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Duality Quotes


"The truth is, there is good and bad in everybody, in every nation, in every race, and in every religion. To hear someone say that all the people that belong to a certain country, race, or religion are bad - is extremely untruthful and makes the person making the statement lose credibility right away. We are all flawed and even nature is flawed. Nobody is perfect, and no country, race or religion is perfect. Duality and polarity are imprinted in everything in nature - in all humans, and even within ourselves. For example, there are those who are ignorant, and those who are wise."


"The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart."



"Besides, I seemed to hold two lives-the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter."


"I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other."



"Like-dislike, good-bad, profit-loss; who gave rise to all these dualities? The society did. As far as God is concerned, there is no duality. If there are grains of food on one side and excrement on the other, in God's eyes, they are both "material (matter). What does God say about this? "All are materials!"



"What are dualities? They are what creates the worldly life [sansaar]. And if one attains Liberation [moksha], he will be beyond dualities!"


"Life may be a bed of roses, but roses still have thorns."


"Only in duality consciousness we witness this-that thing. In reality, a unity consciousness runs as the very soul of every little thing."


"If its danger you seek, come on over. I covet tranquility but beget the tempest storm."


"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."


"Inside of every good person there is also something very wild."


"Fire can destroy everything, but it is also the most important creative force."


"There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine."


"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."


"I sighed again, tipping my head back. My skin was still flushed, whether from anger or adrenaline or both, and my dragon crackled and snapped in myriad different directions. I needed to calm down. I wished I had my board. It was impossible to stay tense while floating on the surface of the ocean, its cold, dark depths lulling you to sleep. The sea was fascinating. It always amazed me how calm and peaceful it was one moment, only to bear down on you a moment later with the power and savagery of a hurricane."



"If egoism is there, the benefit of the Self cannot be obtained and if the Self is there, the benefit of egoism cannot be obtained."


"A rose, no matter how beautiful, still has to contend with thorns."


"A thorn is a rose's friend but a gardener's enemy."


"There's no difference between a madman and a professor...it should be clear to you in the way they dress, act and think."



"Nothing worldly will ever become the Self (the Soul). The Self [the Soul] will never become worldly. Both are separate things."


"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."


"None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them."


"I live in two unique worlds, traveling between both with just the opening or closing of my eyes."


"People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox."


"I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."



"We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side."



"The intellect shows profit-loss in all worldly things. It shows duality. The intellect is the mother of duality."


"For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. So that I was never disappointed, so to speak, whatever I did, in this domain. And these inseparable fools I indulged turn about, that they might understand their foolishness."


"At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang."


"And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant."
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