87 Contradiction Quotes

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.

Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which if persisted in, must make peace impossible.

The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions... Existence in itself is here to prove that it cannot be an evil.

There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

I used to be a narrator for bad mimes.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself, but I didn't.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the 'impossible,' come true.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

'You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?' 'No,' said Father Brown.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. 'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed. 'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, 'I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out.'

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.

When I was in school the teachers told me practice makes perfect; then they told me nobody's perfect so I stopped practicing.

'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.'

Time and again these governments have rejected proposals today-and longed for them tomorrow.

The following is an attempt to systematize alike the data of mysticism and the results of comparative religion. The skeptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true. Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ('I am not my own subject,' I used to say with icy superiority). [1]

Marvel not that having been made acquainted with the young sailor's essential innocence (an irruption of heretic thought hard to suppress) the worthy man lifted not a finger to avert the doom of such a martyr to martial discipline. So to do would not only have been as idle as invoking the desert, but would also have been an audacious transgression of the bounds of his function, one as exactly prescribed to him by military law as that of the boatswain or any other naval officer. Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War-Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why then is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.

I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest. But this rest itself is an intense form of activity where utter quiescence and unceasing energy meet at the same point in love. In love, loss and gain are harmonised. In its balance-sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column, and gifts are added to gains. In this wonderful festival of creation, this great ceremony of self-sacrifice of God, the lover constantly gives himself up to gain himself in love. Indeed, love is what brings together and inseparably connects both the act of abandoning and that of receiving.

An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

I exercise extreme self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

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. To be radical, according to Marx, means 'going to the root of things.' If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain.

Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print out leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can't do this and keep a straight face.

'Compassionate Conservative', that's kind of like having a gun rack on a Volvo.

'Love music. Love racism.'

'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

'The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular.'

'...he's really awesome and really horrible' --Anonymous young boy, 2007.

You have to be logical. You know? If I know that in this hotel room they have food every day, and I'm knocking on the door every day to eat, and they open the door, let me see the party, let me see them throwing salami all over, I mean, just throwing food around, but they're telling me there's no food.

I like you, but you're crazy.

I tell you it's a cold world, stay in school/You tell me its a man's world, play the rules

We're ooh-rah. We're ready to fight and die for this country. But first, we want to smoke dope and shoot heroin.

So I watched pay per view and polished my shoes and my gun

Whatever may have been the opinion of the President at one time as to 'good faith requiring the security of the freemen in their liberty and their property,' it is now manifest from the character of his objections to this bill that he will approve no measures that will accomplish the object.

Forgive me, Kitty, they don't call me a bundle of contradictions for nothing!

I just cannot believe in a war against drugs when they've got anti-drug commercials on TV all day long, followed by, 'This Bud's for you'.

'I like seeing experienced girls home.' 'But I'm not experienced!' 'You're not home yet!'

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.

I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.

We are two abysses -- a well staring at the sky.

So you want to live 'according to nature?' Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to 'live according to nature' basically amounts to 'living according to life' - well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?

This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.

I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine. I want to break off with them.

The more I think of you the less I think of you.

He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

Rizal is the spirit of contradiction; a soul that dreads the revolution, although deep down desires it.

Yeah, Silent Bob, you're a rude motherfucker, you know that? But you're cute as hell. I could go down on you, suck you, line up three other guys and make like a circus seal. Ewww, you fuckin' faggot, I hate guys. I LOVE WOMEN!

I can resist everything . . . except child pornography. Sweet, sweet child pornography.

We loved, sir - used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was - But then, how it was sweet!

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

Iron hand in a velvet glove.

I fought against the bottle but I had to do it drunk