Incongruities Quotes & Sayings

Incongruities between self-efficacy and action may stem from misperceptions of task demands, as well as from faulty self-knowledge — Albert Bandura

An entirely honest man, in the severe sense of the word, exists no more than an entirely dishonest knave; the best and the worst are only approximations to those qualities. Who are those that never contradict themselves? yet honesty never contradicts itself. Who are they that always contradict themselves? yet knavery is mere self-contradiction. Thus the knowledge of man determines not the things themselves, but their proportions, the quantum of congruities and incongruities. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

People will not follow a leader with moral incongruities for long. Every time you compromise character you compromise leadership. The foundation of firm leadership is character. — Bill Hybels

It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! — Robert Louis Stevenson

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. — Mark Twain

I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities. — Joanna Scott

He wiped out Jericho, and He saved a harlot. What kind of God was this? He seemed at once impossibly holy and ridiculously merciful. How could you tie those two incongruities together? Rahab — Tessa Afshar

What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper. — Jeremy Reed

But yet with all this, although, of course, one may admit this, that and the other, may even ... and after all, where aren't there incongruities? — Nikolai Gogol

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion. It is also a sense of delight
delight in noting life has its incongruities and absurdities and that we can live in spite of them.
John Frederick Nims (WESTERN WIND: AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY) — Margaret Jean Langstaff

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. — Ernest Becker

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life. — Reinhold Niebuhr

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I have also thought of a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real. — Italo Calvino

He(Samuel, known as 'the Pea') was as apprehensive, weak and nervous about things as Swaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeable thing to others would tickle them to death. — R.K. Narayan

But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men's ways. — William Osler

On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power. — George Will

Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better - not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities. — Chuck Klosterman

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof. — Stephen Leacock

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one. — Anne Fadiman

In this, then, lies their power of understanding
understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for those wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.
This is why they laughed at the President's speech. — Oliver Sacks

Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones. — William Sloane Coffin

We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or "documentary," whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both. — Tim Parks

Make no mistake: I'm all about guns! I just love the legal incongruities our national discourse has spawned, like I can buy a shotgun any time of day without a serious background check, but if I need something for my sniffles, it's six forms of ID and complete school transcripts. The government has essentially created a system where if I want to clear a head cold, the easiest cure is to blow my brains out. — Tim Dorsey

This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds. — Amy Lowell

Although it is useful to specify the incongruities of the fox-hunting ban, the definitive word on the hunt is Oscar Wilde's: "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable". PAGE NELSON Charlottesville, Virginia — Anonymous

Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner. — Leigh Hunt

It is only when you realize that you are mortal and yet immortal simultaneously that you begin to realize that the beautiful incongruities of existence aren't incongruous at all, but rather perfect. — Frederick Lenz

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. — August Strindberg

But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed. — Richard Ford

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void. — Emil Cioran