#contradict

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. ↗

— Marcel Duchamp

#conforming #contradict #forced #i #my own

As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her. ↗

— Thomm Quackenbush

#confident #confusion #contradict #dreams

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians. ↗

— Henry Adams

#paradox #education

why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs. ↗

— Marian Keyes

#hurt #love #love

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#longing #love #solitude #love

Seemed she should learn to smile when she was unhappy, to stop laughing, to speak up, to never speak to strangers, to share guilt for the acts of strangers, that strangers made the laws of the land, that the laws of the land valued things over life, that life ended if a stranger decided it, to be where she could be found, to feel one thing and do another. How could she hang so many contradictions in one skull ↗

— Steve Aylett

#life #love #life

There is only one hopeful suggestion that I can give you: By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an inventor of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner--check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#existence #philosophy #nature

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. ↗

— Saint Augustine

#bathed #contradictory #experience #extracting #find

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

Governing isn't as easy as you think. Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory - to balance the budget and cut taxes, for example. You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending combined. ↗

— Brian Baird

#annual #balance #budget #combined #contradictory