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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"My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things."
"We're programmed to believe that time is the enemy, that it takes away from us or that it diminishes us. I have found that it's done the opposite to me. Life is in perfect balance. It's just that our perception of it isn't."
"I think it's fair to say that [Donald Trump] and I are sort of opposites in some ways."
"Peace can be threatening because peace is the absence of problems and conflict. There is something, perhaps in the personal you, that does not want freedom or peace, or the absence of problems. There's something that wants the opposite."
"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing... The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence."
"In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal -- quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is."
".. we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations."
"A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other... until death do them join."
"Submission does not mean being weak or passive. It leads to neither fatalism nor capitulation. Just the opposite. True power resides in submission. A power that comes from within. Those who submit to the divine essence of life will live in unperturbed tranquility and peace even when the whole wide world goes through turbulence after turbulence."
"Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same."
"If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new."
"A refrigerator is the opposite of a drug addict, because a refrigerator starts in a box and then moves to a house."
"But the real secret to lifelong good health is actually the opposite: Let your body take care of you."
"The problem is that, regardless of what our theologies tell us about the purpose of the clergy, the actual effect of the clergy profession is to make the body of Christ lame. This happens not because clergy intend it (they usually intend the opposite) but because the objective nature of the profession inevitably turns the laity into passive receivers."
"Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled."
"PowerPoint presentations, the cesspool of data visualization that Microsoft has visited upon the earth. PowerPoint, indeed, is a cautionary tale in our emerging data literacy. It shows that tools matter: Good ones help us think well and bad ones do the opposite. Ever since it was first released in 1990, PowerPoint has become an omnipresent tool for showing charts and info during corporate presentations."
"For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It's enough. I'm enough. My kids are enough."
"Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever."
"But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites."
"It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite."
