Opposites quotes
2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside opposites — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing."
"Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite."
"Genes which allow females to be less inhibited leave fewer copies of themselves than genes which persuade them to remain highly selective. Among males, the best strategy is exactly the opposite one. The maximum advantage goes to those males with the fewest inhibitions. "Love 'em and leave 'em" is not so much a nasty peice of male chauvinist piggery as an accurate reflection of biological reality."
"Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?"
"Music is the harmonization of opposites; the conciliation of warring elements"
"I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome."
"It has been ordained that there be summer and winter, abundance and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites for the harmony of the whole, and (Zeus) has given each of us a body, property, and companions."
"Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!"
"Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction."
"Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet."
"Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion."
"The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."
"The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it."
"To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage."
"The world is full of paradoxes and life is full of opposites. The art is to embrace the opposites, accommodate the paradoxes and live with a smile."
"The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."
"Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West - every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion."
"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
"An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite."
"The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology."
