Non Contradiction Quotes & Sayings

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning. — Jean Baudrillard

I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like. — Lena Dunham

If you do not assume the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about. If you do not assume the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If you do not assume libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against. If you do not assume morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place. — William J. Murray

When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You're seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you're worth. — Haruki Murakami

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell. — Kim Elizabeth

I like first class, but I don't like first class people - I prefer the people in coach. I like fine restaurants, but prefer the taste of McDonalds. I like to be perfect, but I don't like perfection - I think it's dangerous. There is nothing after perfection. I know, I am a walking contradiction. — Alber Elbaz

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! — Ralph Ellison

What is considered [True] Knowledge? There should be solution from all sides, there should be no contradiction. It is a non-contradicting principle when a spoken sentence will be the same even after fifty years; there will be no contradictions. — Dada Bhagwan

Wizard's Ninth Rule
A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole. — Terry Goodkind

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves. — Blaise Pascal

Imagine being able to plot in advance, in systematic fashion, the approach of all meaningful coincidences. Is that a priori, by the very meaning of the word, not a contradiction? After all, a coincidence, or as Pauli called it, a manifestation of synchronicity, is by its very nature not dependent on the past; hence nothing exists as a harbinger of it (cf. David Hume on the topic; in particular the train whistle versus the train). This state, not knowing what is going to happen next and therefore having no way of controlling it, is the sine qua non of the unhappy world of the schizophrenic; he is helpless, passive, and instead of doing things, he is done to. Reality happens to him
a sort of perpetual auto accident, going on and on without relief. — Philip K. Dick

If you play games with the law of non-contradiction, then every time you open your mouth and say anything, you're cheating. Every time you make a choice in life you're cheating. — Ronald H. Nash

A non-serving Christian is a contradiction in terms. — Rick Warren

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms. — Edgar Allan Poe

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

Sameness leaves us in peace but it is contradiction that makes us productive. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal. — Sydney Pollack

In order not to find me in contradiction with myself, I should be allowed enough time to explain myself — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. — George Santayana

They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone. — Billy Joel

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs. — Billy Collins

Where in the Bible are we told in one verse not to do a thing and in the next to do it?

'Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.' Prov. xxvi. 4.

'Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.' Prov. xxvi. 5. — Samuel Grant Oliphant

You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction. — Frank Schaeffer

How do you get people to want to live in time, to have a sense of the importance of time for growth, development, of the need for ups-and-downs, of non-homogenized development? [...] A revolution in the U.S. is only going to be led and made by people with some sense of the thickness of time, of time as duration, of time as heterogenous, of development through contradiction, not in a straight line. — James Boggs

Your eyes will contradict your words if your words contradict your thoughts and feelings. — Sam Owen

If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction. — Peter Kreeft

Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable. — David Hume

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy. — Eric Scigliano

If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power ... the subject exceeds the logic of non contradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were. — Judith Butler

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms. — Aldous Huxley

Only the 'Right belief' gives rise to non-contradicting principle and that which is free from contradiction is known as 'Principle'. — Dada Bhagwan

A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction. — Orson Scott Card

The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that God is one in essence and three in person, so He is one in one sense and three in another sense, and that does not violate the categories of rational thought or the law of non-contradiction. — R.C. Sproul

Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. — Avicenna

A perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and everything outside. Every moment we are fighting actually with external nature, and if we are defeated, our life has to go. — Swami Vivekananda

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. — Georges Bataille

If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless. — Denis Diderot

The fact is that there is a contradiction going on but our brains don't like contradiction. So when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer and Curly says, "ow" and Moe says, "Serves you right Numbskull", you can say that's because they're separate beings, and that's true. — Brad Warner

Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow. — Carl Von Clausewitz

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

It is therefore an analogical knowledge: a knowledge of a being who is unknowable in himself, yet able to make something of himself known in the being he created. Here, indeed, lies something of an antinomy. Rather, agnosticism, suffering from a confusion of concepts, sees here an irresolvable contradiction in what Christian theology regards as an adorable mystery. It is completely incomprehensible to us how God can reveal himself and to some extent make himself known in created beings: eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in the finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all, as it were, in that which is nothing. This mystery cannot be comprehended; it can only be gratefully acknowledged. — Anonymous

Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death. — Paul Ricoeur

Then there's the intelligence that practically radiates from you. Did I ever tell you smart women seriously turn me on?" His thumbs began caressing her cheeks and he bent to whisper close to her ear. "You're a walking contradiction, Hayden. Prim and proper one moment, wild and uninhibited the next. And the more I get to know you, the more I like what I find. — Elle Kennedy

Mind is dual, it always divides things into polar opposites: the conqueror and the conquered, the observer and the observed, the object and the subject, the day and the night. It goes on dividing things which are not divided. Neither is the day divided from the night, nor is birth divided from death. They are one energy. But mind goes on dividing everything into polarities, opposites. Nothing is opposite in existence; every contradiction is only apparent. Deep down all contradictions are meeting together. — Rajneesh

Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it. — Mason Cooley

I am convinced of the validity of contradiction. There are many worlds. Each is true, at its time, in its own fashion — Errol Flynn

It is a contradiction this creek- a hundred thousand years old but renewed with each rainfall. — Robert McCammon

I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card. — Ron Paul

The discovery of a completely unknown manuscript at a period in which historical science is carried to such a high degree appeared almost miraculous. We hastened, therefore, to obtain permission to print it, with the view of presenting ourselves someday with the pack of others at the doors of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, if we should not succeed - a very probable thing, by the by - in gaining admission to the Academie Francaise with our own proper pack. This permission, we feel bound to say, was graciously granted; which compels us here to give a public contradiction to the slanderers who pretend that we live under a government but moderately indulgent to men of letters. — Alexandre Dumas

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

Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water — Michael Frayn

If you order, with the absolute conviction that his wish will come, it will happen that way. But you mix the desire, fear and regret, and that is a contradiction. — Hermann Hesse

"Keep it 100" means keeping it 100 percent real. It comes from the expression ... "keeping it real," which means you are being completely honest and 100 percent real means you are really being honest, which is kind of a contradiction of sorts. You're either being honest or you're not. — Larry Wilmore

Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him. — Erich Fromm

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. — Douglas Adams

He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted. — Anna Funder

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. — H.L. Mencken

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

It's funny. Maria Elena and I, we are meant for each other and not meant for each other, it's a contradiction. — Woody Allen

Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known. — Donald Kingsbury

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas ... — Charles De Lint

No beast of reality, or creature of imagination, is as terrible as mankind. Or as loving. It's a contradiction. I've always liked contradictions. Today I see both sides of the coin unveiled in gruesome and beautiful imagery, captured by my eyes and filed away in my mind, like still shots taken by a world-renowned photographer. — David Estes

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors. — Pieter Zeeman

Reality is a perpetual process of
evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior
synthesis which, itself, creates its opposite and again causes history to advance. What Hegel affirmed
concerning reality advancing toward the spirit, Marx affirms concerning economy on the march toward
the classless society; everything is both itself and its opposite, and this contradiction compels it to become
something else. Capitalism, because it is bourgeois, reveals itself as revolutionary and prepares the way
for communism. — Albert Camus

For Americans the contradiction between national ideal and social fact required explanation and correction. Ultimately this contradiction did not lead to the abandonment of the ideal of equal opportunity but rather to its postponement: to the notion of achieving for the next generation what could not be achieved for the current one. And the chief means to this end was a brilliant American invention: universal, free, compulsory public education. This "solution" was especially important for children and families because it gave children a central role in achieving the national ideal. — Kenneth Keniston