Contrast Quotes

“You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you'd get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached.”
― Stephenie Meyer, The Host

“Because you don't notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“It takes darkness to be aware of the light.”
― Treasure Tatum

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life.

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage.

Dare to breach the surface and sink.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Nothing exists without its opposite.”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

“Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything.
Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore

“Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.

But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves. ”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“I don't really wanna know what makes you leave, or when you'll be back.
I just wanna know what will make me cry at your arrival.”
― Ade Santi

“I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.”
― Tom Holland, Lord of the Dead

“Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“She could see all of Ferenwood from here: the rolling hills, the endless explosion of color cascading down and across the lush landscape. Reds and blues: Maroon and ceruleans. Yellow and tangerine and violet and aquamarine. Every hue held a flavor, a heartbeat, a life. She took a deep breath and drew it all in.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore

“Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But--on the top of that--he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it.”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“If you're facing the worst, then your back is certainly towards the best. All that remains is for you to decide whether or not to make that 180-degree turn that will surely bring a sharp contrast to your life.”
― Dr. Anhad Kaur Suri

“The world separates. Night coagulates.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Her evident self-possession, though, seemed at odds with the sunglasses, the ends of which were chewed and discolored.”
― Sharon Bolton

“Yoga: once an exotic rite for mystics, now a suburban hobby in church halls and gymnasiums. Stretches, belly breaths and chants. Ancient (and awkward) poses with odd animal names, enjoyed by Lycra-clad mothers and post-matcha tea hipsters alike.”
― Damon Young, How to Think More About Exercise

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrick Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Even beneath the lively bloomed flowers of spring, always lie the dead fallen leaves of autumn.”
― Lakshya Chouhan

“Let's say a person says:
"I am the light. It's my desire to be a light unto the world: To shine a light wherever I go. To be the light among people who know me." - and so forth.

But if we decide that "I am the light" but we find ourselves in a place where there is nothing but the light...
Let's say that we're a candle in the Sun,
Well we're there all right, along with the 50 billion cajillion other candles, and we can know that we are the light, but we can't experience ourselves being the light.

And if it's our hearts desire to experience ourselves,
not just to know conceptually, but to experience ourselves, experientially -
if that's our heart's desire, we're going to actually call forth, or at least search around to see if anywhere in the contextual field, there is this thing called the darkness.
And if we find the darkness we will move toward it or even co-create it with those around us, who have the same desire to be the light, in order that we may experience ourselves as the light amidst the darkness.”
― Neale Donald Walsch

“We didn't come [to this life] only for the sunny days, the lollipops and roses! We also came for the silky dark nights, and the moonlight and the stars. We came for the soft veils of fog in the early mornings, and the rain painting circles in the pond... the hailstorms and the thunderclaps.”
― Elke Heinrich

“You came here [to this life] to enjoy the fullness of the creative experience. [Both smooth and rough patches]. In the process, any growth you experience adds to the growth of humanity as a whole.

What better way could there be for humans to evolve than in an environment of [contrasting experiences; dark and light] where free will stretches and pulls against rigid rules? This creative tension results in an inner urge to progress ever onward, ever upward, through winding curves and over the occasional whoop-de-doos.”
― Suzanne Giesemann, The Awakened Way: Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life