Contradictory Quotes - Page 10

• Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Musical, Language

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• You have got to compete with them...you have to be working toward a future of your own. A picture of the future of your own that is contradictory to theirs, in which the things that they want to do have no place because you have been so successful at promoting the idea of sex within marriage...focus on transforming the society to be reinforcing of all these ideas...everywhere...When you do that then you create a climate in which these things really cannot get very far.

  Scott Lively

  Sex, Gay, Successful

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• Irony is the bringing together of two contradictory truths and to make out of the contradiction a new truth, with a laugh or a smile.

  Anne Hathaway

  Truth, Reality, Two

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• I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.

  Paul Wolfowitz

  Ideas, People, Flags

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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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• 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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• Everything that is contradictory creates life

  Salvador Dali

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

  Plato

  Reflection, Impression, Ifs

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

  Alan Lightman

  Long, People, World

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.18, Vintage

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• If you want to do good research, it's important not to know too much. This almost sounds contradictory but really if you know too much and you get an idea, you will sort of talk yourself out of trying it because you figure it won't work. But if you know just the right amount and you get enthusiastic about your project, you go ahead, you do it and if you're lucky things'll work out.

  Ivar Giaever

  Ideas, Work Out, Trying

  "Ivar Giaever's Nobel Prize". Interview with Alfred Leitner, 1982.

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• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

  Susan McClary

  Symphony, Musical, Enlightenment

  "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality". Book by Susan McClary, 1991.

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• People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself.

  Harper Lee

  Selfish, Writing, Audience Of One

  "All I Want To Be Is The Jane Austen Of South Alabama". Interview with Roy Newquist, www.thebluegrassspecial.com.

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• I am going to be contradictory to myself many times for the simple reason that I am trying to bring all the religions to a higher synthesis. Different approaches have to be joined together. I am creating an orchestra.

  Rajneesh

  Simple, Creating, Trying

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• Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

  Naomi Wolf

  Criticism, Use, Language

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• Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel.

  John Dalton

  Wise, Loyalty, Fall

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