Brennan Manning Quotes

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.

How can someone so wonderful do something so terrible?

Deep down, I happen to be very shallow.

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

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.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

I am a living contradiction.

It's a weird dynamic - I guess there is a fine line between hope and sadness. Sometimes you can be feeling both at the same time.

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?

I hate, and yet must love the thing I hate.

People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.

Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away.

I'm a Gemini, so I'm very dual. I love something and I hate it at the same time, so that probably comes out in the lyrics.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

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

I'm talking about intellectually and emotionally challenging, but at the same time it's actually not that challenging. So there's this dichotomy.

I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all: I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

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'm a combination between extreme insecurity and extreme confidence.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.