Cyrano de Bergerac Quotes

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Where white is black and black is white, I won.

Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.

I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself.

Those who deny the existence of the truth postulate the truth of their denial and plainly contradict themselves.

All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt: We called the chess-board white-we call it black.

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

That’s the thing about life, he knew. There was always a but.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

For me, love is the never-ending question. It is confusing. It is the answer, but it is also inundated with contradictions and complications.

I don't trust white critics' judgment about most things that deal with black life, particularly when a black person is the creator.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.