opposites Quotes

“Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.”

“Without the dark there isn’t light. Without the pain there is no relief.”

“The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”

“Things outside you are projections of what’s inside ... what’s inside ... is a projection of what’s outside.”

“I noticed something about Finny’s own mind, which was such an opposite from mine. It wasn’t completely unleashed after all. I noticed that he did abide by certain rules, which he seemed to cast in the form of Commandments. ‘Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half’ was the first one I encountered.”

“I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.”

“The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.”

“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error?

“In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.”

″‘A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing.’ He nudged the angel. ‘Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?‘”

“At your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.”

“By what you allow to occupy your mind and mouth, you can either bless your life to great heights of success or send it orbiting into realms of failure, sadness, and discontentment.”

“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. ”

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”

“For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing.”

“It occurs to me how close happiness and sadness are. So closely knitted together. Such a thin line, a thread-like divide that in the midst of emotions, it trembles, blurring the territory of exact opposites ... how quickly a moment of love was snapped away to a moment of hate ... Of how love and war stand upon the very same foundations.”

“A veil hangs between the two opposites, a mere slip of a thing that is transparent to warn us or comfort us. You hate now but look through this veil and see the possibility of love; you’re sad now but look through to the other side and see happiness. Absolute composure to a complete mess - it happens so quickly, all in the blink of an eye.”

“Human beings are not reasonable creatures. Instead of being ruled by logic, we are ruled by emotions. The world would be a happier place if the opposite were true.”

“Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love.”

“I hate him. I hate him for being so brutal. I hate that I’m beholden to him. I hate that I’m in love with his wife and something damned close to that with the elephant. And most of all, I hate that I’ve let them both down.”

“The right thing and the easy thing are never the same.”

“Please boss, don’t put that thing over my face, don’t put me in the dark. I’s afraid of the dark.”

“Or we fall in love with someone who incarnates the virtues or vices opposite our own. An orderly man who plans his days marries a spontaneous woman who lets things lie where they fall, lives in the moment, and is perpetually late for appointments.”

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. ”

“My sorrows are evil and they are at strife with joys that are good, and I cannot tell which will gain the victory.”

“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.”

“Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

“Fear is an impediment to happiness.”

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”

“Love, hate, what’s the difference?”

“It’s usually our opposites who complement us best, because they’re the only ones who can balance us out.”

“What worries me the most,′ she continued, ‘is the opposite, the possibility that they’re not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they’re not doing it because they don’t see any point to it. It’s like...”--she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass--“like the ants.”

“Or we fall in love with someone who incarnates the virtues or vices opposite our own. An orderly man who plans his days marries a spontaneous woman who lets things lie where they fall, lives in the moment, and is perpetually late for appointments.”

“ALL TALL We all are tall. ALL SMALL We all are small. ”

″ Left foot, Left foot Right foot, Right. Feet in the morning. Feet at night. Left foot, Left foot, Left foot, Right. Wet foot, Dry foot. High foot, Low foot. ”

“Here come clown feet. Small feet, Big feet.”

“Left foot. Right foot. Feet. Feet. Feet. Oh, how many feet you meet!”

“Front feet, Back feet. Red feet, Black feet. Left foot, Right foot.”

“Slow feet, Quick feet. Trick feet, Sick feet. Up feet, Down feet.”

“His feet, Her feet. Fuzzy fur feet.”

“Some big dogs and some little dogs going around in cars.”

“The blue dog is in. The red dog is out.”

“A dog over the water. A dog under the water.”

“And he wasn’t just plain weird like Hector.”

“People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognized no opposites. Even life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.”

“All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure.”

“It is because every one under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty, that the idea of ugliness exists.”

“Difficult and easy complete one another. Long and short test one another. High and low determine one another. Pitch and mode give harmony to one another. Front and back give sequence to one another.”

“I had been friends with Mark long before he came to live with us. He had lived down the street and it seemed to me that we had always been together. We had never had a fight. We had never even had an argument. In looks, we were complete opposites…He was my best friend and we were like brothers.”