Ori Gersht Quotes

Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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

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.

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth ... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

Beautiful. And ugly. The world is always both.

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

All things come into being by conflict of opposites.

...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.

Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

Nature hath meal and bran, contempt and grace.

Be the ugly one, look at the nice one.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

If ice can burn, then love and hate can mate.

Every sin already carries grace within in, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. The Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?