Sylvia Plath Quotes

An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

You can't have bad without good. You can't have right without wrong. You can't have fantastic without mundane. You need to experience all that to really earn the title of the film, 'Fantastic Four.'

We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.

no light no dark no you no me know light know dark know you know me

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

What darkness to you is light to me

Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there's but a hair's breath between them. It's all one in the end.

When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil.

Without the existence of the opposite, the concept has no meaning.

You cannot experience yourself as what you are until you've encountered what you are not

truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

Be the ugly one, look at the nice one.

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.

Put light against light - you have nothing. Put dark against dark - you have nothing. It's the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.

As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

When everyone sees good, then bad exists.

How could any of us truly appreciate our lives if we had nothing else to compare them to?

Things of which there is sight, hearing, apprehension, these I prefer.