I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Crime is a fact of the human species a fact of that specieas alone but it is above all the secret aspect impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Crime is a fact of the human species a fact of that species alone but it is above all the secret aspect impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.

We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

Say to all small and great, and that often, that fully, quickly and willingly, without grumbling and contradiction, they do all your commands that are not against God.

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment.

Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

I now add, farther, that the apostle's argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.

Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.

We have to acknowledge peace is in danger and mankind still has not realised the priority to be given to world dialogue versus armed contradiction and bloodshed.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.