contradiction

My darkest moments, my most fearful times, when faced, became my bravest.  At your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest you are suddenly lifted higher than you've ever been.  They all border one another, these opposites, and show how quickly we can be altered.

We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don't know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.

Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

We seek integrity in our lives not by ending our inner contradictions – an act that would call into question our prior learning – but by deluding ourselves that our undesired qualities can be transferred to others, who we can then target for punishment. 

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. 

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

"Whatever we fight, we shall strengthen, for the mere fact of fighting it is witness to our belief in it......Belief is but worship by degree. To fight what we worship is a contradiction in itself. Resistance of any kind  achieves the opposite of its intent."

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

Altruism is an inverted morality, a "morality" of death. It teaches man that his interests are opposed to the interests of everyone else and that the only "moral" thing he can do is to sacrifice his interests. This means that whatever is practical and beneficial for a man is "immoral," and conversely, that whatever is "moral" for him is impractical and destructive of his values.