#opposites

I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin. ↗

— Betsy Lerner

#trust #age

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites. ↗

— Marc Chagall

#friends #lovers #neighbors #opposites #their

Ginny who lived her life with hair in the breeze, Stillman who lived his with it under his hat. And he loved her so much the worse for it. ↗

— Josh Weil

#life

We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing. ↗

— Konstantin Josef Jireček

#paradox #paradox

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#beyond #capable #consists #dividing #dividing line

If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#occupation #opposites #taste #business

A man can't love you because you haven't read as many books as he has? He can't love you because you don't speak French or because you don't go to operas? You're telling me we have to fall in love with people who are just like us? ↗

— Billie Letts

#love #novalee-nation #opposites-attract #love

Most people think of success and failure as opposites, but they both are products of the same process. ↗

— Roger von Oech

#failure #most #opposites #people #process

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#cause-and-effect #chain-of-events #chance #change #choice

The town of L— represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose. ↗

— Thomas de Quincey

#reconciliation-of-opposites #equality