Quotes about Contradiction

My darkest moments, my most fearful times, when faced, became my bravest.  At your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest you are suddenly lifted higher than you've ever been.  They all border one another, these opposites, and show how quickly we can be altered.

What should I do about the wild and the tame?  The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.  I want to be held.  I don't want you to come too close.  I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights.  I don't want to tell you where I am.  I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me.  I want to be with you.

We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don't know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.

Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

We seek integrity in our lives not by ending our inner contradictions – an act that would call into question our prior learning – but by deluding ourselves that our undesired qualities can be transferred to others, who we can then target for punishment. 

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. 

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

"Whatever we fight, we shall strengthen, for the mere fact of fighting it is witness to our belief in it......Belief is but worship by degree. To fight what we worship is a contradiction in itself. Resistance of any kind  achieves the opposite of its intent."

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

Altruism is an inverted morality, a "morality" of death. It teaches man that his interests are opposed to the interests of everyone else and that the only "moral" thing he can do is to sacrifice his interests. This means that whatever is practical and beneficial for a man is "immoral," and conversely, that whatever is "moral" for him is impractical and destructive of his values.

"For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them."

If you find out what it is you love to do and give your whole life to it, then there is no contradiction, and in that state your being is your doing.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

Si nuestros dioses y esperanzas
no son más que fenómenos científicos...
...entonces se debería decir
que nuestro amor... es igualmente científico

contradiction only exists because people are susceptible to bad moods.