I always have sort of been someone who has contradictory parts, and I haven't tried to uncomplicate myself. I've sort of let things seem contradictory, and sometimes it really confuses people. I don't know if it's working all the time, but I'd rather do that than try to sell myself as one thing or another.

Emily Ratajkowski

And hence he must be invisible; for a spirit cannot be seen by the eye of man: nor is there any thing in this principle contradictory to reason or experience.

Adam Clarke

Experience Visible Us

I don't think he has a real concept of reality. To stand by some of the things that Donald Trump has said and for Mike Pence to say he's a devout Christian man is completely contradictory.

Adam Rippon

Trump Tory Think

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

Aja Naomi King

Time Learning Wing

I think intelligence basically can be in a way defined by the possibility of having two opposite ideas living together and at the same time functioning. That's why I think a smart script has two things living in the same place, and they're absolutely contradictory.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Time Intelligence Art

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

Ali Smith

World Us Tory

The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined.

Alice Oswald

You Whose Who

We've got a great team sport, but we harp on about individuals. It's a bit contradictory.

Alun Wyn Jones

Great Tory Team Sport

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

Amor Towles

Nature Very Us

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

Andrew Carnegie

Men Weakness Weak

I'm not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I'm - part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Power God Art

It was about a football program that brought in massive amounts of money. They're going to try to cover something up, because it's about money at the end of the day. That's clear. There's no ambiguity to that. Paterno is much more complicated and contradictory, and that's why he's interesting to me.

Barry Levinson

Money Why Use

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

Boy George

Great Funny You

Governing isn't as easy as you think. Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory - to balance the budget and cut taxes, for example. You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending combined.

Brian Baird

You Us Tory

You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

Bryant H. McGill

Men Life You

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

Carl von Clausewitz

War Intelligence Uncertain

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Charles Baudelaire

Life Art Two

Identity is as absurd and contradictory, I think - and certainly as mutable - as the human brain.

Chloe Benjamin

Tory Think Thin

The FBI's mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That mission is both dual and simultaneous - it is not contradictory.

Christopher A. Wray

Us Up Tory

When I first entered the corporate world, doing good and making money were seen as separate and contradictory threads. Challenging that notion set my career - and life - on a new course.

Dan Schulman

Money Life Good

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

Daniel Libeskind

Change Age World

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

David Antin

I like characters who are contradictory.

David Bergen

We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.

Don Winslow

I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.

Doug Liman

The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

E. L. Konigsburg

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

Edmund White

Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.

Eduardo Galeano

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

Edward Norton

The condition of sleep is profoundly contradictory. It is a precious good... but it is a good like none other, because to obtain it, one must seemingly give up the imperative to have it.

Emily Martin

I always have sort of been someone who has contradictory parts, and I haven't tried to uncomplicate myself. I've sort of let things seem contradictory, and sometimes it really confuses people. I don't know if it's working all the time, but I'd rather do that than try to sell myself as one thing or another.

Emily Ratajkowski

To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.

Emma Goldman

Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

Eugene Ionesco

Many investors understandably want to do good while also doing well. But the standards for ESG investing are often unclear and sometimes contradictory.

Eugene Scalia

To be a film-maker, you are almost forced to be surrounded by contradictions... You must have talents of so many different kinds - talents that are contradictory.

Francois Truffaut

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers.

Gary Wolf

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

George Orwell

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory.

George Saunders

Trickster stories are pleasurable, contradictory, annoying, abrasive. They're powerful, transformational acts of liberation because they are not nailed down to the real, to the representation of something in the world.

Gerald Vizenor

Contradictory precepts that have guided me for as long as I can remember: 1: I will live forever. 2: I will die tomorrow.

Howard Gardner

As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

Hugo Weaving

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

Irwin Shaw

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.

James Q. Wilson

I'm a human being who lives a flawed, contradictory life. And I have all sorts of problems and all sorts of successes.

Jamie Lee Curtis

I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art.

Jeffrey Deitch

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Joanna Scott

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

Jocko Willink

My father was a very contradictory man.

John Malkovich

God has levels of willing and delighting. He wills and delights in things in different ways so that approval and disapproval can coexist without being contradictory, without canceling each other out. I am making the case here for infinite complexity.

John Piper

Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

Julian Baggini

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

Junot Diaz