Contrary Quotes

1. "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "Be quiet or I'll be forced to flick you.""Ooh," he mocked. "The ultimate threat. I don't think I've ever been flicked before.""Are you suggesting I can't hurt you?""On the contrary, I think you have the power to do great damage."
Author: Alexandra Adornetto

3. "Faith, coming from the lack of faith: as much as the faith in oneself is demolished, as much the intoxicating faith in the salvation becomes strong and the desperate need to be save grows. The savior is that much great, as you're small, insignificant and unworthy. Anri Begrson writes: "It's not true that faith can move mountains. On the contrary, the main thing in faith is the ability not to notice anything, even the moving of the mountain in front of you. It's like a hermetic screen, fully impregnable to the facts."
Author: Amos Oz

4. "Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood's forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common."
Author: Antonio Negri

5. "Yes, free markets tend to produce unequal incomes. We should not be ashamed of that. On the contrary, our system is the envy of the world and should be a source of pride."
Author: Arthur C. Brooks

6. "It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,' whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,' whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory."
Author: Béla Bartók

7. "I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species."
Author: Bertrand Russell

8. "Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them."
Author: Christine De Pizan

9. "I do not at all have the mind of a bully... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me."
Author: Conrad Black

10. "If I were to envy any persons on this planet, it would be mountain hermits. You often hear old platitudes such as, 'Speak out. Be heard.' On the contrary, a breath of fresh air would be something like: 'Silence, think for at least 15 minutes, and then maybe speak out."
Author: Criss Jami

11. "When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough."
Author: Criss Jami

12. "And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics."
Author: David Korten

13. "I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view."
Author: Douglas Adams

14. "This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience - it looks for a way of being constructive.Love is not possessive.Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own ideas.Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage.Love is not touchy.Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails.Love knows no limits to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that stands when all else has fallen."
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

15. "I mean, contrary to popular belief, I'm actually not harboring a secret desire to grow up and become a bioterrorist."
Author: Elizabeth Norris

16. "My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

17. "Neither can such a doctrine argue: it simply does not understand that other doctrines exist, can exist, it simply does not know how to imagine an opinion contrary to its own"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity"
Author: G.H. Hardy

19. "Don't fall asleep yet. Contrary to popular belief, that's not where dreams get accomplished."
Author: George Watsky

20. "Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other."
Author: Haim G. Ginott

21. "I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves."
Author: Henri Barbusse

22. "Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; While others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before."
Author: Herodotus

23. "Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state it would not seem at all impossible/ Fantasy will perish and become Morbid Delusion."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

24. "Contrary to the media circus which portrayed politicians as all-powerful figures, Kentbridge knew from experience the vast majority of US Government officials – elected or otherwise – were puppets who only had the illusion of power."
Author: James Morcan

25. "The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word."
Author: Jean Paul Sartre

26. "Nothing cuts the nerve of the desire to pursue holiness as much as a sense of guilt. On the contrary, nothing so motivates us to deal with sin in our lives as does the understanding and application of the two truth that our sins are forgiven and the dominion of sin is broken because of our union with Christ."
Author: Jerry Bridges

27. "The angel told her, An honest man who committed a crime, you have no idea how many honest men have committed crimes, their crimes are countless, and contrary to popular belief these are the only crimes that cannot be forgiven."
Author: José Saramago

28. "If the members of the Church would search their scriptures more intensely in the spirit of humility and prayer, disputations would cease among us. It seems to be a difficult thing to eliminate from the minds of some of our brethren cherished notions that are contrary to the revealed word. Many questions have been answered time and time again by those who have the knowledge and are prepared to give the answers, yet the error continues to exist. . . . Why is it that some members of the Church grasp at every sensational rumor with apparent eagerness and delight? If the same eagerness were applied to the revelations already given and we would heed them soberly and in humility of spirit, all would be well. The Lord has promised the Church "commandments not a few, and revelation in their time," yet we have some clamoring for more revelation when we have failed to keep those already given."
Author: Joseph Fielding Smith

29. "I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person."
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

30. "Rules. Even as the world of phone and computer sex (and dominance) were full of their own rules, so was the new world of doing-it-for real. And some of these new rules, (OK, most of them, Robin admitted) were just as silly as the ones she had learned and followed before. Safe words, for example. Magic words that when said by the bottom, stopped a scene so that some kind of inconvenient or dangerous activity could be halted. Robin had nothing against the concept.........Having a code to use so that you're free to pull against the bondage or whimper "no, no, no" seemed to be a great idea. But having all these possible ways to orchestrate what was happening seemed, well, contrary to the point........I want to feel that I can't stop it. I want to be really mastered, taken over by someone who isn't goin to stop doing things because I'm not getting off on it. Someone who knows enough not to endanger me, unless that was what was intended........."
Author: Laura Antoniou

31. "On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began--that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

32. "But it will be asked: What is the force and power of the blessings and curses of men, even if these men be such giants as Plato and Aristotle? Does truth become more true because Aristotle blesses it, or does it become error because Plato curses it? Is it given men to judge the truths, to decide the fate of the truths? On the contrary, it is the truths which judge men and decide their fate and not men who rule over the truths. Men, the great as well as the small, are born and die, appear and disappear - but the truth remains. When no one had as yet begun to "think" or to "search," the truths which later revealed themselves to men already existed. And when men will have finally disappeared from the face of the earth, or will have lost the faculty of thinking, the truths will not suffer therefrom."
Author: Lev Shestov

33. "As a youth I got my jollies by confronting my professors with facts that ran completely contrary to what they were trying to ram into our thick skulls. His expressions of bafflement and anger had never failed to amuse me."
Author: Lia Habel

34. "They see nothing indecent in sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and indulge in it quite openly, in full view of everyone. The only exception was Socrates, who was always swearing that his relations with young men were purely Platonic, but nobody believed him for a moment, and Hyacinthus and Narcissus gave first-hand evidence to the contrary."
Author: Lucian

35. "A theory of personal resurrection or reincarnation of the individual is untenable when we but pause to consider the magnitude of the idea. On the contrary, I must believe that rather than the survival of all, we must look for survival only in the spirit of the good we have done in passing through.Once obsolete, an automobile is thrown to the scrap heap. Once here and gone, the human life has likewise served its purpose. If it has been a good life, it has been sufficient. There is no need for another."
Author: Luther Burbank

36. "Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance."
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure."
Author: Peter Marshall

38. "Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering."
Author: Philip Yancey

39. "The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

40. "You used your power to toss one rock at me?" he exclaimed, an almost comic note of incredulity in his voice. "On the contrary," I heard Dorian say pleasantly. "I didn't use magic for that. I just threw it."
Author: Richelle Mead

41. "We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such."
Author: Robert Anton Wilson

42. "And what makes humans so sure that thinking is the most important activity in the universe?...I on the contrary have never forgotten that first I existed and then, with a lot of difficulty, I learned to think." (p. 31)"
Author: Sabina Berman

43. "Contrary to his infallibly "honest" image, Abe wasn't above lying so long as it served a noble purpose."
Author: Seth Grahame Smith

44. "On the contrary, there is something pleasing about his mouth when hespeaks. And there is something of dignity in the way his trousers cling to those most English partsof him."
Author: Seth Grahame Smith

45. "In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies,on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains."
Author: Thucydides

46. "Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters")"
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

47. "It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow."
Author: Walter Kaufmann

48. "You hear more than enough of married people living together miserably. Here is an example to the contrary. Let it be a warning to some of you, and an encouragement to others. In the meantime, I will go on with my story."
Author: Wilkie Collins

49. "Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary."
Author: William Adams

50. "Contrary to what most people think, there is a Rich Daley under Mayor Daley."
Author: William M. Daley

Contrary Quotes Pictures