Opposites Quotes

“The life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites”

“Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."”

“A light here required a shadow there.”

“Great is Youth--equally great is Old Age--great are Day and Night.Great is Wealth--great is Poverty--great is Expression-great is Silence.”

“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the”

“Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?”

“I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.”

“This principle of opposites is at the very root of Creation, which is divided between the rule of the King and the Queen; Night and Day; the One and the Varied; the Eternal and the Evolving.”

“Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.”

“Everything desires not like but unlike: for example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like receives like receives nothing from like.”

“Activity conquers coldness. Stillness conquers heat.”

“The heavy is the root of the light. The tranquil is the ruler of the hasty.”

“High and low rest on each other.”

“Heavy is the root of light.”

“Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.”

“It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest.”

“There is harmony in the tension of opposites, as in the case of the bow and lyre.”

“All things come into being by conflict of opposites.”

“The opposite is beneficial; from things that differ comes the fairest attunement; all things are born through strife.”

“Yin and yang, male and female, strong and weak, rigid and tender, heaven and earth, light and darkness, thunder and lightning, cold and warmth, good and evil...the interplay of opposite principles constitutes the universe.”

“The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”

“Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!”

“If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.”

“The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”

“How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?”

“Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.”

“Saints need sinners.”

“However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.”

“Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.”

“Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.”

“A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.”