Contradict Quotes

1. "Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast.Take the contradictionsOf your lifeAnd wrap aroundYou like a shawl,To parry stonesTo keep you warm."
Author: Alice Walker

2. "We must not contradict, but instruct him that contradicts us; for a madman is not cured by another running mad also."
Author: An Wang

3. "There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises."
Author: Ayn Rand

4. "The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."
Author: Carl Sagan

5. "I tell you what, Mr. Fledgeby,' said Lammle, advancing on him. 'Since you presume to contradict me, I'll assert myself a little. Give me your nose!'Fledgeby covered it with his hand instead, and said, retreating, 'I beg you won't!'... 'Say no more, say no more!' Mr. Lammle repeated in a magnificent tone. 'Give me your'--Fledgeby started-- 'hand."
Author: Charles Dickens

6. "I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert."
Author: Clayton M. Christensen

7. "You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there's some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other."
Author: David Mitchell

8. "All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard."
Author: Edward Norton

9. "I realized that cats make a perfect audience, they don't laugh at you, they never contradict you, there's no need to impress them, and they won't divulge your secrets."
Author: Elle Newmark

10. "There's only one lesson to be learned form life, anyway," interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement."What's that?" demanded Maury sharply."That there's no lesson to be learned from life."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

11. "The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times. . . . But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature."
Author: Ferdinand Cohn

12. "Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

13. "What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?"
Author: G.K. Chesterton

14. "The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. ... The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue. The prejudice is evident in the contradiction that some harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco) are legal while others, less harmful in some ways, are contraband. This has less to do with the innate danger of the drugs than with which populations are publicly identified with using the drugs. The white and wealthier the population, the more acceptable is the substance. And profit. If you have fear, prejudice, and ignorance, there will be profit."
Author: Gabor Maté

15. "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
Author: George Orwell

16. "You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!"
Author: Georgette Heyer

17. "We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls..."
Author: Gregory Maguire

18. "In his] mind, there was no contradiction between "I will jump into my grave laughing," appropriate for the end of the war, and "I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth," which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift."
Author: Hannah Arendt

19. "The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles."
Author: Harrison Birtwistle

20. "Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct."
Author: Haruki Murakami

21. "But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret's secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die."
Author: Jacques Derrida

22. "Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

23. "The word ‘slavery' and ‘right' are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish."
Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau

24. "Perhaps some of my hearers this evening may have occasionally heard it stated of me that I am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do so. I never met wth a question yet, of any importance, which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times: but once must do for this evening."
Author: John Ruskin

25. "Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humour of her Jew. Ken looked lika a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford laywer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns, but no mysteries. (...) He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine."
Author: John Updike

26. "Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified."
Author: Jose Ortega Y Gasset

27. "I didn't sleep with Brodick," she blurted out. "I have no need for a priest.""Yes, you did too.""Alec, it isn't polite to contradict your elders.""But, Mama...""Hush, sweetheart."Gillian glared at Brodick. He could easily correct this horrid misunderstanding if he would only offer a quick explanation. He wasn't inclined. He winked at her. "I didn't know a face could get that red," he remarked."Do explain," she demanded."Explain what?" he asked, feigning innocence.She turned to Judith. "We were camping...and it isn't what it sounds like...I did sleep, and when I awakened...they were all there...""They?" Iain asked."His soldiers.""You slept with his soldiers too?"
Author: Julie Garwood

28. "Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion."
Author: Kiran Desai

29. "With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says."
Author: Leland Ryken

30. "Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves."
Author: Louise Penny

31. "And in declaring true every theory that does not contravene the evidence of the senses, Epicurus does not blink the fact that the philosopher may arrive at more than one explanation for a given phenomenon—in some cases, even at explanations that are mutually exclusive or contradictory."
Author: Lucretius

32. "When our feelings and observations contradict, problems arise."
Author: M.H. Rakib

33. "For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths."
Author: Marcel Proust

34. "Look at the tyranny of party-- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty-- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes-- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing thier doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults nad licking the shoes of his Southern master."
Author: Mark Twain

35. "You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse."
Author: Marya Hornbacher

36. "The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there."
Author: Marya Hornbacher

37. "I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions."
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston

38. "The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the "cultural contradictions of capitalism"—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display today at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant there."
Author: Michael Pollan

39. "No one can know a false thing, one can only believe it with certainty until it is contradicted. (Page 7)"
Author: Orson Scott Card

40. "A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false."
Author: P.D. Ouspensky

41. "Paradox reconciles all contradictions."
Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor

42. "We made quite a crew, all talking at once, contradicting and sparring, a cacophony of affectionate arguing."
Author: Patti Smith Just Kids

43. "If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction."
Author: Peter Kreeft

44. "Rose, oh pure contradiction, joyof being No-one's sleep under so manylids."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

45. "The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the "happiness of mankind" as its promise."
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr

46. "Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences."
Author: Richard Ford

47. "What New York City football team did Joe Namath play for?""The New York City Yankees!"A roar of laughter went up from the crowd, accompanied by more than a few loud groans. Bobby Tom silenced them all with a glare. At the same time, the glitter in his eyes dared any of them to contradict her.When he was certain every person there understood his message, he turned back to Gracie and gathered her into his arms. With a tender look and a gentle brush of his lips, he said, "Exactly right, sweetheart. I had no idea you knew so much about football."And that was how every last person in Telarosa, Texas, came to understand that Bobby Tom Denton had finally and forever fallen head over heels in love."
Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

48. "The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfill a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear's morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous and sometimes contradictory roles to play. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")"
Author: Thomas Ligotti

49. "Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules..."
Author: Umberto Eco

50. "In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)"
Author: W.H. Auden

Contradict Quotes Pictures