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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"In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework."
"These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her."
"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."
"Wisdom is not a matter of study, but a matter of living, and of sure action which rises above opposites."
"Ministers are tempted to join the ranks of those who consider it their primary task to keep other people busy … But our task is the opposite of distraction … how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence."
"Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else."
"For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction."
"There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character."
"We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage."
"Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite."
"Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive."
"The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible to imagine"
"It's a character I've created. Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest."
"Avoid evil, particularly if they're attractive members of the opposite sex."
"The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way."
"Cultivated people foster what is good in others, not what is bad. Petty people do the opposite."
"Humor is not the opposite of seriousness. Humor is the opposite of despair."
"Fear is the opposite of love, in my opinion."
"A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites."
"If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."
