Antagonist Quotes & Sayings

What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist? — Charlotte Bronte

As Deborah sits below a tree to give advice to her people, the cat could envision itself above Deborah. In the cats mind, the visual allusion would first point to the prophetess as being a predator. This consideration would not be hard to reach for the lucid intelligent cat as she is giving advice to her people here as how to engage in war. Envisioning this text, the cats would find it hard not to recognize the predatory nature of the human beneath it. This fact means that Deborah becomes, in feline hermeneutics, the antagonist. The prophetess would be seen as a danger to the cat. This could lead the cat to deduce that the enemy of the prophetess was a fellow protagonist. Then the advice that Deborah gave to Barak would seem as a malicious attack on a ally or worse an innocent. — Leviak B. Kelly

Envy is the antagonist of the fortunate. — Epictetus

Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!'
("The Man In Crescent Terrace") — Seabury Quinn

[H]is 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either. — Orson Scott Card

No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversaries. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. — Christopher Hitchens

All wicked are antagonist but all antagonist are not all wicked. — Ikechukwu Joseph

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous. — Cheyenne Jackson

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. — Thomas Paine

Testing the wrong person can prove a massive failure for the antagonist. — Carlos Wallace

I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension. — Benjamin Disraeli

I've been keeping in stuff worse than that for more than twenty years."
- what the serial killer said to me. Based the antagonist in my novel on him. He's dead now. — Kristi Belcamino

The fact, however, to which I want to call attention is that the master of Judo never relies upon his own strength. He scarcely uses his own strength in the greatest emergency. Then what does he use? Simply the strength of his antagonist. The force of the enemy is the only means by which that enemy is overcome. — Lafcadio Hearn

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within. — Patricia Hickman

No, indeed, I shall grant you nothing. I always take the part of my own sex. I do indeed. I give you notice
You will find me a formidable antagonist on that point. I always stand up for women. — Jane Austen

Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen. — Kealan Patrick Burke

It is not like the white Republican, the conservative, who clears it up for you and says, "I don't like you", to your face and then you know immediately he is an antagonist. Racism operates in a lot of ways, and so I live it every day. — Bocafloja

People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it. — Robert Z'Dar

To fear is to have more faith in your antagonist than in Christ. — D.L. Moody

Ridicule has even been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm, and properly the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success. — Oliver Goldsmith

Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures]. — Harrison Ford

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern. — Barbara Deming

LARRY
(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?
and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself? — Eugene O'Neill

But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself. — Thomas Paine

Johnny Ringo to me was just the best antagonist that I've ever played, because I played him as a guy who has a death wish and had done everything that he wanted in life. As far as he was concerned, a gun fight was about as exciting as it was going to get. — Michael Biehn

Donna Mills came on the show as a female antagonist, about a year before, so now they wanted to have a male antagonist. I was cast as a Senator to shake things up. — William Devane

Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error. — Thomas Jefferson

What then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life. — George MacDonald

Fear plays the role of antagonist in the story of your life — Anne Marie Miller

I was tenaciously opposed by the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank, who had seats in parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion. — William E. Gladstone

The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him. — William Hazlitt

He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain. — Leo Tolstoy

If you have to be the antagonist, you often have a lot more creative powers. You have a lot more color to you. — William Atherton

There's always enough retribution to be dealt. — Amber Silvia

It's one thing to not want an evil-sorcerer type villain in your story, but it's another thing to avoid having any sort of antagonist at all. A story without an antagonist gets weird pretty quick. — Patrick Rothfuss

Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

When you meet opposition to your faith, your first reaction may be anger toward your antagonist. This may divert your attention from the deeper, spiritual dimensions of your conflict. Your adversary may be hopelessly in bondage to sin. Rather than retaliating, you should immediately and earnestly intercede for that person. Your opponent's hostility is your invitation to become involved in God's redemptive work to free him or her from spiritual bondage. Be alert to the spiritual warfare around you. — Henry Blackaby

It's bizarre, but as disgusting and evil and terrible as the Wolfman is, I can't help but feel he's unable to control himself. It seems to me he makes up bizarre excuses to make it okay for him to kill and rape, because he can't stop himself from killing and raping. Whether born or made, the Wolfman is more creature than human. He's a monster. — Carolyn Lee Adams

I have been to hell and back. It's a place where all antagonist meet and most often hug and ask:
why didn't we love ourselves enough? — PK Gyewu Akrofi

antagonist having one hand strapped behind his back and the other — Giles Milton

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities. — Helen DeWitt

You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I think in any movie really the two most interesting parts are the protagonist and the antagonist. — Cung Le

For him, she was the evil one; the antagonist to his life story. The reason he was married at an early age.
And to her, he would always be her infatuation gone horribly wrong. — Alyssa Urbano

I mean, without the antagonist, there would be no story! It'd be like: 'Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be loved, so she met a prince and got married and lived Happily Ever After, The End'? That's not a story; that's a bumper sticker. — Shannon Hale

Yet as she tells the story, the change came about when that director stopped treating her like an antagonist and treated her like a person. He apologized for publicly calling her "baby-killer" and started spending time with her during her smoking breaks in the parking lot. Later, McCorvey accepted an invitation to church from a seven-year-old girl whose mother also worked at Operation Rescue. Pro-abortion forces had dismissed McCorvey - her dubious record of drug-dealing, alcohol, lesbianism, and rape made bad public relations - but Christian leaders took the time to counsel her in the faith, keeping her out of the public spotlight for half a year. "Ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts," says McCorvey now. "A Christian witness is the biggest tool in effecting change. — Philip Yancey

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy. — Joseph Addison

Sex as the vital antagonist to death - isn't the orgasm the primal spark of life? I know of many instances in which sexual feelings arise in order to neutralize fears of death. — Irvin D. Yalom

There's always an antagonistic personality in any group, simply because life isn't meant to be simple. Our thoughts can be clear, we may know what we want, but life will always show us the duality, simply because that's how things are meant to be. Before a three, there's a two. Before the change, there is the choice. it's just what it is. And yet, the antagonist is often the one we love the most, because that's how his temptation can lead us astray. — Robin Sacredfire

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story. — Elmore Leonard

We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers. — William Ellery Channing

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you. — Franz Kafka

Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax. — Gillian Flynn

You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe. — L.M. Montgomery

I just want to be a part of great stories, whether I'm part of an amazing ensemble cast or I'm leading it or the antagonist or whatever. — Zoe Saldana

I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful. — Paul Haggis

You're not so tough. No tougher than the man whose blood will spill from your veins. — Dawn M. Turner

One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority. — Julius Evola

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192 — Jeff VanderMeer

It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains. — Barbara Deming

You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world. — John Rogers

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. — Doris Lessing

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement. — John Kessel

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience. — David Mamet

When you have a nightmare, don't let it control you. Try transforming that fear into into an antagonist to release pent-up feelings. — B.A. Gabrielle

I think, at the end of the day, the real antagonist is the brokenness of humanity. — LeCrae

Your malice and your striving to seek revenge are much more harmful to your health than they are to your antagonist. — Aaidh Ibn Abdullah Al-Qarni

The zeal and virtue of Ali were never outstripped by any recent proselyte. He united the qualifications of a poet, a soldier, and a saint; his wisdom still breathes in a collection of moral and religious sayings; and every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour. From the first hour of his mission to the last rites of his funeral, the apostle was never forsaken by a generous friend, whom he delighted to name his brother, his vicegerent, and the faithful Aaron of a second Moses. — Edward Gibbon

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person
of an antagonist odious. — David Hume

... the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope — Samuel Johnson

You -have- to love your monster. — Philippa Dowding

So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. — Richard Feynman

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author. — Isaac D'Israeli

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon. — Margaret Mahy

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans. — Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Difficulties show men what they are.
In case of any difficulty,
remember that God has pitted you
against a rough antagonist
that you may be a conqueror,
and this cannot be without toil. — Epictetus

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. — K. Hari Kumar

Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist. — Charles Caleb Colton

Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I sense that you are nearby, son and daughter of the Almari bloodline. I will soon come for you both. — Eric Mrozek

In holding your antagonist, therefore, you should hold him lightly as if your arms were nothing but chains which connect you with him, so that you may stretch or contract them at will when necessary, and pull or push him in any direction you choose. If you pull your opponent or apply your tricks on him by putting from the beginning too much strength in your arms, then you are going to contest with him by means of your power and against the principles of Judo. In doing so, you can never expect to succeed in your contest. — Yokoyama Sakujiro

Your life, sir, is propelled
By a dream of the fear of having nightmares; your love
Is the fear of being alone; your world's history
The fear of a possible leap by a possible antagonist
Out of a possible shadow, or a not-improbable
Skeleton out of your dead-certain cupboard. — Christopher Fry

It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform — Eric Hobsbawm

Evil is relative - and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of 'Forever Evil' is to explore that darkness. — Geoff Johns

On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry. — Bocafloja

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage. — Franz Kafka

I miss having a villain. Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely the better. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month. — Philip K. Dick

To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters. — Angelica Hopes

I'll allow you to live, if only for a little longer. -Lilith — C.D. Sutherland

He who has a slight disadvantage plays more attentively, inventively and more boldly than his antagonist who either takes it easy or aspires after too much. Thus a slight disadvantage is very frequently seen to convert into a good, solid advantage. — Emanuel Lasker

There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night — Ernest Bramah

Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God. — Ada Palmer

the ultimate standard, by which we determine all disputes, that may arise concerning them, is always derived from experience and observation. Where this experience is not entirely uniform on any side, it is attended with an unavoidable contrariety in our judgments, and with the same opposition and mutual destruction of argument as in every other kind of evidence. We frequently hesitate concerning the reports of others. We balance the opposite circumstances, which cause any doubt or uncertainty; and when we discover a superiority on any side, we incline to it; but still with a diminution of assurance, in proportion to the force of its antagonist. — Christopher Hitchens

I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush. — Criss Jami

There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. that it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty. — David Hume

You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Where you have a villain in the piece or the antagonist, whatever you want to call them, there has to be humanity at the core of it or it's faintly ridiculous. Nobody is just villain through and through. You have to feel something for them. — Scott Hicks

The basic script of an agonist tending, an antagonist reacting, played out in different combinations and outcomes, underlies the meaning of the causal constructions in most, perhaps all, of the world's languages. And in language after language, the prototypical force-dynamic scenario-an antagonist directly and intentionally causing a passive agonist to change from its intrinsic state-gets pride of place in the language's most concise causative construction. — Steven Pinker