#contradiction

It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind. ↗

— نجيب محفوظ

#heart #sentimentality #skepticism #skepticism

All those religions--they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#contradictions #life-and-death #religions #death

Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world. ↗

— Otsuichi

#contradictions #contradictory #death #epiphany #gratitude

The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears? Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation! I guess that explains their rich military history, then. -Ennesbey & Petey ↗

— Howard Tayler

#contradictions #cuddly #humour #military #overreaction

The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory. ↗

— Ivan Doig

#love #love

Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time. ↗

— Aravind Adiga

#contradictions #entrepreneur #god #gods #men

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

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#contradiction #here #hoped #involved #merely

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy. ↗

— Freda Adler

#conformity #contradiction #creative #creature #define