Explore Quotes on Opposites

We have more media than ever and more technology in our lives. It's supposed to help us communicate, but it has the opposite effect of isolating us.

In every well-written play the battle rages between the primary powers of Good and Evil, and it is this battle which constitutes the life impulse of the play, its driving force, and is basic to all plot structures...In any true piece of art...the beginning and the end are, or should be, polar in principle. All the main qualities of the first section should transform themselves into their opposites in the last section.

Competition is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don't want to compete. They want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors. The good actor is the one who competes, willingly, who enjoys competing. An actor must compete, or die...Peacefulness and the avoidance of trouble won't help in his acting. It is just the opposite he must seek.

Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

Non-cooperation is a measure of discipline and sacrifice, and it demands respect for the opposite views.

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

Convulsions in nature, disorders, prodigies, miracles, though the most opposite of the plan of a wise superintendent, impress mankind with the strongest sentiments of religion.

The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace.

I'm moved by contraries, by opposites, the strength that was my mother's eyes, the beauty of my father's hands.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.