John MacDonald Quotes

I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.

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

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

A light here required a shadow there.

This principle of opposites is at the very root of Creation, which is divided between the rule of the King and the Queen; Night and Day; the One and the Varied; the Eternal and the Evolving.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The rose and thorn, the treasure and dragon, joy and sorrow, all mingle into one.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

The art of living is based on rhythm - on give & take, ebb & flow, light & dark, life & death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good & bad, right & wrong, yours & mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life,' metamorphosis.

The light and the dark are the same. They share. They really do rub up against each other, and they are extraordinarily familiar with each other. They are actually friends.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.

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.'

If you love large, you've got to hurt large. If you've got a lot of light, you've probably got an equal amount of darkness.

The principle of subordination is the great bond of union and harmony through the universe.