Best 256 quotes in «contradiction quotes» category

The man who pursues moral ends with unmoral means is involved in a contradiction of motives, and nullifies the object at which he aims, since he denies it by his actions.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.

The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

The modern teachings of Christianity often preach of a peaceful, merciful, and loving God/Creator. Culturally, this concept of a God of peace is well liked and accepted amongst clergymen and the Christian community alike; however, some scriptural evidence gives us a contradictory and seemingly destructive version of our Creator.

The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it—they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel—as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw." "Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?" "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now. And yet. And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

The paradox of hell, as the most contradiction-filled one of all, will in all likelihood be patient of no exposition but the most contradictory.

The profoundest thing writing teaches us is how much we contradict ourselves.

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings.

The writer who's afraid to contradict himself will never write anything.

The trick has been to live in the contradictions while maintaining principles, beliefs, and purpose.

The world is full of confusion and contradiction. We cannot expect to do anything that is absolutely right. We can only measure rightness by the truth within ourselves. And our own truth will never be quite the same as somebody else's.

They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone.

Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.

This was the bad version. This version was what later events told her had happened. It was as real as the other. They played simultaneously in a loop, yet Mathilde could never quite believe it. That twitch of a leg, a later insertion, surely. She could not believe, and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything. All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened she had been so beloved, afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn't, the result had been all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her, but she had been so very young. How could parents do this? How could she not have been forgiven?

Thomas Henri Huxley often preached tolerance, but in practice he could not wait to go after religion and religious people in the most scornful of terms. [Curb your enthusiasm,2016]

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’

Where in the Bible are we told in one verse not to do a thing and in the next to do it? ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.’ Prov. xxvi. 4. ‘Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.’ Prov. xxvi. 5.

What is considered [True] Knowledge? There should be solution from all sides, there should be no contradiction. It is a non-contradicting principle when a spoken sentence will be the same even after fifty years; there will be no contradictions.

What you call 'contradiction' I call 'complement'.

When you feel hatred towards your life, hate it. See how it will actually do something to your life.

You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.

Your eyes will contradict your words if your words contradict your thoughts and feelings.

A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.

You seem to be in a state of such absolute contradiction that I would not be surprised if your face tore in half.

A church without a missions or a mission without the church are both contradictions. Such things do exist, but only as pseudostructures

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.

A literal interpretation of the Gita lands one in a sea of contradictions.

All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.

A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.

...an incorrect theory, even if it cannot be inhibited by any contradiction that would refute it, is none the less incorrect, just as a criminal policy is none the less criminal even if it cannot be inhibited by any court that would curb it.

An expropriating property protector (the state, through taxation) is a contradiction in terms

An Italian university is a contradiction in terms.

An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction.

A non-serving Christian is a contradiction in terms.

A proud faith is as much a contradiction as a humble devil.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

Aren't you an enigma wrapped in a thick coating of contradictions.

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.

At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.

Avoid contradiction. Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge.

As if finding a guy to solve your problems isn't a contradiction of terms.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.