"All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding. Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind." Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing."
Opposites quotes
Opposites
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Opposites quotes (page 27 of 102)
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"As a general rule, do not kick the shins of the opposite gentleman under the table, if personally unaquainted with him; your pleasantry is liable to be misunderstood--a circumstance at all times unpleasant."
"Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives."
"I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite."
"There is harmony in the tension of opposites, as in the case of the bow and lyre."
"Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure."
"Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure."
"Beauty is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension: - that violence is no longer needed: that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly - that is what delights the artist's WILL TO POWER."
"I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks."
"People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour."
"I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument."
"As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way."
"...that left Francesca to slink into the chair opposite us. My feeling of superiority was short-lived, however, when she settled herself down and then crossed her legs. I didn't need a mirror to know my whole face had just turned red. With a hemline up to her thighs that gesture didn't leave anything to the imagination. Bones curled his fingers around mine and squeezed. His hand was still warmed from our contact moments ago. That's how fast he had to grab me again to keep me sitting where I was instead of yanking off my jacket to make her a pair of panties."
"Wrong way, Bones. The men's showers are in the opposite direction." I'll file that away with all the other information that doesn't pertain to me" was Bones' mocking reply."
"In World War II all these countries were completely against each other, complete opposite. Now we're getting them all together, through the idea of music."
"The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic"
"Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage."
"The diversity revolution [in the news media] was supposed to increase readership and enhance credibility. Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take the business to figure this out?"
"Marlon Brando was the absolute opposite of everything they told me he was going to be, which is that he was a testy guy who wants to know that he's in control of everything. But, that's not who Marlon was. No matter what he did, the most important thing on his mind was justice."
"I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world."