Opposite People Quotes & Sayings

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people. — Bernie Siegel

Dad always told me I was good at noticing moments, at appreciating the little things in life. It struck me as an odd thing, being good at noticing moments. Moments, in and of themselves, were actually pretty boring little bits of time. For most people, they were like confetti or snowflakes; they didn't amount to much until they were in groups. I think I was the opposite. I avoided the groups, the mounds of confetti or snow that had built up in my life, because I was more frightened of what those mounds might tell me to do.
I lived in the now so I didn't have to move forward. — Kim Culbertson

Life is full of painful events, and people who have lost their way and hurt others. Our pain is not lessened when we respond with hatred. In fact, the opposite occurs: When we hate people who hurt us, we come to resemble what we hate, or worse, and then we suffer all the more. What is evil is our response. We have choices, and love is the most powerful eliminator of all. — Bernie Siegel

When people are entering a high-stress period, they don't sleep and don't exercise, but in fact, it should be just the opposite. — Jim Loehr

Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil
only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Robert A. Bjork It is natural for people to think that learning is a matter of building up skills or knowledge in one's memory, and that forgetting is a matter of losing some of what was built up. From that perspective, learning is a good thing and forgetting is a bad thing. The relationship between learning and forgetting is not, however, so simple, and in certain important respects is quite the opposite: Conditions that produce forgetting often enable additional learning, for example, and learning or recalling some things is a contributor to the forgetting of other things. — Aaron S. Benjamin

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. — Nelson Mandela

People think that their world will get smaller as they get older. My experience is just the opposite. Your senses become more acute. You start to blossom. — Yoko Ono

Cultivated people foster what is good in others,
not what is bad.
Petty people do the opposite. — Confucius

I'm certainly not your typical front-man material. Some people love being on stage and really open up, and I'm sort of the opposite of that. I don't crave the spotlight. I'm still not comfortable even talking on stage. — Dan Auerbach

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite. — Kurt Vonnegut

I think people that have fear that, 'Oh if I have a kid I won't be able to do this and I won't be able to do that.' It's kind of the opposite. It really gives you energy. It makes people better. — Anthony Kiedis

I was lucky in that I had a mother that was full of this colloquial wisdom and she used to say to me 'You know, failure is not the opposite of success, it's the stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way.' So I think its very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that because otherwise, they only see people's success. So, when I speak, I speak of my failures. — Arianna Huffington

We all collide. It made him think of Newton's third law of motion:
for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It was like, when
you collided with someone, they would not be in the same position as they
used to be. Everyone equally affected one another. — J.R. Lenk

Love does not involve emotions, then?" he asked her with a smile.
"It is not ruled by them," she told him. "Love is liking and companionship and respect and trust. Love does not dominate or try to possess. Love thrives only in a commitment to pure, mutual freedom. That is why marriage is so tricky. There are the marriage ceremony and the marriage vows and the necessity for fidelity -all of them suggestive of restraints, even imprisonment. Men talk of life sentences and leg shackles in connection with marriage, do they not? But marriage out to be just the opposite -two people agreeing to set each other free, — Mary Balogh

Here dwell a people whom the Greeks call Maurusians, and the Romans and the natives Mauri - a large and prosperous Libyan tribe, who live on the side of the strait opposite Iberia. Here also is the strait which is at the Pillars of Heracles, concerning which I have often spoken. On proceeding outside the strait at the Pillars, with Libya on the left, one comes to a mountain which the Greeks call Atlas and the barbarians Dyris.
17.3.2 — Strabo

I believe most people are born with the potential to have same-sex and opposite-sex attractions. However, homophobia creates an internal split, locking up a natural part of a person's psyche, sometimes to the point where the person is unaware that part exists. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite. — Thomas Sowell

In the news this week, the polls continue to slide for Gordon Brown and some people are saying he's dead and buried. But I think the opposite - I say GORDON'S ALIVE! — Brian Blessed

An assault on an ideology is not merely different from a threat made to a person; it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. — Adam Gopnik

Everybody in hip-hop discriminates against gay people. Matter of fact, the exact opposite word of 'hip-hop,' I think, is 'gay.' Like yo, you play a record and if it's wack, 'That's gay, dog!' And I wanna just come on TV and just tell my rappers, just tell my friends, 'Yo, stop it, fam.' — Kanye West

Intellectuals seemed to think that their life - the life of the mind, the endless self examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people. Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdraw from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.
In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasantly about them. — Orson Scott Card

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father. — Janet Malcolm

With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans. — Dick Morris

I think the media has become incredibly corrupt. We used to have a profound tradition of investigative journalism in the United States. Some journalists were real heroes, such as Bob Woodward who helped uncover the Watergate scandal. But today he is leading the opposite charge, trying to bring down the careers of people and score easy victories. In other words, those who used to bust the status quo have now become the status quo. — Marianne Williamson

It's been my experience that people who make proclamations about themselves are usually the opposite of what they claim to be. — Chelsea Handler

Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion? ... Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law. — Gerald R. Ford

Although people sometimes assume that the happy are self-absorbed and complacent, just the opposite is true. In general, happiness doesn't make people want to drink daiquiris on the beach; it makes them want to help rural villagers gain better access to clean water. — Gretchen Rubin

How did the American people ever reach this point where they believe that US aggression in the Middle East will make us safe when it does the opposite? How did the American people ever reach the point where they believe that fighting unconstitutional wars is required to protect our freedoms and our Constitution? Why do we allow the NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, etc. to destroy our liberty at home, as part of the Global War on Terror, with a pretext that they are preserving our liberty? Why are the lying politicians reelected and allowed to bankrupt our country, destroy our money, and enter wars without the proper consent? Why do the American people suffer in silence and not scream "Enough is enough!"? We've had enough of the "humanitarian do-gooders" and the proponents of "American exceptionalism" who give us nothing but war, economic suffering, and less freedom. This can and must be stopped. — Ron Paul

If you're going to be a visual artist, then there has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That's why it's not like a table or a car or something. I think that that might even be hard for people because most of our visual experiences are of tables. It has no business being anything else but a table. But a painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not-you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question. — Richard Tuttle

If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business. — Wilkie Collins

The general conception that all actors are born exhibitionists is far from the truth. They are quite the opposite. They are shy, frightened people in hiding from themselves- people who have found a way of concealing their secret by footlights, make up and the parts they play. Their own self rejection is what has made most of them actors. — Moss Hart

He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful. — Avi Steinberg

If we have to tell Hollywood good-by, it may be with one of those tender, old-fashioned, seven-second kisses exchanged between two people of the opposite sex, with all their clothes on. — Anita Loos

Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. — Paul Graham

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. — Iris Murdoch

Fitness is a curve. You can be Lance Armstrong, or you can be really out of shape at the opposite end. People enter the curve wherever they are and then they can move up the curve, by better nutrition and better exercise. — Gordon Strachan

Just imagine for a day that you do not know anything, that what you believe could be completely false. Let go of your preconceptions and even your most cherished beliefs. Experiment. Force yourself to hold the opposite opinion or see the world through your enemy's eyes. Listen to the people around you with more attentiveness. See everything as a source for education - even the most banal encounters. Imagine that the world is still full of mystery. — Robert Greene

I've read so many stories online about how tragedy brings people together, how hard times encourage bravery and sacrifice, how a crisis can turn ordinary folks into heroes. But what about the opposite, when something horrible happens and it strips us bare, exposing weaknesses we didn't even know we had. What about when tragedy makes people worse? — Paula Stokes

Do people believe that police in their city and neighborhood treat individual whites and minorities differently? Most blacks and Hispanics believe that police in their city treat blacks worse than whites; three-quarters of blacks and just over half of Hispanics take this view. Roughly the same percentages think that police treat Hispanics worse than whites. Whites tend to take the opposite view: Three-quarters of whites, for instance, believe that police in their city treat whites the same as the two minority groups. — Ronald Weitzer

these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite). — Richard Ford

It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to gather them together and wheel them back. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality the men are hunters, stalking their rattling prey across the landscape, trapping them, breaking their spirit, taming them and herding them to a life of slavery. Possibly. — Terry Pratchett

We are born male. We must learn to be men. Remember, strength is a force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong. Remember the words of Tao te ching. "The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear." Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave. — Kent Nerburn

No, I don't party; no, I don't dress in black leather and chains; that's not my style. That's how I was raised. I worry about getting good grades and I go to church and I watch sci-fi movies and I generally follow the rules. Most people would call me a geek or a nerd. You've called me that many times. But that isn't everything that defines me. I mean, look at me, sitting here in a rainstorm under a tree that's probably going to kill us when the lightning hits it, holding the hand of a pretty cool girl who really is the opposite of me, a girl that I happen to be in love with. A girl I couldn't have imagined would want to be with me. But here she is, letting me hold her hand, trying to tell me why she isn't good enough for me. That's crazy. — Cindy C. Bennett

Watching Limelight with my mother really brought home to me the brevity of life. I realized in a little while that I would die and leave everything behind. Unlike vain people, I had the ability to think this right through. I had no difficulty in picturing full theatres and cinemas long after myself was gone. Not everybody can do that. Many are so intoxicated with sensual impressions that they're not able to grasp that there is a world out there. And therefore they're not able to comprehend the opposite either - they don't understand that one day the world will end. We, however, are only a few missing heartbeats away from being divorced from humanity forever. — Jostein Gaarder

I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it's quite the opposite
he doesn't try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn't check if it's going to work for his image or come off wrong. Since the rest of us are being so self-aware, his presence seems calculated. No one can possibly be that breezy, saying what he thinks, feeling what he feels. I can see why people don't like him for this very reason
it's so much easier to call him a poser.
Because if he's the real deal, then that makes the rest of us fakes. — Lindsey Leavitt

It seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked — Thomas Gilovich

Some people live closely guarded lives, fearful of encountering someone or something that might shatter their insecure spiritual foundation. This attitude, however, is not the fault of religion but of their own limited understanding. True Dharma leads in exactly the opposite direction. It enables one to integrate all the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole, thereby banishing fear and insecurity completely. — Thubten Yeshe

I.Q. deficiency. There are some people who are an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, and what is often a characteristic about every one of these people is that they don't know it. They have no idea how incompetent or stupid they are. It's the exact opposite. They have the loftiest, highest self-image. — Rush Limbaugh

People always tell me I'm the complete opposite of Chief Keef and act like I'm supposed to stop him from making his music. But I like Chief Keef, so it's always super awkward. I just make music I like. — Chance The Rapper

When you follow your heart, you're never supposed to do things because of what you think people might say. You do it for the opposite reasons. — Will.i.am

Everyone in this room knows that Venus is probably one of the greatest people on the tour. She's really great. She's super professional. Complete opposite of me. — Serena Williams

I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to writing them and to go to festivals and spend your life emotionally invested in reviews or the awards. You have to shrink your universe in a way. To me, it's the opposite. — Arundhati Roy

20. The day she graduated from college, Keegan told her mother that she was especially proud of her Yale Daily News article "Even Artichokes Have Doubts," which went on to be adapted for the New York Times and discussed on NPR. When The Opposite of Loneliness was first published in April 2014, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks - even if there are no easy answers." As Keegan reminds other young people that "we can do something really cool to this world" (p. 200), what points does she emphasize? What counterarguments might she have considered more specifically? Do you share her concern about where so many top young graduates take their first jobs? Do you worry that you need to compromise your own dreams for practical concerns? Why or why not? — Marina Keegan

The more people, as you know, are able to be on whatever spectrum of femininity and masculinity they are on at that moment, that opens the door for women to not have to be the opposite of what the supposed traditional male is. — Kathleen Hanna

Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune - really anything, everything - to their advantage. But this crisis in front of you? You're wasting it feeling sorry for yourself, feeling tired or disappointed. You forget: Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave. We — Ryan Holiday

People think that being on Star Trek is career suicide, but it's really just the opposite. — Brent Spiner

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. — Rob Sheffield

Because I never set out to be an actress, I always feel so lucky and grateful. There are so many people who are really desperate to be stars, and it was completely the opposite for me - I fell into it. — Sophia Myles

It is particularly in contacts with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one's own shadow and those of other people. Although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it. — C. G. Jung

The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. — Jurgen Moltmann

This game brings out the most selfish parts of many people, but it had the opposite effect on you. Watching you restored my belief that Caraval could be what I believe it used to be---and that my brother could be good once again. — Stephanie Garber

People think that you can save calories by eating fewer meals a day, but it works just the opposite: the fewer meals you eat, the more counterproductive it becomes to you being able to lose weight. — Ian K. Smith

Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul - often just the opposite. — Lisa Unger

Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to. — Thomas Sowell

The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance. — Patrick Dixon

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it. — Lynn Weingarten

The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people's ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite. — Alex Steffen

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, — Salman Rushdie

Is this true on smaller scales too? Apart from a visible fragment is everybody largely invisible - invisible like the magic part of magic mushrooms and the song part of songbirds? Maybe the balance between one's visibility and invisibility is like the balance between the salt and the water in the blood, delicate and critical, as becomes obvious when the balance deteriorates: people with an invisibility deficiency seem like paper dolls, subject to crumple. Other people have the opposite problem: they cannot be seen building a bicycle, nor making lentil soup, nor knitting a green wool sweater by candlelight; neither can you look down from your second-story window in the morning and see them tromping off through the snow — Amy Leach

A square space with complicated ceremonies going on in it, the purpose of which is to transform animals into men. Two snakes, moving in opposite directions, have to be got rid of at once. Some animals are there, e.g. foxes and dogs. The people walk around the square and must let themselves be bitten by these animals in each of the four corners . If they run away all is lost. Now the higher animals come on to the scene-bulls and ibexes. Four snakes glide into the four corners. Then the congregation flies out. Two sacrificial priests carry in a huge reptile and with this they touch the forehead of a shapeless animal lump or life-mass. Out of it there instantly rises a human head, transfigured. A voice proclaims: "These are attempts at being. — David Lindorff

Most people think the biggest sacrifice, the greates act of love you can give is to die for someone. And probably it is. But Sometimes it is the opposite. The biggest thing you can do for someone is to live. — Sarah Wylie

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart
and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit. — Friedrich Nietzsche

the post-traumatic-stress-disordered often vacillate between phases of symptoms, moving from intrusion - the crying and howling nightmares and other asylum-worthy behaviors - to constriction and back, without predictability or reason. It's one of the many things that undermine their credibility with the outside world: People seem fine for a while, but then they're not fine, or they go from one extreme set of symptoms to an opposite one. — Mac McClelland

Our culture is intent on taking the lines out of people's faces - surgically, with costly creams, and with fear and trembling - when, in fact, the opposite should be the case. As artists know, if there is anything behind a face, that face improves with age. — Karen DeCrow

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think. — David Rakoff

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. [ ... ] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[ ... ]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. — C.S. Lewis

Grace is loving people for who they are, where they are. It's loving people *before* they change, not just *after* they change. And that grace is the difference between holy and holier-than-thou. Holiness, in its purest form, is irresistible. That's why sinners couldn't be kept away from Jesus. Hypocrisy has the opposite effect. It's as repulsive to the irreligious as the Pharisees' religiosity was to Jesus. — Mark Batterson

In face of this modern nihilism, Christians are often lacking in courage. We tend to give the impression that we will hold on to the outward forms whatever happens, even if God really is not there. But the opposite ought to be true of us, so that people can see that we demand the truth of what is there and that we are not dealing merely with platitudes. In other words, it should be understood that we take this question of truth and personality so seriously that if God were not there we would be among the first of those who had the courage to step out of the queue. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Free will is something that people struggle with so much, but it's very simple to me. Carl Jung said at the same moment you're a protagonist in your own life making choices, you also are the spear carrier, or the extra, in a much larger drama. You've got to live with these two opposite ideas at the same time. — Wayne Dyer

You know, he's a bit of a rock star, but I think he's consciously learnt how to make people feel comfortable around him. Because otherwise, how could anyone act opposite him? The whole time you'd be thinking, 'My god, it's Johnny Depp!' — Bella Heathcote

People instantly assume you can't have a platonic friendship with someone of the opposite sex. I think this may be specific to L.A. - or America. — Isabel Lucas

Most of my characters are romantic rather than sexual. I think that's an essential difference in my pictures. I think they are more accurate in portraying young people as romantic - as wanting a relationship, an understanding with a member of the opposite sex more than just physical sex. — John Hughes

What happened to, 'girls on left, boys on right?'" Mr. Bradshaw asked wearily.
Jayden shrugged. "We got bored. Nothing's fun without people of the opposite gender. — Embee

This was one of the secret jokes about marriage. People turned out to be exactly the opposite of how they'd seemed at first; they then went on changing randomly, as though enacting a hypothesis of unceasing chaos. — Anjali Joseph

More than one thing is never true. People love to say the opposite, love to talk about inner conflict, nuances, levels of complication. But if this last year has taught her anything, it has taught her that people are clearer on what they want than they admit to themselves. They want something, or they don't. They decide to keep working at a relationship or they give up. They love someone or they love someone else. And if they love someone else, it is often the idea that they love most, especially when they haven't learned enough to figure out that this new person probably won't save them either. — Laura Dave

Consider the number of young people all over the world who are getting married, day in and day out, for no other reason than thatsomeone of the opposite sex looks well in a green jersey or sings baritone, and then tell me that divorce has reached menacing proportions. The surface of divorce has not even been scratched yet. — Robert Benchley

The fundamental confusion that makes income bracket data and individual income data seem mutually contradictory is the implicit assumption that people in particular income brackets at a given time are an enduring "class" at that level. If that were true, then trends over time in comparisons between income brackets would be the same as trends over time between individuals. Because that is not the case, the two sets of statistics lead not only to different conclusions but even opposite conclusions. — Thomas Sowell

Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It's a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually opressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own - a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world.
I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It's a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it's that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime. — Hayao Miyazaki

The writing is therapeutic for me, it's an introverted process, I'm really inside my head. It's a really obsessive process. The live show, though, is the opposite. It's an extroverted process. It pushes me to connect with people, and so it pulls me out of my head and just pulls me out of myself. — Fernando Torres

People thought tolerance was the opposite of intolerance. Whereas in fact it was some meaningless neutrality. A child, any child, growing up, discovering herself and the nature of her deepest, most native desires - what use was tolerance to a child? It was encouragement she needed, encouragement first to be, then to love, herself. Or himself, whichever. — Jamie O'Neill

The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it's a valid thing. It's a valid forum and I'm not going say that they aren't valid feelings. But it's sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it's sad that it's used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity ... — Chris Gethard

The effect of emotional venting is to sustain an unsatisfactory status quo. Most people think the opposite, that complaining is part of an effort to change an unsatisfying situation. Nope. Complaining lets off pressure so that we neither explode with frustration nor feel compelled to take the often risky steps of openly opposing a difficult person or situation. Keeping emotional pressure tolerably low doesn't change problematic circumstances but rather perpetuates them. — Martha N. Beck

It's easy to think that people will like you more if you do whatever they tell you to do, but it's quite the opposite. People don't appreciate pushovers - they use them. — Osayi Emokpae Lasisi

She thought she'd hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her. — Justin Cronin

Fifty is a big corner to turn. It used to mean being put out to pasture, but it's the opposite with me. I feel more vibrant; I'm more active than I've ever been. The F-word really is freedom. It's the freedom to have dropped the rock-the rock of addiction, of family, of comparisons with other people. It's being fit and focused and kind of furious. — Jamie Lee Curtis

There is no good way to confront a friend who is drinking too much, although doing it when you're not drunk is a good start. Anything you say will cause pain, because a woman who is drinking too much becomes terrified other people will notice. Every time I got an email like the one Charlotte sent, I felt like I'd been trailing toilet paper from my jeans. For, like, ten years. I also burned with anger, because I didn't like the fact that my closest friends had been murmuring behind cupped hands about me, and I told myself that if they loved me, they wouldn't care about this stuff. But that's the opposite of how friendships work. When someone loves you, they care enormously. — Sarah Hepola

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have been represented as a Protestant minister; there was not one of the canvassers of the honourable gentlemen opposite that did not represent to the people that I was not a Minister of the Crown, but that I was a Protestant minister. — Wilfrid Laurier

Manic depression is a type of depression, technically, and it's the opposite of uni-polar. Manic depression is also called bi-polar disorder. Some people don't like to call it that because they think it makes it sound too nice, when the reality is if you have manic-depression you have manic-depression. — Andy Behrman