Quotes about duality
C.G. Jung - The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
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.
Jack London - The Sea Wolf
At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible but both sides together were bewildering.
Soroosh Shahrivar - The Rise of Shams
He was Lenin in a Lamborghini. He was Gandhi with a gun
Michael Smith - The Present
Everything is balanced. Everything physical (matter/energy) goes back and forth in balanced circles, cycles, or the equivalent. Birth-death, old-young, big-small, strong-weak, start-stop, up-down, rich-poor, beginning-end, fast-slow, hot-cold, pain-pleasure, win-lose, day-night, full-empty, high-low, in-out, success-failure, united-divided, give-receive, creation-destruction, on-off, positive-negative, etc.Positive and negative forces moving in balance are the physical universe.
Virginia Woolf - The Common Reader
For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited
Rabindranath Tagore -
The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga.
Donna Tartt -
It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which de
Peter Santos - Everything I Wanted To Know About Spirituality But Didn't Know How To Ask: A Spiritual Seekers Guidebook
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.
Jack Gilbert - Collected Poems
We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
Zhuangzi - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
A beam or pillar can be used to batter down a city wall, but it is no good for stopping up a little hole - this refers to a difference in function. Thoroughbreds like Qiji and Hualiu could gallop a thousand li in one day, but when it came to catching rats they were no match for the wildcat or the weasel - this refers to a difference in skill. The horned owl catches fleas at night and can spot the tip of a hair, but when daylight comes, no matter how wide it opens its eyes, it cannot see a mound
Patricia Highsmith -
For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes met the staring eyes in the mirror, they slipped away as they must have slipped away, Guy thought, that first afternoon on the train, when he had tried to avoid Bruno’s eyes.
Nahoko Uehashi - Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit
Balsa seemed invincible, endowed with powers no other warrior could match, but in her profile he could glimpse the shadow of a young girl, hurt and buffeted by a cruel and hopeless fate. If he had never experienced what it was like to be at the mercy of fate himself, he would not have noticed, but now he could see it with unbearable, heartrending clarity.
Neal Shusterman - Unwind
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.
Robert Aickman - Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories
We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.
Jack London -
As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed
Andrea Seigel - To Feel Stuff
Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal -
Every 'no' is a 'yes' to something.
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
[T]his jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable chill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a land
Louise Penny - Bury Your Dead
Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Human life is inherently dualistic. It consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, including rivalries between subject and object, mind and matter, and conflict between the benevolent and the malevolent forces. Opposition in the universe creates a dynamic living universe composed of good and evil, body and soul. Human thoughts and feelings are the communal products of the conscious and unconscious mind’s interpretation of a constant flow of coded and symbolic dialogue.
W. Somerset Maugham -
... I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.
Doug Cooper - Outside In
I am two people. One goes through the motions, rolling from one thing to the next; the other is withdrawn, watching a complete stranger.
Gyalwa Dokhampa - The Restful Mind
The tendency of the human mind is to see the world with a ‘dualistic’ view that describes everything through comparisons: good and bad, pain and happiness, beauty and ugliness, rich and poor.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal -
To the ego, love is poison.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal -
To see through the illusion of duality, remember that fear and darkness have no substance in themselves, for they do not indicate the presence of a second universal force, but are only names given to the one Light unperceived.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal -
The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two.
Soroosh Shahrivar - The Rise of Shams
Not long ago, man grew a sense of conscience. He defined himself by what he is, what he thinks, and, more importantly, what he feels—failing to realize that all come from One single source. All of man’s qualities come from One divine being. And that One being has bestowed nature’s hand with the ability to balance itself. Where there is good, there is also evil. And where evil arises, so does good
Robin Sacredfire -
God's strength is rooted in being faithful to his true Self, in just Being good. The Devil's strength depends on synergies, agreements, cooperation and beliefs.
Joseph Campbell -
Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal -
As you begin to look deeply into the mystery of your own evolution, in place of good and evil you will find only stories, finished or unfinished.
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good an
Vivian Amis - The Lotus - Realization of Oneness
A Miracle is nothing more, than the removal of an Illusion".
Rainer Maria Rilke - Sonnets to Orpheus
Only he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild.
Jalaluddin Rumi - The Big Red Book
From "Wetness and Water"How does a part of the world leave the world?How can wetness leave water?Do not try to put out a fireby throwing on more fire.Do not wash a wound with blood.No matter how fast you run,your shadow more than keeps up.Sometimes it's in front.Only full, overhead sundiminishes your shadow.But that shadow has been serving you.What hurts you blesses you.Darkness is your candle.Your boundaries are your quest.
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.
T.F. Hodge - From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
When it occurs without having to voice it - vibin' on the same page, flowin' on the same wave, soakin' up the same light rays.
Munia Khan -
That’s not me.That’s my duality!
Thomas Lloyd Qualls - Love Jaywalks: Poems From The Novel Waking Up At Rembrandts
i am the lion and you are the lamb and as prophesied, we will lie down together.
Jorge Luis Borges -
I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?
Sengcan -
If the eye never sleeps,all dreams will naturally cease.If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are,of single essence.To understand the mystery of this One essence is to be released from all entanglements.When all things are seen equallythe timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possiblein this causeless, relationless state.Consider movement stationaryand the stationary in motion,both movement and rest disappear.When such dualities cea
Sengcan -
When no discriminating thoughts arise,the old mind ceases to exist.When thought objects vanish,the thinking-subject vanishes,as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish.Things are objects because of the subject;the mind is such because of things.Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world.If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to p
SENG-TS'AN -
If the eye never sleeps,all dreams will naturally cease.If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are,of single essence.To understand the mystery of this One essence is to be released from all entanglements.When all things are seen equallythe timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.Consider movement stationaryand the stationary in motion,both movement and rest disappear.When such dualities ce
Lao Tzu - Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
...the mind is just as immeasurable as the vast universe. An integral being settles his mind just as the vast universe settles itself. He unites his mind with the unnameable Subtle Origin of the multi-universe in which there is no past, present or future. This is how an integral being deals with his mind.
Tony Parsons -
...all that we do is governed by the law of opposites in which every so-called positive act is exactly and equally balanced by its opposite.
Chögyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
All life depends upon the opportunistic interplay between elemental forces, the mysterious dualities of the numinous universe. Ying and yang forces of the natural world (lightness and darkness, fire and water, expansion and contraction) create tangible dualities that are complementary, interconnected, and independent. Without the firmament in the midst of the waters, without both sunshine and water, no life forms could subsist on this rocky orb. Without the rich soil surrounded by a canopy of an
James Emlund -
Come clean about your true nature before the day the body ceases. Hard not to cling to duality as the excuse, but every brain is manifesting duality as if it is some internal feature projected outward for the attention of others.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The truth is, there is good and bad in everybody, in every nation, in every race, and in every religion. To hear someone say that all the people that belong to a certain country, race, or religion are bad — is extremely untruthful and makes the person making the statement lose credibility right away. We are all flawed and even nature is flawed. Nobody is perfect, and no country, race or religion is perfect. Duality and polarity are imprinted in everything in nature — in all humans, and even with
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Through transcendence of duality, we foster greater unity in our lives, which brings about inner peace and the sprouting of unconditional LOVE.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Living in the present moment is the recurring baptism of the soul, forever purifying every new day with a new you.
Karl Lagerfeld -
Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.
Hermann Hesse -
It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast—which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life—then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the
Anthon St. Maarten - Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny
If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Love is being able to view a situation without adding duality to it.
Chögyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
Joseph Campbell - Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)
Joseph Campbell - Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
J.D. Salinger - Nine Stories
You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.
Alaric Hutchinson - Living Peace
Negative means separating energies, while positive means unifying energies. It’s not about being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – energy is quite neutral, actually… one just feels better. Simply imagine that being negative creates distance between the hearts of two people, while being positive brings them closer together.
Christina Rasmussen - Second Firsts Live Laugh and Love Again
When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.This is the duality of loss.
Raynetta Manees - All for Love
The DARRYL part of him that exploded on stage made its spellbinding, turbulent presence most felt off stage when we made love. He was a symphony of contradiction; tender, yet fierce; sweet, yet riotous; impassioned, yet leisurely; giving, yet unquenchable. We lay there naked on the carpet a long time afterward, both too depleted—and too content—to move.
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, a
C.G. Jung - The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
Ka Chinery -
Your observations and conclusions are mirrored illusions of your inner state of being, teaching you truth through falsehoods, strength through weakness and clarity through confusion. You are seeing your Self now, disguised as the world through a lens of denial, but you will soon come to realize that what you choose to deny in yourself manifests into your world. The flaws you see in your world are your most powerful teachers.
Solange nicole -
Every man is sensitive. Some cover it up with brutality, others with cowardice and vanity, but a small few wear it bravely like armor
Troy Denning - Pages of Pain
It was the perfect set. Theseus gave a great war cry and brought his sword arcing up toward Sheba’s throat - but the monster of the labyrinth lives inside us all. She is the dark, devouring hunger that is never sated, the creeping shadow that ever plays the fiend to our seraphim, the secret rage hidden in our hearts; deny her, and we become her slaves; fight her, and we make her invincible. By now, you must know that no monster can ever be killed, not really - […]
C.G. Jung - The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the nigh
C.G. Jung -
We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.
C.G. Jung -
But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!
Curious George Brigade - Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs
Traditionally, there have been two major strains of motivation (or perceived motivations) in anarchist politics: Duty and Joy. Like any duality, it is easy to fall into the trap of simplistic black and white labels, ignoring the more realistic continuum of grays. Instead, think of these two motivations as the end points on a continuum, illuminating everything in between.
Fernando Pessoa -
We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.
Tehya Sky - A Ceremony Called Life: When Your Morning Coffee Is as Sacred as Holy Water
To be sure, just because the darkness and the light are equally sacred does not mean we benefit by becoming complacent about the darkness we may meet in ourselves. Ultimately, if we are to cleanse the mirror of perception and purify ourselves, then we must bring light into the darkness. That’s always been the path of consciousness and the movement of illumination. This coexistence of darkness and light indeed creates a dance in which the clarity of light is invited to lead, but it does not creat
Ashim Shanker - Don't Forget to Breathe
At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?
Marina G. Roussou -
To Graduate from the "School of Life" you need to have met the following criteria: Found your life purpose, know how the egoic mind operates, detached yourself from the egoic mind, lived in essence, been in essence in relationships, overcame duality, trusted life, became awake, reprogrammed beliefs, handled anger, forgiven everyone, loved yourself, dealt with fears, overcome anger you had with God/you, cleared your emotional complexes & negativity, let go of the past, dealt with difficult relati
Hermann Hesse -
And was it not perhaps more childlike and human to lead a Goldmund-life, more courageous, more noble perhaps in the end to abandon oneself to the cruel stream of reality, to chaos, to commit sins and accept their bitter consequences rather than live a clean life with washed hands outside the world, laying out a lonely harmonious thought-garden, strolling sinlessly among one's sheltered flower beds. Perhaps it was harder, braver and nobler to wander through forests and along the highways with tor
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
A beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different from insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature — human or not human.
Peter Heller - The Dog Stars
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
Saurabh Sharma -
A Strange Prayer:Dear Lord, I, the self searching illusion, has seen and experienced the outer world:relationships,success and failure,true friends, strangers and backbiters.I lived the different emotionsduring different seasons;I witnessed ups & downs,enjoyed love & hate,was good & bad,faced beauty & ugliness.There were times when I was brave,there were times when I was a coward.There were times when I was proactive,there were times when I was indecisive.After, flying high in the skies,and yet
Petek Kabakci -
For grey matter, there is no black and white. If you think in black and white, then you do not use enough brain functions.
W. Somerset Maugham -
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
Saurabh Sharma -
Don't you know romance is mind's way of getting rid of it's own duality?
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
In his article, Bogen concluded: “I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western Man. . . .
T.F. Hodge - From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
The artist speaks with inspiring tools of creativity. Thinkers challenge with the weapons of choice. These two forces are necessary to move souls beyond limitation.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
I'm just so tired of life being something that happens to me. That's not how it's supposed to work. I'm supposed to make my own life.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
Here we have both a paradox, and a beautiful symmetry. It is a duality. I am the earth and you are the moon, and you are the earth and I am the moon.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
Anything can happen, Pet. If there's one thing for certain, it's that nothing is for certain.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
Sir always had a thing for calves. They were soft and smooth, like all skin on a woman. But the calf flesh was backed by muscle, so there was a firmness you wouldn't find at the hips, say, or in the small of the back. But it wasn't boney like the front of the leg. No, the calf was pretty much the closest thing to the perfection of breast tissue you could touch on a woman without getting your hand slapped away.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
She finally understood that sex was never about orgasms. Sex was merely a vehicle to achieve connection. It wasn't the destination that mattered - only the journey.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
Did you have a nice nap?' he asked. 'Yes, Sir. Naps are tricky. There's a little window of how long you can sleep that will leave you feeling awake and refreshed. But if you miss it and you nap less or more than that amount, you feel like crap the rest of the day. And then you will have insomnia, probably.' 'You're a real risk-taker," he said.
Joshua Edward Smith - Duality
Does she want me to cum? he thought. This was the frustrating part about vanilla sex. He never got to decide anything, and if he asked any question he would "ruin the moment." So it was all up in the air, never knowing exactly what the fuck was going on.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
All men and women on earth were created with two eyes. The left eye represents the moon (mind/ego) and the right eye represents the sun (heart/conscience). Both eyes represent the duality of human nature. The sun represents the light in the heart of man, and the moon represents the darkness in the mind of man. When you read in ancient and religious scriptures that the enemy of humanity will surface with only one eye, this simply means that this being will only see through his left eye and neglec