“We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”

— Thomas Merton

Thoughts in Solitude (1956)
Context: Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

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Thomas Merton 92

Priest and author 1915–1968

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Perspective on incelness

“Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 36.

“When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

“To every woman rising above the tradition of silence, walking tall in a marginalized system…May we be them; may we know them, may we birth them… We’ve got the power?”

Ini Edo (1982) Nollywood actress

Source: https://abtc.ng/actress-ini-edos-motivational-words-to-all-women-will-melt-your-heart/

“…something can be so much more than the parts it took to make it, and why people need things around them that lift them above their lives and make them feel the miracle of living.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Flipped (2001)

“If we can see our difficulties, there is a way of resolving them, or the hope of a way.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

The Glass Forest (1986)

“See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 119 (note 2), in: 'Fumées dans la campagne', Edmond Jaloux

“All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

“[Government] control gives rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help…It makes them spoon-fed.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Delhi Diary (3 November 1947 entry), Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, (March 1948) pp. 68-70
1940s

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

“We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”

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Thomas Merton 92

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