Quotes About Contradictions

#1. It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist] - Author: Joseph Conrad

#2. Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions. - Author: Charles Caleb Colton

#3. I am failing as a woman. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. I am a mess of contradictions. - Author: Roxane Gay

#4. So the studies don't back me up. There'll always be more studies. We'll change our minds and I'll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong. - Author: Karen Joy Fowler

#5. Galaxie 500 broke up because it was time. We broke up as a result of internal contradictions. - Author: Dean Wareham

#6. I didn't know how to exist inside my own contradictions. - Author: C.D. Reiss

#7. A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough ... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror. - Author: Voltaire

#8. 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. - Author: Lidia Yuknavitch

#9. Age helps one to acquire some of the perspectives necessary to create harmony among apparent contradictions. - Author: Roberto Assagioli

#10. It has been the bankers' destiny ... to find themselves on the dangerous edge of the world, pointing up the contradictions and cross-purposes. They are not often loved for it. - Author: Anthony Sampson

#11. One remains young as long as one can still learn, can still take on new habits, can bear contradictions. - Author: Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

#12. 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. - Author: Ayn Rand

#13. 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. - Author: Ronald H. Nash

#14. We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid. - Author: Philip K. Dick

#15. The will is a product of integrity, not a child of contradictions. - Author: Nilakanta Sri Ram

#16. 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. - Author: Rabindranath Tagore

#17. We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other. - Author: Esther Perel

#18. As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional. - Author: Hugo Weaving

#19. Song-writing is therapy for me. I'm a very moody person, very difficult to live with. There's a lot going on and a lot of contradictions. My life is always one step away from disaster. - Author: Gary Numan

#20. Consciousness is a state in which a man knows all at once everything that he in general knows and in which he can see how little he does know and how many contradictions there are in what he knows. - Author: G.I. Gurdjieff

#21. I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world. - Author: Joseph Fiennes

#22. Conflict never lies between two people. It always lies between rigid beliefs about the other person and the contradictions they show you. Conflict is always an inside job, but until you recognise this, it is easier to blame the other person. - Author: Esther Veltheim

#23. BLINDSIGHT is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride. - Author: Elizabeth Bear

#24. It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being - Author: Sergei Eisenstein

#25. I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world. - Author: Michael Haneke

#26. The only way you can grow is to let yourself make mistakes and create contradictions. As we learn new things, some of our old attitudes will change. - Author: Nikki Giovanni

#27. I'm a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both. - Author: Angela Davis

#28. There is no way around the contradictions and dangers inherent in Israel's decision to free over 1,000 prisoners in order to liberate Gilad Shalit. - Author: Elliott Abrams

#29. Teresa [of Avila]'s story dismantles the common belief that all those chosen for sainthood are flawless in personality and character. Indeed, she would want us to consider her contradictions and struggles as integral to her sainthood. - Author: Helen LaKelly Hunt

#30. We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every heart. - Author: Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#31. The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past. - Author: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

#32. Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions? - Author: Noah Feldman

#33. As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change. - Author: Haruki Murakami

#34. When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people. - Author: Tom Hughes

#35. But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are? - Author: Molly Peacock

#36. God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow. - Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#37. 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. - Author: Man Ray

#38. Really, life is full of contradictions. Life is messy. - Author: Tim Blake Nelson

#39. Finding a partner who understands the vicissitudes of travel is challenging. A nomadic life fosters inconsistencies and contradictions within you - a vacillation between loneliness and needing desperately to be left alone. - Author: Carrie Brownstein

#40. As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men. - Author: Thomas Paine

#41. Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history. - Author: A. N. Wilson

#42. 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. - Author: Priyavrat Thareja

#43. Do you think when two representatives holding diametrically opposing views get together and shake hands, the contradictions between our systems will simply melt away? What kind of a daydream is that? - Author: Nikita Khrushchev

#44. You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions. - Author: Anthony F. C. Wallace

#45. She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions. - Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

#46. 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. - Author: Lawrence Kushner

#47. One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality. - Author: Justin Cronin

#48. An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face. - Author: Steve Martin

#49. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit. - Author: Edgar Allan Poe

#50. Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good. - Author: Anne Michaels

#51. 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. - Author: Robert A. Heinlein

#52. The women I cast have to embody all sorts of contradictions ... I have to find the right woman to speak to other women. - Author: Allison Anders

#53. I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then ... find wholeness in the torn world. - Author: Robert Adams

#54. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives - and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. - Author: Ayn Rand

#55. Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. - Author: Wilhelm Reich

#56. You stay young as long as you can learn, acquire new habits, and suffer contradictions. - Author: Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

#57. Love is an act of faith, not an exchange.
Contradictions are what make love grow. Conflicts are what allow love to remain by our side. - Author: Paulo Coelho

#58. But life is not a fairy tale. It's brighter and darker, longer and briefer, duller and more magical. It's full of contradictions, but one thing it's not is neat. - Author: Kirsty Logan

#59. Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic. - Author: Terry Eagleton

#60. Bollywood is a cinema of vibrant contradictions, which works when it seems it shouldn't. - Author: Gurinder Chadha

#61. Imagination does not enable us to invent as many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart. - Author: Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#62. I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. - Author: Sheri S. Tepper

#63. These little contradictions are in all of us. They're in me at least. And so I forgot that I had been awake for 30 hours and kept walking, grateful to be a little boat full of water, still floating. - Author: John Green

#64. Old contradictions never die; they just get new outfits. - Author: Susan J. Douglas

#65. The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable. - Author: Theodore Dreiser

#66. Ladies and gentlemen, I take office at a time in which the world is living in extreme contradictions. - Author: Gustav Heinemann

#67. Lucien Knight was a walking, talking hang up, a beautiful mass of contradictions. He'd been single-minded in his mission to free her from her marriage and it was time to return the favour. - Author: Kitty French

#68. What I love about the Don Draper character is that he's so real and filled with all these contradictions. - Author: Jerry Della Femina

#69. It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions. - Author: Rajneesh

#70. Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't. - Author: Alex Gibney

#71. Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery. - Author: Leonardo Da Vinci

#72. The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. - Author: Peter De Vries

#73. The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution. - Author: Vladimir Lenin

#74. If I go out into nature, into the unknown, to the fringes of knowledge, everything seems mixed up and contradictory, illogical, and incoherent. This is what research does; it smooths out contradictions and makes things simple, logical, and coherent. - Author: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

#75. Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it. - Author: Karl Barth

#76. Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative ... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. - Author: Kiki Smith

#77. You can always find contradictions and hope, in hopeless circumstances, and a sense of redemption in somebody who makes the same mistake, over and over. So far, so good. That's how I put it. - Author: Chris Bauer

#78. Paradox reconciles all contradictions. - Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor

#79. As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life. - Author: Jack Kornfield

#80. If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last. - Author: Jonathan Swift

#81. I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing. - Author: Marge Piercy

#82. I am, like anybody else, full of contradictions and personality traits, and I don't know which ones to speak from as a stand-up or what aspects of myself to ask an audience to identify with. - Author: Andy Daly

#83. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. - Author: Eric Hobsbawm

#84. Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism. - Author: Greg Graffin

#85. Christianity rejects tolerance and demands choice, wherein lies its greatest flaw - one of a multitude of contradictions found throughout the Bible and the historical doctrine of the Church. - Author: Aaron B. Powell

#86. We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another. - Author: A.S.A Harrison

#87. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them. - Author: William Blake

#88. I like complicated women. I like women with strength and contradictions ... - Author: Naomi Watts

#89. When Catullus expresses his love and hate for Lesbia, he is not obviously voicing a wish to rid himself of one or the other of these two sentiments. Not all contradictions resolve into temporal change of belief or desire. - Author: Raymond Geuss

#90. Allow me to contradict my clarifications and in no time we'll get to the bottom of nothing. - Author: Brian Spellman

#91. You need contradictions to make an ideal. - Author: Alex Shakar

#92. Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.
Or insanity. - Author: Richard Kadrey

#93. She was the oddest combination of contradictions he'd ever met -innocence and sensuality, candour and diplomacy, anxiety and utter fearlessness. He hadn't even begun to figure out how her mind worked. But she was damn well going to live long enough for him to try. - Author: Karen Chance

#94. New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch. - Author: Tom Waits

#95. Reform as such is inherently reactionary and perpetuates
psychological dependence on
the enemy,while confusing
the true class contradictions
between ourselves and the enemy. - Author: Black Liberation Army Co-Ordinating Committee

#96. The city's contradictions and frailties drive me to the church. The church, in turn, binds my wounds and soothes my troubled heart, and sends me right back out into the city again. - Author: Steve Ross

#97. I found the book, Qur'an,] in spite of "the contradictions, the absurdities, the anachronisms", "rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art. - Author: Voltaire

#98. The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible. - Author: William Poundstone

#99. If you're that obsessed with someone, why would you kill her?
Humans are full of contradictions. - Author: Ai Yazawa

#100. Love is a drama of contradictions. - Author: Franz Kafka