Quotes About Opposites

#1. But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.

C. G. Jung

#2. Sometimes good and evil aren't so much opposites as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way and it looks good, another way and it's evil, sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you're on.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#3. I don't think opposites attract. I think like attracts like. So I don't think that they do attract, opposites. Only when you're talking about magnetic poles.

Ashton Kutcher

#4. If I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I'd imagined it before, that I'd say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposites, the kind that couldn't exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.

Jill Bialosky

#5. They say opposites attract. Nobody ever said opposites live happily ever after.

Linda Morris

#6. Freedom and relationship are polar opposites - they both exist on the same continuum. You DO want a relationship - and you DO want freedom - what you really want is BALANCE, you want wholeness.

Shakti Gawain

#7. The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the best tool for driving out fear.

Ed Catmull

#8. There is harmony in the tension of opposites, as in the case of the bow and lyre.

Heraclitus

#9. Wisdom is not a matter of study, but a matter of living, and of sure action which rises above opposites.

Nilakanta Sri Ram

#10. There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.

Rhonda Byrne

#11. Love and hate were complete opposites; and yet they intersected so frequently, changing paths often until they collided and made one big mess as they became parallel and found peace within.

Nashoda Rose

#12. Justice and I became friends, though we were opposites in many ways - he was extroverted, I was introverted; he was lighthearted, I was serious.

Nelson Mandela

#13. When you put the subjectivity of the art together with the context of the science, you have this very powerful conjunction of opposites and together they are greater than either one could ever be.

James Balog

#14. A marriage of opposites - modern elements with antique pieces - highlights both their individuality and compatibility.

Nancy Price

#15. Unless a man or woman has experienced the darkness of the soul he or she can know nothing of that transforming laughter without which no hint of the ultimate reality of the opposites can be faintly intuited.

Luke The Evangelist

#16. Perhaps she was both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death - all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.

Paule Marshall

#17. Darling, I wish I could help you. Try to remember this: to live, you need every experience. Some will come in glory and in beauty, and some in pain and what seems like ugliness. But - they are. Life consists of opposites in balance.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#18. The world is full of paradoxes and life is full of opposites. The art is to embrace the opposites, accommodate the paradoxes and live with a smile.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

#19. We're intellectual opposites. Well, I'm intellectual and you're opposite.

Mae West

#20. True enough and opposites don't just attract they freaking catch fire and burn the entire city down.

Jay Crownover

#21. Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!

Carl Jung

#22. Dignity and pride are not only two different feelings, but, in some ways, opposites.
You can step on your pride to preserve your dignity. You can destroy your dignity because of your pride.

Luigina Sgarro

#23. The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.

Carl Jung

#24. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.

Theodor W. Adorno

#25. You learn more and more that everything exists at once with its opposite, so the contradictions of life are never-ending and somehow the mediation between these opposites is the game of life.

Milton Glaser

#26. Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.

George Carlin

#27. [The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs
pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.

C.S. Lewis

#28. Pride and vanity, the opposites of humility, can destroy our spiritual health as surely as a debilitating disease can destroy our physical health.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#29. When summer is over, winter becomes sad too, because opposites often admire each other secretly!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#30. My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.

Stephen Spender

#31. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

Bell Hooks

#32. Why are a 'wise man' and a 'wiseguy' opposites?

George Carlin

#33. Why do men like intelligent women? Because opposites attract.

Kathy Lette

#34. The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity.

Nicholas Mosley

#35. [B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.

Ira Berlin

#36. Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.

Frank Herbert

#37. Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Andy Warhol

#38. When we combine the set of whole numbers with their opposites, including zero, we
obtain a set of numbers we call integers. That

Judith Sowder

#39. The great battle (jihad) of life is the conflict of opposites.

Tim

#40. They're like the opposites poles of my personality. Mild-mannered, responsible Reese is who I used to be, while in-your-face Olivia's who I want to be - with a few sharp edges dulled.

Kirsten Hubbard

#41. Even honor and virtue make enemies, condemning, as they do, their opposites by too close a contrast.

Tacitus

#42. God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one

Rumi

#43. At first opposites attract. Then opposites attack.

Rick Warren

#44. It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.

Alain De Botton

#45. In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other.

Karl Liebknecht

#46. Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Louis Aragon

#47. Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

#48. In life's work, bliss and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, complementary opposites.

Laurence Boldt

#49. The activities of the liberated soul transcend the pairs of opposites.

Patanjali

#50. [The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#51. The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

Joseph Campbell

#52. The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine

Carl Jung

#53. It is critical, therefore, in every new generation and setting to find ways to communicate the gospel clearly and strikingly, distinguishing it from its opposites and counterfeits.

Timothy Keller

#54. In my judgment, excellence and wealth are direct opposites, since when the one shrinks, the other grows, and when one grows, the other shrinks.

Apollonius Of Tyana

#55. You can't say: This much love is worth this much misery. They're not opposites that cancel each other out; they're both true at the same time.

Sonia Sotomayor

#56. Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient.

Patrick Kavanagh

#57. Economy, prudence, and a simple life are the sure masters of need, and will often accomplish that which, their opposites, with a fortune at hand, will fail to do.

Clara Barton

#58. Opposites attract, and I think temperament is so fundamental that you end up craving someone of the opposite temperament to complete you.

Susan Cain

#59. The troubling truth is that rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much.

Alfie Kohn

#60. Opposites attract in physics. In life, like attracts like. Kindness attracts kindness. Greed attracts greed. Love attracts love. If you don't like what you're attracting, change who you are.

Connie R. Clay

#61. I know that opposites attract, but who the hell wants to spend time with an opposite?

Brent Hartinger

#62. Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

E.F. Schumacher

#63. Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz said I have never known Allah May He be exalted except through the coincidence in Him of the opposites. 'He is the First and the Last, the Apparent and the Hidden.'

Abdelkader El Djezairi

#64. To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

Hannah Arendt

#65. According to Jung, the symbol is 'a third thing' that lies outside of the opposites; creativity must come from outside the individual, so that the whole self is a matter of discovery.

Anonymous

#66. I cannot help to see how life is a play of opposites. For all you get, you miss out on something, to go means not to come, to buy means to sell, to choose one, means to not choose another. You should enjoy your decision for the adventure that it is. It is all an adventure.

Evan Sutter

#67. Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

Alan Watts

#68. Sex is life: The act of creation in pleasure, the loss of oneself in another, the coming together of opposites in a temporary union of yin and yang, that creates something other than either. What is life if not this?

Frederick Lenz

#69. The Taoists realised that all opposites aren't opponents that must clash but are part of a dynamic balance of existence, necessary to create and sustain life.

Mark Forstater

#70. Physiologically, the union of two opposites is a pleasurable affair. Why should the psyche be any different?

Anthony Marais

#71. That is what the opposites do, cross the swords invariably and unknowingly.

Aporva Kala

#72. Taoism means streching your being, becoming both a man and a woman and joining within yourself, to be the heavens themselves, to stretch your awareness beyond the breaking point until all opposites are reconciled within yourself.

Frederick Lenz

#73. The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

Max Weber

#74. I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.

Criss Jami

#75. If it were me, I'd be flying off the handle and freaking out. But he's not. He's as calm as can be. We're like yin and yang. Perfect opposites.

Courtney Cole

#76. Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

Keith Haring

#77. God created sufferings so that joy might appear through its opposite. Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden.

Elif Shafak

#78. You are really in search of yourself, without knowing it. You are love-longing for the love-worthy, the perfect lovable. Due to ignorance you are looking for it in the world of opposites and contradictions. When you find it within, your search will be over.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

#79. The Dark Knight series is all from Batman's point of view. But if you look at Dark Knight 2, you'll see a Superman who's much calmer than the one in the first Dark Knight. Batman and Superman are dead opposites. I love Superman. Do I love Batman more? They're not people. They're only lines on paper.

Frank Miller

#80. It's usually our opposites who complement us best, because they're the only ones who can balance us out.

Rachel Hollis

#81. If we accept that opposites (or gradations of circumstances, or differences in ways of being) are all part of the same hologram of life (just as we need different shades and colours to make up a picture), then we can see that we need all those aspects to make up our world.

Julia Woodman

#82. Sometimes Opposites Attract, and find out they're not as opposite as they thought ...

Allie Brennan

#83. The most basic principle of Yin and Yang is that one cannot exist without the other," I stated, stepping towards her. "There can be no light without the dark, no good without evil, and no you without me; we are complementary opposites that balance each other.

Meka James

#84. They say opposites attract, which is possibly why I am very much attracted to Nicholas Parsons.

Maria McErlane

#85. True humility involves opposites. The truly humble work in silence. Because they do not speak of their accomplishments, credit for them can never be taken away.

Laozi

#86. As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.

Nico Muhly

#87. What's that darkness over there?" Leven asked.
"It's not good." Clover said.
"Then what is it?"
'Bad," Clover suggested, sounding as though he wasn't all that impressed with Leven's level of knowledge.
"I understand opposites," Leven said, frustrated.

Obert Skye

#88. To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

Gustav Stresemann

#89. I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites.

Mitch Albom

#90. Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.

Piet Mondrian

#91. In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

Joseph Campbell

#92. My husband and I are very different. Our company is called Syzygy Industries, which can mean a pair of opposites. And that's exactly what we are. Yet there is obviously a very strong pull toward each other.

Jamie Lee Curtis

#93. We ought to be able to combine opposites: the love of goodness with indifference to other people's opinions, a liking for work with indifference to fame, concern for our health with indifference to life.

Nicolas Chamfort

#94. Opposites may attract, but I wouldn't put my money on a relationship of financial opposites.

Suze Orman

#95. In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.

Douglas Coupland

#96. Every good girl loved a bad boy. It was a fact of life, a quirk of nature. Opposites attract, and the badder the boy, the more attractive he was to that good girl who couldn't help but be drawn to him.

Lora Leigh

#97. Rapping and singing are not two polar opposites. There's so much middle ground. And I think there's a lot of people who find that middle ground.

Ezra Koenig

#98. Thanks to the night, we long for the day; thanks to the day, we long for the night! The purpose of the opposites is to make us long for something! Thanks to the crowds, we long for the solitude; thanks to the solitude, we long for the crowds!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#99. The duality of positive and negative becomes subsumed in Oneness. There are no opposites in the totality and absolute perfection of the Oneness that we know as Divine.

Peter Santos

#100. Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

Elizabeth Wurtzel