Contradictory Input Quotes

The essence of Druidry is training the mind to both handle contradictory input and construct contradictory output.'
What? Oh. Well

'I continued to lecture a bit more, to disguise the fact that I was getting my ass handed to me by my dog. ~ Kevin Hearne

We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It's based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us. ~ Marcia Conner

How can one freeze and put their hands above their head at the same time? Do they teach cops to shout contradictory instructions at suspects at the academy for some sinister purpose? If I obeyed one cop, did the other cop get to shoot me for resisting arrest? ~ Kevin Hearne

What has been said of [God] is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man of common sense. ~ Baron D'Holbach

The word dialectic (in dialectical behavior therapy) means to balance and compare two things that appear very different or even contradictory. In dialectical behavior therapy, the balance is between change and acceptance (Linehan, 1993a). You need to change the behaviors in your life that are creating more suffering for yourself and others while simultaneously also accepting yourself the way you are. This might sound contradictory, but it's a key part of this treatment. Dialectical behavior therapy depends on acceptance and change, not acceptance or change. ~ Matthew McKay

the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people. Yet our conscious self also plays a vital role in maintaining our inner equilibrium: We need to register and act on our physical sensations to keep our bodies safe. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.
What does this contradictory pattern mean? There are several possible explanations, but one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

He described the securities - called Abacus - to a girlfriend: I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself 'Well, what if we created a "thing," which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?').15 ~ John Kay

Capitalism and socialism are two distinct patterns of social organization. Private control of the means of production and public control are contradictory notions and not merely contrary notions. There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

We often think ourselves inconsistent creatures, when we are the furthest from it, and all the variety of shapes and contradictory appearances we put on, are in truth but so many different attempts to gratify the same governing appetite. ~ Laurence Sterne

We have arrived at one of the central paradoxes of economics: uniformity amid diversity. Economists work with a plethora of models, pointing in all kinds of contradictory directions. Yet when it comes to the issues of the day, their views often converge in ways that cannot be justified by the strength of the available evidence. ~ Dani Rodrik

To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility. ~ Timothy Radcliffe

You have a lot more leeway to be contradictory playing a character than most of the scripts have in them. That's how all actors are. We have so many different sides of ourselves and we're so different, in meeting with different people. The audiences relate more to that and find that more believable. ~ Joel Kinnaman

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught ~ Hermann Hesse

Decide what you want and go for it, Fred, it's just a matter of will power!" I remember you saying that to me more than once.'

I did not recall saying this nor did it sound like anything which anyone would say more than once, assuming he had ever had the misfortune to say it at all, but I was glad that Freddie had such rosy memories. ~ Iris Murdoch

The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret). ~ Gregory Maguire

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory. ~ Peter Enns

The quest for the eternal, all-beautiful, all-true and all-pure, and the quest to be close to the poor and most broken people appear to be so contradictory. And yet, in the broken heart of Christ, these two quests are united. Jesus reveals to us that he loves his Father, and is intimately linked to him; at the same time he is himself in love with each person and in a particular way with the most broken, the most suffering and the most rejected. To manifest this love, Jesus himself became broken and rejected, a man of sorrows and of anguish and of tears; he became the Crucified One.

. . . Within the church, over the ages, one or the other aspect of this double mission has been emphasized, according to the call of God in different times and places, but both are also present. There are those who are called to the desert or the mountain top to see greater union with God through the Crucified One; and their prayer will flow upon the broken and the crucified ones of this world. And there are those called together to give their lives for and with the crucified and broken ones in the world; and they will always seek a personal and mystical union with Jesus so that they may love as he loves.

Every community and every family are called to live both forms of mission, but in different ways: to pray and to be present in a special way to the smallest and the weakest within their own community or outside it, according to their individual call. ~ Jean Vanier

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I first began to worry about this during the summer of 1989, when it began to be clear that string theory would not quickly lead to a unique theory of everything. Henry Tye, a string theorist from Cornell University, had told me of his computer program to produce new string theories. When you run Tye's program, you input a rough description of a universe you would like to describe. You tell it the dimension of spacetime, and something about how the world should look. It outputs all the string theories it can construct that lead to the world you requested, one per page. ~ Lee Smolin

The institution of marriage would be damaged. Ideologically, marital morality must be kept intact, in spite of the contradictory facts of sexual life, because marriage is the backbone of the authoritarian family, which in turn is the breeding ground for authoritarian ideologies and character structure. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you. ~ Andre Aciman

Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" - objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": - in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing. ~ Marie Stopes

Wise people are able to give themselves gracefully to seemingly contradictory experiences, because they know that they belong to different seasons of life, all of which are necessary to the whole. Spring and winter, growth and decay, creativity and fallowness, health and sickness, power and impotence, and life and death all belong within the economy of being. ~ Sam Keen

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners - in this case, the venture investors - is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job. ~ Cal Newport

I used to do all my programming on a BBC computer. It was limited to 16 tracks, and you used the keyboard, not a mouse, to input, but I was using it so long, I got quite fast at it. ~ Vince Clarke

It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music. ~ Oliver Sacks

I designed all the characters, anyway, and Frank Doyle was doing all the writing. I didn't have any more input on what direction they were going to go with Josie. ~ Dan DeCarlo

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. ~ Max Porter

My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also though and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. "There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice," my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England. ~ Matt Haig

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding. ~ Jose Saramago

Always seek input from others to aide you in reaching the best possible decision for your business/start-up. This is due to entrepreneurship mostly being about taking calculated risks, and you will always create better strategies if more facts and information go into the decision-making process. ~ Luigi Wewege

However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic "body crystals," flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I'm small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time. ~ Sarah Vowell

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. ~ Irwin Shaw

In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep's words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women's lives and women's stories:
"I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth - the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept."

In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age - she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life - her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a "journal intime," or diary, of one woman's emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They're radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture - albeit one with flaws of its own - in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for c ~ Mick LaSalle

Be mindful that the world that you want to live in and that you need to live in needs you to create it; it needs your input. The world needs to hear what you have to say. The last word has not been spoken. ~ Beah Richards

Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances. ~ William Hazlitt

There's a lot of social input when you put these things out there. People's ideas cross with other people's thoughts. ~ Biz Stone

Sometimes it takes asking others for input to find out you have to ultimately look within yourself for the answers to the questions only you know the truth about ... we choose the information we share. So, the person giving feedback is limited in view and their perspective will only keep your view of the situation distorted. ~ C. Nzingha Smith

If something happened to Suzanne I don't think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I'd feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we've been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn't what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions. ~ Karl Pilkington

No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. ~ Paul Kurtz

Human evolution is essentially the progression of information gathering (knowledge) and consciousness, or the advancement in wisdom. A wise person is willing to learn at all stages of life by using their cognitive abilities open-mindedly to examine contradictory beliefs, and rationally meld various schools of thought into a living philosophy, developing over time a logical and systematic method to maintain and evaluate oneself in order to assist a person not merely survive but thrive. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean. ~ Ken Wilber

She just kept on criticizing me, but for contradictory reasons. ~ Giorgio Bassani