Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

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

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

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

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

I'm full of contradictions.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.

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.

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.

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.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

How can a man be so brave and so stupid, so gentle and so cruel, so warming and so detestable -- all at the same time?

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.

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

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

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.