Coexistence of Opposites Quotes

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

Nature is harmony in discord.

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.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

You can't have an up without a down. You can't have a left without a right. This is duality. If you have a problem, you must already have the solution. The question is, do you really want the solution, or do you want to perpetuate the problem?

I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

Small moments can coexist with big moments and even back right up against each other.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.

It might be, gentlemen, that the lion and the lamb would be down together, but ... the lamb would be inside the lion.

And remember, it's also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

People are complicated; you put two of them together and it's generally a mess, but hopefully a beautiful mess.

For whatever reason, the films I gravitate towards do have these strange sort of tonal balances to them... I kind of realized on '50/ 50' why I liked these blending of tones, because I think it's kind of what life is like: funny one minute, sad the next, scary the next.

You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand

I have a normal life and I have this glamorous life, but to me it's two different things.