Famous Quotes & Sayings

Deb Caletti

You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.

Dido Armstrong

The older you get, the more you realize you're drifting toward a direction, and sometimes your significant other drifts into an opposite direction. You can't blame anybody for it.

Alexandra Roach

Transformations don't scare me: it thrills me to become the polar opposite.

Ben Gibbard

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can't stand us, and people who absolutely can't live without us. I'd rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.

C. S. Lewis

Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you'll react into the opposite one, and he's got you.

Stephen Jay Gould

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

Kurt Vonnegut

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

Orson Scott Card

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.

Ram Dass

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz said I have never known Allah May He be exalted except through the coincidence in Him of the opposites. 'He is the First and the Last, the Apparent and the Hidden.'

John Avlon

Politics follows the lines of physics: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

Carol Ann Duffy

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Charles Darwin

For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

David Bowie

For me a chameleon is something that disguises itself to look as much like its environment as possible. I always thought I did exactly the opposite of that.

Cecelia Ahern

at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.

Bernard Arnault

What we do in our group is the opposite of the bad effects of globalization. We produce in Italy and in France and we sell to China, when usually it's the opposite.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruellest of sufferings. For, notwithstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

Dinah Sheridan

What a thrill it was to play opposite Maurice Evans in this brilliant, dazzling musical, based on the life of two of the greatest personalities in stage history.

Derek Sivers

I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn't even know we had and realize that the opposite may also be true.

Derek Sivers

Let’s never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.

Cindy Sherman

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't.

Cindy Sheehan

The opposite of good is not evil; it's apathy.

Debbie Ford

There is no quality that we respond to in another that we lack. It might be hidden behind some bad behavior or an old, outdated shadow belief that says we are the exact opposite of what we are seeing in the other person. But I promise you that if you are attracted to a quality in someone else, no matter how great, it also exists inside of you.

Douglas Adams

But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment." I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod,"nothing but a gnab gib." A what?" Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy.

Douglas Adams

The moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.

Craig Newmark

I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite.

Anthony Jeselnik

The opposite of sad is down's syndrome.

Ann Coulter

Here's a foolproof method for keeping America safe. Always do the exact 180-degree opposite of whatever [Jimmy] Carter says, as quickly as possible.

A. A. Milne

When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.

Alexander McCall Smith

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

Alexander McCall Smith

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

A. R. Rahman

Certain things are done intentionally opposite - like there's no sound at the end or synthesizers or all that stuff. Anything that drowns the movie, no. Anything that makes you sit up and watch it, yes. So, some are expecting a very sad theme going on.

A. S. Byatt

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.