Contradictory Person Quotes & Sayings

The concrete, physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory political judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person's judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict that no purportedly scientific analysis can alleviate. — Thomas Piketty

The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory ... and is challenged by such irregularities. — Frank X. Barron

I don't know," said Diana. "I gave up a long time ago trying to decide whether we're ever ourselves or are only playing roles. And who could tell which the role was, the passionate kisser or the ruthless conqueror? Maybe they both are roles. Or maybe they're both true. Can't two contradictory things exist inside one person? — Kate Elliott

A person cannot be equally divided between two contradictory identities. And if that's what happened, doesn't it stand to reason that when it came to a test he would lose his ability to decide and find himself doing things his heart couldn't be at peace with? — Shimon Ballas

The Christian formula for the Trinity - God is one essence in three persons - may seem to be contradictory because we are accustomed to seeing one being as one person. We cannot conceive of how one being could be contained in three persons and still be only one being. To that extent, the doctrine of the Trinity in this formulation is mysterious; it boggles the mind to think of a being who is absolutely one in His essence yet three in person. — R.C. Sproul

Not even Fanny had tears for aunt Norris, not even when she was gone for ever. — Jane Austen

i mean, heather said, our bodies are just these things that we float around in. it's not like they belong to anyone — Emily Franklin

You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect. — Edwin Meese

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise — Thomas Dekker

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times. — Rem Koolhaas

But these people were judged very stupid by their friends. Was not Jonathan Strange known to be precisely the sort of whimsical, contradictory person who would publish against himself? — Susanna Clarke

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory. — George Saunders

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones. — Jonathan Franzen

And I looked closer and it totally did say Latoya. But in my defense, it looked like "Labia" from a distance. Much like tacos. Or Georgia O'Keeffe paintings. — Jenny Lawson

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. — Ian McEwan

I'm shameless, and I love a pun. There's a lot of Beth puns. — Beth Ditto

A person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information - a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love. — Marcel Proust

One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits — Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. — Terry Eagleton

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

I think this is one of the major challenges that we face in the U.S. The major incidents in the U.S. have not conformed to our stereotype of an established terror organization attacking a major iconic landmark. — Bruce Hoffman

and starting to stay even with — Mary Higgins Clark

The family remains the basic unit of society and the first school in which children learn the human, spiritual and moral values which enable them to be a beacon of goodness, integrity and justice in our communities. — Pope Francis

Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves. — Louise Penny

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable. — Lucian Freud

Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole. — Esther Perel

None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy - they'd always struck him as digital clones ... Jimmy knew the drill. They were supposed to look like that, he thought ... There were at least three layers of contradictory make-believe, one on top of the other. I want to, I want to not, I want to ... Oryx smiled a hard little smile that made her appear much older ... Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer - right into Jimmy's eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want. — Margaret Atwood