Contradictory Quotes - Page 13

• You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!

  Edwin Way Teale

  Years, Understanding, Answers

  Edwin Way Teale (1987). “Circle of the seasons: the journal of a naturalist's year”, Olympic Marketing Corp

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• Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

  Greg Egan

  Islands, Self, Inventory

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• I can not 'make my mark' for all time - those concepts are mutually exclusive. 'Lasting effect' is a self-contradictory term. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I. Nothing will have meaning 'ultimately.' Nothing will even mean tomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context. My meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to someone today. It is enough that I make a difference now.

  Hugh Prather

  Time, Future, Mean

  Hugh Prather (2009). “Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person”, p.24, Bantam

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• You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.

  Edwin Meese

  Innocent, Crime, Persons

  "Justice under Reagan: Reagan seeks judges with 'traditional approach'". U.S. News & World Report, October 14, 1985.

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• It is impossible! It has never happened - it cannot happen in the very nature of things. Marriage is something against nature. Marriage is an imposition, an invention of man - certainly out of necessity, but now even that necessity is out of date. It was a necessary evil in the past, but now it can be dropped. And it should be dropped: man has suffered enough for it, more than enough. It is an ugly institution for the simple reason that love cannot be legalized. Love and law are contradictory phenomena.

  Rajneesh

  Marriage, Past, Simple

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• Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self-consistent.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Real, Self

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “An Outline of Philosophy”, p.2, Routledge

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• You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

  Junot Diaz

  Running, Hurt, Home

  Interview with Matt Okie, www.identitytheory.com. September 2, 2008.

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• When faced with a loss, it is no use trying to recover what has gone. On the other hand, a great space has been opened up in your life - there it lies, empty, waiting to be filled with something new. At the moment of one's loss, contradictory as this might seem, one is being given a large slice of freedom.

  Paulo Coelho

  Lying, Loss, Hands

  Paulo Coelho (2015). “Warrior of the Light -”, p.22, Booklassic

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• Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, Evil, Mad

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.59, Basic Books

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• One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Philosophy, Thinking, Confusion

  "Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science". Science and Society, Volume II, No. 1, 1937.

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• It seems significant that according to quantum physics the indestructibility of energy on one hand which expresses its timeless existence and the appearance of energy in space and time on the other hand correspond to two contradictory (complementary) aspects of reality. In fact, both are always present, but in individual cases the one or the other may be more pronounced.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Reality, Two, Space

  C. G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli (2014). “Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958”, p.185, Princeton University Press

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• The just man is not the product of a day, but of a long brooding and a painful birth. To become a power for peace, a man must first pass through experiences which lead him to see things in their different aspects: it is necessary that he have a wide horizon, and breathe various atmospheres--in a word, from crossing, one after another, paths and points of view the most diverse, and sometimes the most contradictory, he must acquire the faculty of putting himself in the place of others and appreciating them.

  Charles Wagner

  Men, Views, Justice

  Charles Wagner (1905). “Justice”, W. Briggs

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• The tolerance of the skeptic… accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the “dogmatist.”

  Jean Guitton

  Tolerance, Opinion, Accepting

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• Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

  Umberto Eco

  Two, Creative, Secret

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• I know why I make films -cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.

  Catherine Breillat

  Expression, Opposites, Cinema

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• I thought I was going to die. I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.

  Nicki Minaj

  Children, Teenager, Choices

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• If there is no contradictory impression, there is nothing to awaken reflection

  Plato

  Reflection, Impression, Ifs

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• Prayer and action...can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.

  Henri Nouwen

  Prayer, Manipulation, Degenerates

  Henri J. M. Nouwen (2017). “You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living”, Hachette UK

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• The standard of the world, and the standard of the Lord Jesus, are indeed widely different. They are more than different. They are flatly contradictory one to the other.

  J. C. Ryle

  Jesus, Different, World

  J.C. Ryle “Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Volume 1-4”, Primedia E-launch LLC

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• Everything that is contradictory creates life

  Salvador Dali

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• The message about sex and relationships that she had gotten as a child... was confused, contradictory. Sex was for men, and marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

  Carrie Fisher

  Relationship, Sex, Children

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• No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

  Paul Kurtz

  Would Be, Virtue, Claims

  "Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda" by Paul Kurtz, (p. 338), 2014.

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• When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Mother, Being Yourself, Father

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.25, Granta Books

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• The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Greatness, Men, Pieces

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• Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals,
  seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Goal, Joy

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.107, Penguin

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