Quotes on Contradiction

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

Do what you will this life's a fiction, And is made up of contradiction.

Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death.

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

To say we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by His life or by life derived from Him, was a contradiction in itself.

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

When we accept all of life's contradictions, when we can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing them both while getting stuck in neither, then we are free.

It is absolutely without contradiction that when women are encouraged to participate in the formal economies of their societies, the economy grows.

No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.

The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Life without death and happiness without misery are contradiction and neither can be found alone, because each of them is a different manifestation of the same thing.

The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.