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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"Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy? “No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well."
"The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends."
"Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?"
"The only good thing about religion is the music. Because nature is filled with balances and opposites, there are always exceptions to the overall rules, whether the overall rules are bleak or otherwise. If you propound a joyous theory of existence, I will find an exception to that. If I propound a bleak theory, someone will find a joyous exception. That's just nature being nature, I think, and I don't think it offers a lot of hope. It's sort of a respite along the way."
"excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous"
"I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice."
"Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."
"I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend."
"Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge."
"When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads."
"Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn."
"If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence."
"Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious."
"My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite."
"In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true."
"If [Barack] Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is."
"Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language."
"The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same."
"There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite."
"The national debate on health care once centered on improving access to quality care, yet the effect of Obamacare will be the exact opposite, resulting in the shameful degradation of care for the neediest individuals."
