Jacques Derrida Quotes

We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.

I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.

I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

There's not one person in the world that's not a living, walking contradiction.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou should”, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

You can't take contradiction away. Part of the fun of it is that the contradiction never really quite goes away.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

I love that contradiction of being feminine but playing in the boys' treehouse. My whole life's been like that.

The tension of opposites: 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.

The world is full of contradiction.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,- The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

I may be a real bad boy, but baby I'm a real good man.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

Power is paradoxical.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.