#contra

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd. ↗

— Baruch Spinoza

#contrary #nature #reason #whatsoever

A king who’s innocent of the things of which he’s guilty? ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#humor #king #humor

Not everything I do is gossip or bedroom. To the contrary, I think that's just an easy label to dismiss me and to dismiss the new medium. ↗

— Matt Drudge

#contrary #dismiss #easy #everything #gossip

[The laws of logic] were placed in our minds by the Creator during the act of creation. We speak because God has spoken. God is not the author of confusion, irrationality, or the absurd. Furthermore, his words are meant to be understood by his creatures, and a necessary condition for his creature's understanding of those words is that they are intelligible and not irrational. ↗

— R. C. Sproul

#god #logic #the-law-of-noncontradiction #faith

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in theyear's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#happiness #sadness #life

You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#opposites #love

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#heart #love #love

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found. ↗

— Billy Collins

#poetry #love

The four stages of acceptance: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so." (Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464) ↗

— J.B.S. Haldane

#dispute #haldane #opportunism #science #self-contradiction

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg