Contradictions Quotes

Quotations list about contradictions, absurdities and absurdity citing George Orwell, Oscar Wilde and Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

    — George Orwell
    16
  • The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

    — Oscar Wilde
    15
  • Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

    — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    14
  • The world is a perpetual caricature of itself;

    at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

    — George Santayana
    10
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  • I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

    — Marcel Duchamp
    8
  • Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).

    — Walt Whitman
    7
  • When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

    — Simone Weil
    7
  • All concord's born of contraries.

    — Ben Jonson
    6
  • Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

    — Blaise Pascal
    6
  • People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.

    — Oliver Wendell Holmes
    5
  • Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

    — Groucho Marx
    5
  • The world is a contradiction, the universe a paradox.

    — Kedar Joshi
    5
  • Related Topics

    • absurdities
    • absurdity
    • ambiguities
    • theologians
    • conflicting
    • intuitions
    • contradiction
    • inconsistencies
    • axioms
    • discordance
    • contradicting
    • rectitude
    • condemnation
    • constraining
    • premises
    • discrepancies
    • disdain
    • confusions
    • contradictory
    • writings
    • discrepancy
    • incoherence
    • deceptive
    • omission
    • fallibility
    • apprehensible
    • dictators
    • contradicts
    • incongruity
    • contradict
    • revelations
    • philosophical
    • subjugation
    • unceasingly
    • subversion
    • incongruities
    • hypocrisies
    • heretic
    • distortions
    • enlarging
    • incompatibility
    • dichotomy
    • contradicted
    • doublethink
    • witnesses
    • doctrinal
    • hypocrisy
    • dichotomies
    • climactic
    • illogic
  • Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.

    It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

    — G. K. Chesterton
    4
  • Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

    — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    4
  • We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to aflict the world so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.

    — Martin Buber
    4
  • I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

    — Kim Elizabeth
    4
  • We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction;

    we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

    — Blaise Pascal
    3
  • I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

    — Georges Bataille
    3
  • You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings.

    However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

    — Bryant H. McGill
    3
  • The acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution.

    — Shekhar Kapur
    2
  • In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

    — Alfred North Whitehead
    2
  • I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat.

    everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large.

    — Charlie Chaplin
    2
  • Life is never free of contradictions.

    — Manmohan Singh
    2
  • The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

    — Winston Churchill
    1
  • Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

    — Thomas Hardy
    1
  • Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.

    — George Moore
    1
  • A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

    Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

    — Thomas Hardy
    1
  • We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

    — Friedrich Nietzsche
    1
  • He who comes from afar may lie without fear of contradiction as he is sure to be listened to with the utmost attention.

    — Proverbs
    1
  • Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.

    It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

    — Gilbert K. Chesterton
    1
  • The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

    — Thomas Merton
    1
  • Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death.

    — Paul Ricoeur
    1
  • Another key element of human ecology is the inviolability of human life, especially at its beginning and its end. The Holy See insistently proclaims that the first and most fundamental of all human rights is the right to life, and that when this right is denied all other rights are threatened. The assumption that abortion and euthanasia are human rights deserving legislative sanction is seen by the Holy See as a contradiction which amounts to a denial of the human dignity and freedom which the law is supposed to protect. A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.

    — Pope John Paul II
    0
  • They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

    — Samuel Johnson
    0
  • He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife.

    Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

    — Douglas Adams
    0
  • The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

    — Mikhail Gorbachev
    0
  • No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.

    — H. L. Mencken
    0
  • I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.

    — Lisa Alther
    0
  • What an antithetical mind! -- tenderness, roughness -- delicacy, coarseness -- sentiment, sensuality -- soaring and groveling, dirt and deity -- all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

    — Lord Byron
    0
  • Einstein is an analytical mathematician seeking to give a physical interpretation to the conclusions of his mathematical process. In this he is hampered by a load of contradictory and absurd assumptions of the school that he follows, which throws him into all manner of difficulty. Einstein has such a faculty for embracing both sides of a contradiction that one would have to be of the same frame of mind to follow his thought, it is so peculiarly his own. The whole Relativity theory is as easy to follow as the path of a bat in the air at night.

    — Jeremiah Joseph
    0
  • Even though I make those movies, I find myself wishing that more of those magic moments could happen in real life.

    — Jane Seymour
    0
  • How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

    — George Bernard Shaw
    0
  • What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

    — Roland Barthes
    0
  • To call a man evangelical who is not evangelistic is an utter contradiction.

    — G. Campbell Morgan
    0
  • One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us, and whereto our passions transport us; but those which by long habits are rooted in a strong and powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.

    — Michel de Montaigne
    0
  • Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual

    — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    0
  • Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

    — Malcolm Muggeridge
    0
  • Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

    — Erich Fromm
    0
  • Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.

    — Marquis De Sade
    0
  • 'All Mr. Pitt's sentiments were liberal and elevated. His ruling passion was an unbounded ambition, which, when supported by great abilities and crowned with great success, make (sic) what the world calls a great man. He was haughty, imperious, impatient of contradiction, and over-bearing; qualities which too often accompany, but always clog, great ones

    — Philip Dormer Stanhope
    0

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