“Every one of us is a walking set of contradictions. The great among us are no different, except that their contradictions tend to run to extremes. ”

“The further away from something we are, the more we tend to mistrust it, Peter. we dislike the unknown, we reject anything alien to us: people with views that contradict ours, societies that are run along very different lines.”

“What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

“We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.”

“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”