Quotes about contradictions

Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

A woman lives a life of contradictions wrapped inside paradoxes wrapped inside a big candy wrapper.

Richard Kadrey - Butcher Bird

Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.Or insanity.

Elle Kennedy - Body Check

Then there’s the intelligence that practically radiates from you. Did I ever tell you smart women seriously turn me on?” His thumbs began caressing her cheeks and he bent to whisper close to her ear. “You’re a walking contradiction, Hayden. Prim and proper one moment, wild and uninhibited the next. And the more I get to know you, the more I like what I find.

Kamand Kojouri -

Embrace contradictions for they make upall of life:You will eternally be looking for yourself andseeking ways to lose yourself.

Howard Tayler - The Tub of Happiness

The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?""Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!""I guess that explains their rich military history, then.

Sheri S. Tepper - The Visitor

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.

Otsuichi - ZOO

Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die

Society had more and more rules, and laws that contradicted the rules, and new rules that contradicted the laws. People felt too frightened to take even a step outside the invisible regulations that guided everyone's lives.

Kou Yoneda - 漂えど沈まず、されど泣きもせず [Tadayoedo Shizumazu Saredo Naki Mo Sezu]

People are... Full of contradictions. They're lonely. And then they're not. They're missed. And then they're not.

Andrew Wilson - Ζωή στο σκοτάδι

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.

Thomas Jefferson - Letters of Thomas Jefferson

...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlata

Alan Sokal -

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselv

Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I

Criss Jami - Killosophy

Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.

Voltaire - The Works: Voltaire

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.

Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart

How would I know what Jesus would have done? That fella was a mass of contradictions as far as I can see. One minute he says to turn the other cheek, the next minute he's having a big strop and kicking over lads' market stalls. He says blessed are the meek and he goes around shouting and roaring the odds to everyone. He rises from the dead and then shags off a few weeks later and leaves his buddies in the shit.

Albert Einstein -

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appe

Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn't leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.

Shannon L. Alder -

The reason a lot of women can't move on from a relationship or people they love is because they need to know why. Why did this happen? Why did you do this? Why don't you care? Why did you hurt me? Why do you believe this about me? Why did you send me mixed signals? Why are these other people in your life acting like you care? Men have it all wrong. Insecurity is not why a lot of women don't let go. Women have a difficult time letting go because men don't communicate why at the level that women r

Criss Jami - Healology

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

Nema Al-Araby - Remnants and Ashes

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward

Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi -

You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Koran. You say: 'Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.' Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in better meter. … By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myt

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

Ashim Shanker - Don't Forget to Breathe

Their quarry had been cornered in his defenses and their bloodlust was such that they were likely to pay top Julep to watch him escape, so that he might be brutalized and killed before their very eyes, as this was much more gratifying to them than simply watching justice be enacted. They, too, understood that societal constructs for justice were moderate gratification, at best, as they were empty and subject to contradictions and compromises steeped in moral relativism and an unconditional depen

Marian Keyes - The Other Side of the Story

why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.

Henri J.M. Nouwen - Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

The many contradictions in our lives – such as being home while feeling homeless, being busy while feeling bored, being popular while feeling lonely, being believers while feeling many doubts – can frustrate, irritate, and even discourage us. They make us feel that we are never fully present. Every door that opens for us makes us see how many more doors are closed.But there is another response. These same contradictions can bring us into touch with a deeper longing, for the fulfillment of a desi

Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna

The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

Glendon Swarthout - The Homesman

If others fell by the wayside, dear women and strong, loved by men, how had she, single and unloved, kept her sanity?

Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl

Little bundle of contradictions

Jung Chang - Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine. It was rather grand––quite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be. A caption underneath an enormous photograph of Mao's mother said that she had been a very kind person and, because her family was relatively well off, had often given food to the poor. So our Great Leader's parents had been rich peasants! But rich peasants were class enemies! Why were Chairman Mao's parents

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

Contradictions are the impossible chasms that create forever separations. God is the forever bridge that creates impossible reunions.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Aristotle declared that, ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ Does the intrinsic tension between opposing ideas create a lamplight of stereoscopic vision? Does the mental friction generated by antinomy, a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles, lead to war within the mind or does the natural rasping of abrasive thoughts spur the mind to create soothing metapho

Elizabeth F. Howell - Understanding and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Relational Approach

Does the person report having had the experience of meeting people she does not know but who seem to know her, perhaps by a different name? Often, those with DID are thought by others to be lying because different parts will say different things which the host has no knowledge of.

Manal Al-Sharif - Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening

It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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.

Ashly Lorenzana -

Drugs don't really fix anything, except for everything.

J. Courtney Sullivan - Saints for All Occasions

One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.

Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Tom Waits -

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.

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