Contradictory Quotes - Page 14

• What is 'grace'? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness.

  Thomas Merton

  Selfish, Free Gifts, Perfection

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The seven storey mountain”, Harcourt

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• Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

  Tom Robbins

  Philosophical, Reality, Thinking

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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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• Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

  Mary Balogh

  Regret, Opposites, Numbers

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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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• 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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• 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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• Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

  Haruki Murakami

  Years, People, Forever

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Aug 23, 2016

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• Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Christianity, Reason

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• Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

  Immanuel Kant

  Opposites, Liberty, Democracy

  Immanuel Kant (1932). “Perpetual peace”

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• The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Logical Reasoning, Long

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• Money is a mystery. Not only is our behavior with respect to money sometimes puzzling and erratic, but our feelings about money are often contradictory, illogical, deep-rooted, and scarcely known even to our most secret selves. We are getting better at handling money, but what it means to us, how we use it to express ourselves, and how it can help us become all that we are meant to be remain murky issues.

  Rosalie Maggio

  Money, Mean, Issues

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• Nothing that rest on some contradictory basis shall succeed or last in the long run ("ne saurait réussir ou durer, à la longue", Fr.); all that involve (or imply...) a contradiction is fatally destined, early or late, to disintegrate and disappear.

  African Spir

  Running, Long, Succeed

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 37), 1937.

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• We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

  Frans de Waal

  Animal, Earth, Conflict

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• Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.

  Junot Diaz

  Artist, Hurtful, Tourism

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• The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.

  Simone Weil

  Opposites, Transcendental, Correlation

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• Contradictory as it seems, malnutrition is a key contributor to obesity.

  Madeleine M. Kunin

  Keys, Obesity, Seems

  "National Security Depends on the Nation’s Food Security" by Madeleine M. Kunin, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 13, 2013.

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• There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,--that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.

  Joseph Addison

  Truth, Plato, Errors

  Joseph Addison (1857). “Essays, Moral and Humorous. Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.144

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• [I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

  Salvador Dali

  Men, Paradoxical

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• Just as Lincoln got contradictory advice from the extremists of both sides . . . so now I have to guard myself against the extremists of both sides.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Advice, Sides, Extremist

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• Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

  Graham Greene

  Running, Memories, Book

  "The Ministry of Fear". Book by Graham Greene. Book 1, Chapter 7, Section 1, 1943.

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• The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic.

  Colin Thubron

  Writing, Needs, Tough

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• The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a "higher" order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Art, Order, Two

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (pp. 60-61), 1964.

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• A girl asks her doctor, "Doctor, I've forgotten to take my contradictory pill!" The doctor says: "Are you ignorant?" The girl says: "Yes, three months!"

  Frank Carson

  Funny, Girl, Humor

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• Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.

  Harold Ramis

  Struggle, Thinking, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

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