Joe Lonsdale Quotes

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth ... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

The unnatural, that too is natural.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

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.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

In the affairs of men, there always appears to be a need for at least two things simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be incompatible and to exclude one another. We always need both freedom and order

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

I'm all about polarities and juxtapositions.

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

There's light and dark in all things, you know?