Polarity Quotes & Sayings

We were so intimate that it wasn't possible to flirt or fall in love with one another. For love, there has to be a distance across which the lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course an illusion, because love in fact separate people. Love is a polarity. Two lovers are the two oppositely charged poles of the universe. — Antal Szerb

Balance and fullness exists in the polarity of all things. — Bryant McGill

Meaningful learning in a community requires both participation and reification to be present and in interplay. Sharing artifacts without engaging in discussions and activities around them impairs the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts makes learning depend on individual interpretation and memory and can limit its depth, extent, and impact. Both participation and reification are necessary. Sometimes one process may dominate the other, or the two processes may not be well integrated. The challenge of this polarity is for communities to successfully cycle between the two. — Etienne Wenger

The principle of polarity states that like and unlike are the same, that opposites are identical in their nature and different only in their degree. — Wayne B. Chandler

That's when her poles reversed. The earth has experienced many polarity reversals, lasting from hundreds of thousands of years. Paleomagnetists can study sedimentary deposits on the ocean floor to date when these polarity reversals occurred. The anomaly can be observed as a stripe in the sedimentary rock layer. One thing was clear to her as she stared up at her twinkling star: nothing would ever be the same. Leticia believed that when she was dug up one day, there would be a visible stripe in her bones marking the moment she fell in love. — Yalitza Ferreras

I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of. — Criss Jami

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. — C. G. Jung

Male and female are the first things we learn because they represent the polarity of existence. — Frederick Lenz

True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

So deeply ingrained is the unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and even some who don't. 'Unconscious' is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in. It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. — Richard Dawkins

We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it. — C. G. Jung

I think certain people resonate in our lives, and no matter how much time or how many worlds stand between us, we often gravitate back to those same people. Call it a weak sort of fate, magnets at the right polarity, but years, distance - even death - were no match to whatever near-inconceivable force I felt at that moment, sitting with Tia at her bar and sipping rocket fuel. — Joe Ducie

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music. — Eric Hoffer

It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. — Mircea Eliade

You were my polarity, and the universe held you up to me like a mirror so I'd understand the parts of me I needed to embrace. - Nicole Abbot — Jennifer DeLucy

Home and journey together constitute the creative polarity of the heart, the two dimensions we must cultivate if we want to 'develop the heart. — David Steindl-Rast

We forget that things can only be things when there is something which is not a thing, the space. — Chris Matakas

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. — Germaine Greer

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? — Carl Jung

Even if everybody is looking at the same light bulb, the unique composition of an individual will dictate how they interpret and see things. Some people will only see things with their left eye (mind/moon), while others will use only their right (heart/sun). Some people are completely void of light and repel it immediately. For instance, a beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different than the insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature - human or not human. — Suzy Kassem

When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies. — Walter Russell

It is fair to say that Africa has become a major force in moving the world towards multi-polarity, an important emerging market that helps promote global economic recovery and integration, and an outstanding representative of diverse civilizations in the world. — Li Keqiang

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit. — Erich Fromm

The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites. — James Hollis

Death is not an anomaly or the most dreadful of all events as modern culture would have you believe, but the most natural thing in the world, inseparable from and just as natural as its polarity - birth. — Eckhart Tolle

Our human perception of reality is made up by binary electromagnetic energy in the form of separated polarities: negative-positive, male-female, dark-light. Ordinary reality is a mono-dimensional arbitrary setting, which means that in order to be officially operative in this configuration, we need to release our multidimensional nature. This practically implies to let go of one polarity, so that one pole is allowed circulation in ordinary reality while the other is out of bound and remains in the non-ordinary or unconscious reality. — Franco Santoro

We can only obey our own polarity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of body depends only on type and polarity. — G.I. Gurdjieff

Angels and demons were identical
interchangeable archetypes
all a matter of polarity. The guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer. — Dan Brown

Our stations in life, our difference of cultures, the pain-laid men who raised us - forbid us to be us. They have brainwashed us. We feel we should believe the polarity between us. — Coco J. Ginger

That henceforth the absurd game of chemical noughts and crosses be tabu within the Society's precincts and that, following the practice of the Press in ending a correspondence, it be an instruction to the officers to give notice "That no further contributions to the mysteries of Polarity will be received, considered or printed by the Society." His challenge was not accepted. — Henry Edward Armstrong

Okay, it's a matter of company policy from now on. You must build a reverse polarity setting into all experiments. — Brian Clevinger

The polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man - and woman - finds union within himself only in the union of his female and his male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity. — Erich Fromm

(...) I think your definition changes based on your experiences." (age twenty-two, bisexual)

Six years later, this same woman noted:

"I date both men and women, but i don't like the word "bisexual", because I think it implies polarity. I guess I started thinking about this around 4 1/2 years ago, when I was involved in a long-term committed relationship with a man, but a queer man. And it made me redefine things, because I didn't believe that a queer man and a queer woman together in a relationship like ours was conventionally heterosexual." (age twenty-eight, bisexual) — Lisa Diamond

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other. — Erich Fromm

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries. — Terence McKenna

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation. — C. G. Jung

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly. — Michelangelo

Polarity exists so that we may discover the truth beyond this world of duality, which is the ultimate purpose of life. — Dashama Konah Gordon

Once we stop "searching" for joyful feelings in people and things, no matter what polarity the external world brings us (positive or negative), we can still be aware of the inner peace that resides in our consciousness. — Christopher Dines

The time we need in order to heal our wounds and finally manifest our deepest dreams is only as long as the gap between two thoughts. These are thoughts in polarity, such as separation and unity, conflict and peace, misery and joy, hate and love, etc. Since as human beings we are all capable of experiencing both thoughts, the only skill we need to develop involves mastering the GAP. — Franco Santoro

Let us consider the polarity of love and hate ... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate. — Sigmund Freud

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue
and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations. — Dave Hickey

Nowadays I'm really cranky about comics. Because most of them are just really, really poorly written soft-core. And I miss good old storytelling. And you know what else I miss? Super powers. Why is it now that everybody's like "I can reverse the polarity of your ions!" Like in one big flash everybody's Doctor Strange. I like the guys that can stick to walls and change into sand and stuff. I don't understand anything anymore. And all the girls are wearing nothing, and they all look like they have implants. Well, I sound like a very old man, and a cranky one, but it's true. — Joss Whedon

When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc. — Henry Miller

What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex? — Norman Mailer

We are only different because there exists something to be different from, and it is this difference that bonds us. — Chris Matakas

But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. — C. G. Jung

The main thesis of mind-physics holds that consciousness and matter are both manifestations of a more primary entity, and that the processes of manifestation exhibit equivalent invariances for both consciousness and matter. When the program for mind-physics is complete the subject-object dichotomy of modal logic, the polarity of concept-percept, and the antagonism between morality and technology will all come to an end. Then the non-repeatable experiment will be understood to be more primary than the traditional repeatable experiment. — Paul Laffoley

Souls are simply aspects of ego splintered off from Mae and Jin, the two original gods. They began with no ego at all, you know. But as they gained awareness of themselves, each affirmation of something they were created a denial of something they weren't. This created a polarity, a split between themselves and something that became a new 'soul' - an un-being that gave that shadow voice. One god, declaring himself to be good and denying that he was evil, split into two parts - one good and one evil - because each god is both good and evil. Each part, as it gained awareness of itself and declared itself this or that but denied that it was the shadow of each new identification, split into more and more pieces - creating an exponential birth of new souls. — Colleen Chen

Machine time a in polarity the reverse to how know anyone does: question quick? — Jessica Park

If we identify with a polarity we create the other. A belief in the 'Light' means that you must believe in the 'Dark' or you would not have to call it 'Light'. It would just be, no labels necessary. — David Icke

The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. It is the inbetween space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. — Homi K. Bhabha

Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. — Carl Jung

But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes - thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes. — Daniel C. Dennett

For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity. — Antal Szerb

If a friend of mine in Paris had confessed that he was in love with a Simon or a Peter, I would have compared notes with him on my love for Mary Ann. Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice-cream. I imagine the absence of religion in my upbringing was one factor that had allowed this belief to survive. Perhaps, too, I had a natural openness in the matter. At any rate, it was completely unwittingly that I had disregarded this fundamental polarity of North American society. — Yann Martel

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of water; in male and female; in the equation of quantity and quality; in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole an — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A fish will not truly learn to enjoy water, without gasping for air. — Markus W. Lunner

Polarities to manage are sets of opposites that can't function well independently. Because the two sides of a polarity are interdependent, you cannot choose one as a "solution" and neglect the other. The objective of the Polarity Management perspective is to get the best of both opposites while avoiding the limits of each. — Barry Johnson

If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences. — Tim Ferriss

I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad. — Karan Bajaj