-We are a mass of contradictions. Always trying to be more, yet trying to accept and love ourselves just as we are. Trying to accept the reality of the human experience while knowing that we are also spiritual beings.

We suffer, yet we can rise above our suffering. We experience loss, yet we feel love forever. We take life for granted, yet we know it does not last. We live in a world filled with less and more, with cycles of scarcity and abundance, big and small. If we can recognize these oppositions, we will be happier.

..think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.

Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person's heart.

He is like everyone else, a compound of strange and inexplicable contrasts, and this is what the writers of novels and plays will never understand; they make their characters all of a piece. But people are not like that. There may be ten different people in one man, and sometimes all ten appear within a single hour (Wednesday 7 December 1853).

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions - none more so than the most capable.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value

Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It's as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace.

All modern systems are riddled with contradictions.

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

Man is indeed a strange mass of contradictions. Here we are, microscopic creatures scuttling about on the surface of a minor planet circling round a second-rate star in one of half-a-million galaxies. In some ways our minds are so capacious and penetrating. We can judge the weight and composition of stars whose light started before man appeared on this earth. We can unveil the secrets of the nuclei which are so small that if we could put together as many of them as there are drops of water in the ocean they would together scarcely form a particle visible with a microscope. Yet we seem to be unable to order our own affairs so as to avoid exterminating one another. Perhaps the threat of this new weapon may in the end bring home to the various nations the overriding need of finding means, at no matter what cost and sacrifice, of reaching agreement without resort to force. We must pray that this will be achieved in time, for if it is not then the end of civilized life on this planet is at hand.

We are contrary creatures, us humans, but that isn’t something we need be afraid of, or even much troubled by. And if you make a list of those people who worship consistency, you’ll find they’re one and all tyrants or would-be tyrants. Ruling over thousands, or over a husband or a wife, or some cowering child. Never fear contradiction, Cutter, it is the very heart of diversity.

We are contrary creatures, us humans, but that isn't something we need be afraid of, or even much troubled by. And if you make a list of those people who worship consistency, you'll find they're one and all tyrants or would-be tyrants. Ruling over thousands, or over a husband or a wife, or some cowering child. Never fear contradiction, Cutter, it is the very heart of diversity.