Burgess Meredith Quotes

I'm a walking contradiction. I am funny that way.

It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not.

Life is as horrifyingly frightening as it is hilarious.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

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

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

I know that I'm deeply, spiritually, profoundly philosophical and I also know that I'm about the flakiest person you're gonna meet.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

You can either grow old gracefully or begrudgingly. I chose both.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

I'm very sane about how crazy I am.

Being human is being a lot of things at the same time.

I am a deeply superficial person.

Be obscure clearly.

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 think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn't have room for any of that.

I am a simple man, though my wife says I am complicated. I'll trust her on that one.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.