Human Contradiction Quotes & Sayings

Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist - how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the "wide space of the world night," enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd's dance of metaphysics? But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator - whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction? — Friedrich Nietzsche

[ ... ] the sacred - that which is immutable, inviolable and thus infinitely majestic - is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence. The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means bindinghim again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason. — Frithjof Schuon

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

[...] let us note that a so-called "Sociobiologist" - this word is a whole project by itself - pushed the ingeniosity to the point of replacing matter by "genes", whose egoist selfishness, combined with ant and bee instincts, would have managed to constitute not only bodies but also conscience and at the end, human intelligence, miraculously able to dissert on the genes that amusingly created it. — Frithjof Schuon

Contradiction. In the rational realm, the word was a blistering condemnation. Proof of flawed logic. To expose it in an adversary's position was akin to delivering a deathblow, and she well recalled the triumphant gleam in his eyes in the instant he struck. But, she wondered now, where was the crime in that most human of capacities: to carry in one's heart a contradiction, to leave it unchallenged, immune to reconciliation; indeed, to be two people at once, each true to herself, and neither denying the presence of the other? What vast laws of cosmology were broken by this human talent? Did the universe split asunder? Did reality lose its way? — Steven Erikson

Contradiction is the perfect evidence, he (Lincoln) thought, of human fallibility. — Elton Trueblood

In modern day evangelism, this precious doctrine [of regeneration] has been reduced to nothing more than a human decision to raise one's hand, walk an aisle, or pray a 'sinner's prayer.' As a result, the majority of Americans believe that they've been 'born again' even though their thoughts, words, and deeds are a continual contradiction to the nature and will of God. — Paul Washer

I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother's womb, that no alleged right to one's own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the "property" of another human being. The family protects human life in all its stages, including its last. Consequently, "those who work in healthcare facilities are reminded of the moral duty of conscientious objection. Similarly, the Church not only feels the urgency to assert the right to a natural death, without aggressive treatment and euthanasia", but likewise firmly rejects the death penalty. — Pope Francis

It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce - it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. — Soren Kierkegaard

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels. — Carl Jung

There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity? — Carlos Castaneda

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. — A.R. Ammons

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply 'the other', 'an object', 'commodity', 'thing'. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain. — Sheila Rowbotham

There is no one here, said the girl with dark glasses, and burst into tears leaning against the door, her head on her crossed forearms, as if her with her whole body she were deperately imploring pity, if we did not have enough experience of how complicated the human spirit can be we would be surprised that she should be so fond of her parents as to indulge in these demonstrations of sorrow, a girl so free in her behaviour, but not far away is someone who has already affirmed that there does not exist nor ever has existed any contradiction between the one and the other. — Jose Saramago

Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways ... It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being. — John Connolly

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. — Erich Fromm

As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself
for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized. — Philip Roth

The ability to break a loved one's heart is the essential contradiction in human relationships. — Amy Dickinson

There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality. — Arthur Miller

All true love and all sacrifice are
in their essence Nature's contradiction of the primary egoism and
its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first
fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one's self in others.
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in
the darkness. — Sri Aurobindo

The global industrial food system holds an inherent contradiction. It is a major source of global warming pollution, and at the same time it is threatened by increasing climate chaos. This same food system currently leaves close to a billion people hungry, not for a lack of food production or "overpopulation"-as many textbooks tell students- but because the global market privileges the profits of multinational corporations over the human rights to food. — Bill Bigelow

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings. — W.G. Sebald

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter. — Alfred Russel Wallace

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions. — Dorothy Height

I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have. — Anne Roiphe

The game theoretical analysis of the chain store game by backward induction is very easy and does not put any strain on the cognitive abilities of human beings. Even game theoretically untrained persons understand the backward induction argument without difficulty. Nevertheless, the conclusion is behaviorally unacceptable. The author was so worried about this contradiction that he felt three weeks of physical discomfort. — Reinhard Selten

How absurd human beings are and how magnificent. — Benjamin Zander

The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration. — Heinz Pagels

[F]or Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive powers of the human mind are no more artificial than the formative actions of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline. — Alan W. Watts

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings. — Paul Haggis

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) — W. H. Auden

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. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man. — Erich Fromm

There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous. — Walter Bagehot

At the foundation of Hegel's thought was his understanding of dialectic, according to which all things unfold in a continuing evolutionary process whereby every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite. The interaction between these opposites then generates a third stage in which the opposites are integrated - they are at once overcome and fulfilled - in a richer and higher synthesis, which in turn becomes the basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis... Hegel's overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. In Hegel's view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. — Richard Tarnas

I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate. — W. Somerset Maugham

Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes ... — Muriel Spark

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish

The use or abuse of Christianity in contradiction to the very message of the gospel reveals not the gospel for what it is, but the heart of man. That is why atheism is so bankrupt as a view of life, for it miserably fails to deal with the human condition as it really is. — Ravi Zacharias

I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradiction will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in that moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men
let this, let off of this, come true and be revealed. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex. — Marguerite Yourcenar

I have never, so far, in all the studies I have done, met a contradiction between what the human, experimental and natural sciences are telling us and the Islamic rules. In fact, the opposite is true: anything that is coming from the modern sciences is helping me better understand the text. It's not a contradiction. It's a relation. — Tariq Ramadan

Boxing encompasses the very worst and very best of human nature and its beautiful brutality is a marvelous contradiction for a writer. It conjures up so many irreconcilably antagonistic feelings. — Brian D'Ambrosio

You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all
disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought,
history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions
and systems. Its always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out
of it? And what will you make? what are you looking for? There is no Truth.
There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral
action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and
contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,
stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend? — Blaise Cendrars

No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal? — Elie Wiesel

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being. — Madeleine L'Engle

It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. — Philip Schaff

The principal hindrance to the advancement of the kingdom of God is greed. It is the chief obstacle to heaven-sent revival. It seems that when the back of greed is broken, the human spirit soars into regions of unselfishness. I believe that it is safe to say there can be no continuous revival without 'hilarious' giving. And I fear no contradiction: wherever there is 'hilarious' giving there will soon be revival! — O. S. Hawkins

But are we not at the point where we can no longer make the distinction between normal and neurotic? Do we not all have these conflicts, in greater or lesser degree? And do not all conflicts move into contradiction at some point? When all is said and done, all anxiety arises from conflicts, with its origin in the conflict between being and nonbeing, between one's existence and that which threatens it. All of us, no matter how 'neurotic' or 'normal,' experience the gap between our expectations and reality. This distinction becomes less important, and I believe we must look at all anxiety, preferably without special labels, as part of the human condition. — Rollo May

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? — Charles Darwin

Contradiction is an inseparable part of the human condition, and that suffices as a source of miraculousness. — Czeslaw Milosz

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God. — C.S. Lewis

The invention of the concept of sustainable human development and that of so-called human security, as opposed to territorial security of nation- states, and its promotion by the UN is in clear contradiction to all that we, the Group of 77, and the UN Charter itself consider inalienable, namely national sovereignty and security. — Pranab Mukherjee

Central to Frege's philosophy was the assertion that truth is independent of human judgment. In his Basic Laws of Arithmetic he writes: "Being true is different from being taken to be true, whether by one or many or everybody, and in no case is it to be reduced to it. There is no contradiction in something's being true which everybody takes to be false. I understand by 'laws of logic' not psychological laws of takings-to-be-true, but laws of truth...they [the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. — Frege, Gottlob

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. — Frantz Fanon

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers. — Anais Nin

Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation. — Jeremy Griffith

As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as under the dominance of these wants he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. [T]hat is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ. — Ludwig Feuerbach

The domestic cat is a bit of a contradiction. It freely accepts human friendship while never allowing even the most contented life to dim its sense of who it is and what it is capable of. — Ellen Dugan