Opposites Quotes

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
― Konstantin Josef Jireček

“If

"If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie,
Life would be delight,--
But things couldn't go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn't be I.

If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I'd be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn't be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,--
Yet they'd all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn't be we.”
― E.E. Cummings

“When you meet someone so different from yourself, in a good way, you don't even have to kiss to have fireworks go off. It's like fireworks in your heart all the time. I always wondered, do opposites really attract? Now I know for sure they do. I'd grown up going to the library as often as most people go to the grocery store. Jackson didn't need to read about exciting people or places. He went out and found them, or created excitement himself if there wasn't any to be found. The things I like are pretty simple. Burning CDs around themes, like Songs to Get You Groove On and Tunes to Fix a Broken Heart; watching movies; baking cookies; and swimming. It's like I was a salad with a light vinaigrette, and Jackson was a platter of seafood Cajun pasta. Alone, we were good. Together, we were fantastic.”
― Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me

“IN THE HANDS OF MAN

He who creates a poison, also has the cure.
He who creates a virus, also has the antidote.
He who creates chaos, also has the ability to create peace.
He who sparks hate, also has the ability to transform it to love.
He who creates misery, also has the ability to destroy it with kindness.
He who creates sadness, also has the ability to to covert it to happiness.
He who creates darkness, can also be awakened to produce illumination.
He who spreads fear, can also be shaken to spread comfort.
Any problems created by the left hand of man,
Can also be solved with the right,
For he who manifests anything,
Also has the ability to
Destroy it.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“Together, we form a necessary paradox; not a senseless contradiction.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“If we can stay with the tension of
opposites long enough —sustain it,
be true to it—we can sometimes
become vessels within which the
divine opposites come together and
give birth to a new reality.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

“As different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.”
― Michael Moorcock, The Elric Saga Part I

“But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”
― C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

“I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.”
― Betsy Lerner, Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories

“Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?”
― H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure

“A beam or pillar can be used to batter down a city wall, but it is no good for stopping up a little hole - this refers to a difference in function. Thoroughbreds like Qiji and Hualiu could gallop a thousand li in one day, but when it came to catching rats they were no match for the wildcat or the weasel - this refers to a difference in skill. The horned owl catches fleas at night and can spot the tip of a hair, but when daylight comes, no matter how wide it opens its eyes, it cannot see a mound or a hill - this refers to a difference in nature. Now do you say, that you are going to make Right your master and do away with Wrong, or make Order your master and do away with Disorder? If you do, then you have not understood the principle of heaven and earth or the nature of the ten thousand things. This is like saying that you are going to make Heaven your master and do away with Earth, or make Yin your master and do away with Yang. Obviously it is impossible.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“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.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Faith, in its most correct form, never removes responsibility; it removes fear of responsibility. The results are complete opposites with the greater saying, 'God's will is my delight.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“As contraries are known by contraries, so is the delights of presence best known by the torments of absence.”
― Alcibiades

“My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.”
― Lisel Mueller, Alive Together

“I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. Otherwise it is not rising to the heights but falling down. We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Experience is the opposite of education.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Niels Bohr wrote, ‘The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”
― Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

“وبضدها تتميز الأشياء”
― راغب السرجاني, فن التعامل النبوي مع غير المسلمين

“One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.
"Have I told you about the tension of opposites?" he says.
"Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.
A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“English: "Opposites should complement, not exclude."

Česky: „Protiklady se mají doplňovat, ne vylučovat.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“THE OPPOSITE OF DEFEAT IS A SHOW OF HANDS”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch

“The human brain and the past paradigm that has been so prevalent on Earth has set up many systems of behavior meant to continue to support enough cooperation to allow for survival…and just enough fear to continue perpetuating the idea that there is something to survive from.
Indeed, in order to have a friend, there must be a foe. In order for one to feel rich, others have to be poor. And in this paradigm of striking contrasts, it is important for you to decide on the specific identifications which make one person one thing and another person the other.”
― Gwen Juvenal, Our New Story: Guides in the Garden Volume 1