Dialectics Quotes

• Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

  Octavio Paz

  Wisdom, Lying, Learning

  Octavio Paz (1981). “The Monkey Grammarian”, p.10, Arcade Publishing

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• The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

  Adrienne Rich

  Change, Light, People

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.96, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder

  Paul Ricoeur

  Order, Identity, Stories

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• Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Dream, Memories, Revenge

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• Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

  Audre Lorde

  Creativity, Differences, Sparks

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.111, Crossing Press

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• It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.

  Karl Marx

  Littles, Way, Ass

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1983). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: collected works”

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• Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

  Plato

  Plato, Real, Independent

  Plato, John Llewelyn Davies (1996). “Republic”, p.246, Wordsworth Editions

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• The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

  Judith Lewis Herman

  Events, Denial, Conflict

  "Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror". Book by Judith Lewis Herman, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 11, 1992.

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• Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.

  Emile Durkheim

  Causes, Argument, Proof

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.124, Routledge

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• All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Strong

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• History is one long chain of reflections. Hegel also indicated certain rules that apply for this chain of reflections. Anyone studying history in depth will observe that a thought is usually proposed on the basis of other, previously proposed thoughts. But as soon as one thought is proposed, it will be contradicted by another. A tension arises between these two opposite ways of thinking. But the tension is resolved by the proposal of a third thought which accommodates the best of both points of view. Hegel calls this a dialectic process

  Jostein Gaarder

  Reflection, Thinking, Views

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• I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

  Peter Abelard

  Philosophy, War, Teaching

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• Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stars, Knowledge, Heaven

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.534, Modern Library

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• Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Plato, Men, Understanding Nature

  "Writings on Physics and Philosophy" by Wolfgang Pauli, (p. 142), 1994.

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• Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Father, Understanding

  Immanuel Kant, J. Michael Young (2004). “Lectures on Logic”, p.257, Cambridge University Press

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• Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

  Plotinus

  Knowledge, Mean, Illumination

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• Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Philosophy, Inspiration

  "Beyond Good and Evil". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5., 1886.

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• This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

  Douglas Sirk

  Art, Distance, Quality

  Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker

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• The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

  David E. Cooper

  Garden, Culture, Spheres

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Rhetoric completes the tools of learning. Dialectic zeros in on the logic of things, of particular systems of thought or subjects. Rhetoric takes the next grand step and brings all these subjects together into one whole.

  William Blake

  Together, Steps, Tools

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• After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.

  John Lennon

  Order, Should Have, Views

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Our own self-awareness arises not in the Cartesian cogito, but in our finding ourselves in relation to other beings in whom we both actively recognize and do not recognize our own subjectivity, in an inexhaustible dialectic.

  John Milbank

  Self, Subjectivity, Awareness

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• A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced -- it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Kissing, Thinking, Littles

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• With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

  Karl Barth

  Musical, Ears, Young

  Karl Barth (2003). “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”, p.11, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.

  Hannah Arendt

  Beautiful, Party, Years

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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