Joe Lonsdale Quotes

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

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

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

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.

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

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

Don't avoid extremes, and don't choose any one extreme. Remain available to both the polarities - that is the art, the secret of balancing.

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.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

The point is to unify the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses both.

They don't have to choose either/or. They can have their cake and mutilate it too.

If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.

The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.

The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at it's best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.

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

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.

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

The unnatural, that too is natural.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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