#contra

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate. ↗

— Thomas Wolfe

#city #contrasts #new-york #new-york-city #love

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society. ↗

— Man Ray

#expression #liberty #nature

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. ↗

— Sheri S. Tepper

#doctrine #narrow-mindedness #orthodoxy #prophecies #religion

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#contracted #effect #i #illness #institutions

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can. ↗

— Paul Kurtz

#contrary #creatively #death #discovered #eating

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. ↗

— Adolf Loos

#art #artist #contrary #does #everyone

On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class. ↗

— Ernest Mandel

#class #confirms #conscious #constructively #contrary

I was little impressed with this rough and ready way of persuading people to renew their contracts and decided that I was now quite free of any obligations. ↗

— Pietro Mascagni

#contracts #decided #free #i #impressed

I would rather do twenty TV series than go through what I went through under that Rank contract I signed a few years ago for which I blame no one but myself. ↗

— Patrick McGoohan

#blame #contract #few #go #i

Ground not upon dreams; you know they are ever contrary. ↗

— Thomas Middleton

#dreams #ever #ground #know #upon