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"The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?"
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"Nothing worldly will ever become the Self (the Soul). The Self [the Soul] will never become worldly. Both are separate things."

"To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can't. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn't want to be in the sun?"

"Sometimes to love people, I must completely avoid them. Sometimes, to be strong, I must completely fall apart. Sometimes, to create, I must completely destroy."

"You can't imagine what it's like to be torn between darkness and light- to be a traitor no matter what move you make. If my grandmother and Marissa died tonight, it would be because I had stayed in the darkness too long, flirting with the idea of being Cedric's consigliere. If that happened, I could never live with myself- but if Cedric gave me the bite as he planned, I would be forced to live with it forever. That was the worst hell I could imagine."

"You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown."

"The intellect shows profit-loss in all worldly things. It shows duality. The intellect is the mother of duality."
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"We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same."

"One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?,' she said, 'I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up."

"Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all."

"Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on."

"And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?' he said softly.'Assuredly,' she said, 'provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything."

"She had made reason and common sense her gods. She had allowed people who did not know what she knew or understand what she unstood to be her mentors."

"And I need you, my love,' he said. 'I need you so much that I panic when I think that perhaps I will not be able to persuade you to come back with me to Enfield. I need you so much that I cannot quite contemplate the rest of my life if it must be lived without you. I need you so much that-Well, the words speak for themselves. I need you.'To look after Augusta?' she said. She dared not hear what he was surely saying. She dared not hope. 'To look after Enfield? To provide you with an heir?'Yes,' he said, and her heart sank like a stone to be squashed somewhere between her slippers and the parlor carpet.'And to be my friend and my confidant and my comfort. And to be my lover."

"Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.Life itself had become a secret affair."

"But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong."
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