Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.
Interpretation
Contradictions can reveal deeper truths rather than indicate mistakes.
This quote by Simone Weil suggests that encountering contradictions is not necessarily an indication of being wrong; instead, they may point towards a greater understanding of the complexity of truth. It challenges the notion that truth is always straightforward and invites us to embrace the ambiguity that often accompanies profound insights.
In practice
In a debate about morality, one could use this quote to illustrate that differing viewpoints may reveal deeper understandings rather than just conflicts.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Adoration is the spontaneous yearning of the heart to worship, honor, magnify, and bless God. We ask nothing but to cherish him. We seek nothing but his exaltation. We focus on nothing but his goodness.
I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation had a right to intermeddle in the internal concerns of another; that every one had a right to form and adopt whatever government they liked best to live under themselves.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.