Top 100 Quotes About Contradiction
#1. It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.
Francis Bacon
#2. In seeming contradiction of physical laws, time is heavy only when it is empty.
Trevanian
#3. Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it
Yoko Ogawa
#4. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
Erich Fromm
#5. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
David Hume
#6. Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
William Blake
#7. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#8. Freedom comes when you see the built-in contradiction of trying to manipulate something that is going right to begin with ... Stop trying to steer the river.
Deepak Chopra
#9. I find no contradiction between being a Highlander, a Scot, a citizen of the U.K. and a citizen of the European Union at one and the same time.
Charles Kennedy
#10. They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone.
Billy Joel
#11. Individual character is in the right that is in strict consistence with itself. Self-contradiction is the only wrong.
Friedrich Schiller
#12. The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
D.T. Suzuki
#13. One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.
Gene Wolfe
#14. Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#15. In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
Tom Stoppard
#16. Everyone says that getting over somebody 'just takes time' and that one day it will stop hurting and the door will open for you to move on. We are also told that love is eternal; something extraordinary that will stay with you forever... The contradiction is immense.
Natasha Preston
#17. We have to acknowledge peace is in danger and mankind still has not realised the priority to be given to world dialogue versus armed contradiction and bloodshed.
Nursultan Nazarbayev
#18. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.
G. Willow Wilson
#19. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#20. There's an inherent contradiction between appreciating the beauty of clothes and creativity and individuality, and the waste around the ideas of trends and seasons.
Lily Cole
#21. Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.
Roland Allen
#23. I don't think it's a contradiction to find painfulness funny.
Jill Soloway
#24. Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous.
Tony Hendra
#25. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
Ayn Rand
#26. There are no logical contradictions in the Christian faith. If there were even one logical contradiction at the center of the Christian faith, the Christian faith would be necessarily false.
Ronald H. Nash
#27. Life is indefinite--a bundle of contradictions. We men, with our ideas, strive to give it a particular shape by melting it into a particular mould--into the definiteness of success.
Rabindranath Tagore
#28. Remote control. Ingenious contradiction of terms. Fits like a handshake. Aims like a gun.
Roger Rosenblatt
#29. Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#30. We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
George Soros
#31. That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#32. A king who's innocent
of the things of which he's guilty?
Kristin Cashore
#33. Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.
Erich Fromm
#34. What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes?
Euripides
#35. Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.
Ludwig Von Mises
#36. For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others.
Peter Blegvad
#37. An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction.
Thomas Brooks
#38. No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?
Elie Wiesel
#39. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#41. I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.
William Irwin Thompson
#42. It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though
and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger
he was angry only because his position was so weak.
Lev Grossman
#43. I was a theater geek, and I was a surly cheerleader, and that's really kind of a contradiction.
Natalie Zea
#44. Half the time I hate myself for all the things I've done ... But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I'm not hating myself, I feel righteous and victimized. Like the world is so unfair.
E. Lockhart
#45. We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.
R.C. Sproul
#47. The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism ... If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#49. He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.
Leo Tolstoy
#50. Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions?
Noah Feldman
#51. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#53. Holy War is a contradiction of terms ...
Elie Wiesel
#54. You cannot have humane Zionism, it is a contradiction in terms.
Israel Shahak
#55. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
G.K. Chesterton
#56. The four stages of acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so."
(Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464)
J.B.S. Haldane
#58. I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.
Man Ray
#59. A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#60. It is a contradiction to be a true Christian and not humble.
Richard Baxter
#61. A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man.
John William Draper
#62. Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
Gary Ross
#65. But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I'm not hating myself, I feel righteous and victmized. Like the world is so unfair.
E. Lockhart
#66. There are (or is) indeed no contradiction between science and religion, the fields of which are different, and which, far from mutually fighting and persecute, must, on the contrary, complete each other.
African Spir
#67. So you're trying to make her happy despite the fact that the reason she's unhappy in the first place is you," said Simon, not very kindly. "That seems contradictory, doesn't it?"
"Love is a contradiction," said Jace.
Cassandra Clare
#68. Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
Gottfried Leibniz
#69. Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.
Luc Sante
#70. We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.
Blaise Pascal
#71. Brainstorm and make impossible possible. Make contradictions realistic. As if a contradiction is the other name of impossibility? Or simply impossible when contradicted becomes possible.
Priyavrat Thareja
#73. Everything is true at once. Life is a contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works.
Jandy Nelson
#74. Life was hard. Life was good. Most folks think this a contradiction, but I have learned that the hardest, most difficult times of my life caused the most growth in my character.
Chuck Black
#75. I'm a beautiful mess of contradiction,
A chaotic display of imperfection.
Sai Marie Johnson
#76. Marriage is - among other things - a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#77. As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.
Jean Piaget
#78. At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
William Poundstone
#79. The domestic cat is a bit of a contradiction. It freely accepts human friendship while never allowing even the most contented life to dim its sense of who it is and what it is capable of.
Ellen Dugan
#81. A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.
Lawrence Kushner
#82. There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.
Steve Allen
#84. I say this with no fear of contradiction. Jonas Barnes is absolutely, positively the funniest stand-up comic I have ever seen. Of course, I almost never leave my home. Jonas is a great guy and was a big help to me.
Danny Bonaduce
#86. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw." After a few minutes,
Jandy Nelson
#87. An incorrect theory, even if it cannot be inhibited by any contradiction that would refute it, is none the less incorrect, just as a criminal policy is none the less criminal even if it cannot be inhibited by any court that would curb it.
L. E. J. Brouwer
#88. I realize that, to many readers, Hard Fantasy may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Fantasy, according to most generally recognized definitions, differs from both 'real world' fiction and 'science fiction' in that magic or magical creatures are active elements.
Jane Lindskold
#89. A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.
Elie Wiesel
#90. We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.
Alexander Kluge
#91. The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.
Charles Darwin
#92. That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.
Shimon Peres
#93. Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. There's only one lesson to be learned form life, anyway," interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.
"What's that?" demanded Maury sharply.
"That there's no lesson to be learned from life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#95. The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#96. The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.
Carl Zimmer
#97. If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
Paul Schrader
#98. Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction.
Italo Svevo
#99. If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power ... the subject exceeds the logic of non contradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were.
Judith Butler
#100. If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
Denis Diderot
