless.

Idealism couldn't coexist with so many other people's ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they'd chosen.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable--who we are, why we are--and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

Should America's primary goal be to improve the livelihood of its 330 million citizens or to preserve its primacy in the international system? If there are contradictions between the goals of preserving primacy and improving well-being, which should take priority?

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

New knowledge emerges from present-day knowledge because within it there are contradictions, unresolved tensions, details that don't add up, fracture lines.

It would be truly foolish to let the decline of communism blind us to the long-term contradictions in a free market economy unrestrained by considerations of the environment and social justice, and driven by heedless consumerism, instant gratification, and the quick fix.

I do know how life can go one way or another and that it's not all just black and white, and there are many different situations and twists and turns in life.

In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

I've cried out, and my cry has been answered--but life, with all its contradictions and ambiguities, hasn't ended there. The thirsty man drinks and gets thirsty again.

to nic nie znaczy, do diab?a, w ko?cówce naszego wspania?ego XX wieku, wieku tyranii i rozpasanej demokracji, g?upkowatej ?wi?to?ci i genialnego ?ajdactwa, skapcania?ej sztuki i rozwydrzonej grafomanii.