Pema Chodron Quotes

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The color of truth is gray.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

There are gray areas in everything.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

We don't live in a world that's black and white.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

I think it's common to want to label things as all good or all bad and what I'm finding is that every situation, person, event, has good and bad in it.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

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

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

You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

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?'

I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.