Dualism Quotes

“If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse.”
― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

“To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.”
― John E. Remsburg, The Christ

“I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“Most ecofeminists reject dichotomies and hierarchies as alien to the natural world – nature is interconnections.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“If, these people worshiped one God alone, and no other, they would probably have some valid argument against the worship of others. But they pay excessive reverence to one who has but lately appeared among men, and they think it no offence against God if they worship also His servant.”
― Celsus

“To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...?”
― Gregory Maguire

“Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Everything is dual (two) in the world: high-low, good-bad, hot-cold, question-answer. A seeker who has found the answers of his questions is still stuck in the duality or two-ness. He has still not experienced oneness which is beyond questions and answers.”
― Shunya

“A laptop is a good example of what this universe is all about. When it is folded, it is nothing. There is no movement and no visuals. When you unfold it, two parts emerge: the keyboard part and the screen part.

The screen part is the outer world or the Existence. That is where your body exists. The keyboard part is inner world or the non-Existence. That is where your soul (non-)exists. A soul often gets so attached to the visuals on screen that it forgets about the keyboard or the inner world.”
― Shunya

“Life is full of dualities: night and day, black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, birth and death, love and fear. You can't have one without the other. It takes two to create the magnetic pull to generate energy in the first place. This is the natural order: that everything, in contrast, hangs in perfect balance.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

“He has an unusual way of looking at the world. He does not divide everything into tidy halves the way most people do. Right and wrong, good and evil - he sees beyond absolutes, like all great leaders.”
― Heather Fawcett, Even the Darkest Stars

“The point is that we can dissolve the sense of dualism between us and them, between this and that, between here and there, by moving toward what we find difficult and wish to push away.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Even now I know that I am not a hero of my own story”
― Kaelyn Rene

“Great mathematical geniuses such as Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Fourier and Gödel all recognized that mathematics is ontological. ‘Real’ mathematics is ontological mathematics that tells us about reality; it’s not abstract mathematics that has no connection with reality, as most professional mathematicians seem to believe. Reality is 100% mathematical. Above all, Fourier mathematics is the key to the mystery of the universe because it’s the answer to the mystery of mind and matter and how they interact. Mind is the Fourier frequency domain and matter is the inverse Fourier spacetime domain, and the two domains are absolutely tied together in feedback loop. The universe, finally, is a hologram and holography is all about Fourier mathematics.”
― Mike Hockney, The Omega Point

“I think that the old-young polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior.”
― Susan Sontag

“In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind.

Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups.

A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Dualism is an isolating sense of separation, a feeling of being fully on one's own in life, unconnected to others, to the natural world, to the whole of reality. Overcoming dualism is the cure for suffering.”
― Dale S. Wright, Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra

“Despite their illusive nature, twilight never fails to provide a magical quality to the day—a transitional space between day and night, light and dark, head and heart...”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning

“The sex of a person lies more in his mind than in his body, or to express myself in more medical terms, it lies more in the brain than in the genitals.”
― Magnus Hirschfeld

“To call ourselves historical beings is to say that we are constitutively capable of self-transcendence, becoming at one with ourselves only in death.”
― Terry Eagleton, Materialism

“Our economic system is structurally dependent on growth, it serves the interests of the most powerful factions of our society, and it is rooted in a deep-seated world view of dominion and dualism that goes back some 500 years. This edifice will not yield easily. Not even to science.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“I nodded sagely, pretended to be making some sort of useful observation of the white surfaces and clear tubes and gray machines that I lacked the doctorates to comprehend, and thought about dualism. Good and evil. Man and woman. All forces and powers and principalities equal and opposite. The notion that we live in a universe with that kind of comforting, obvious ledger. That is the kind of thinking that makes people believe that the moon controls menstrual cycles, that vaginas are magic, when all they really are is blood and tissue and, in the instance of one particularly ugly case that I drink to forget about, teeth. They're impressively versatile and under the right circumstances a lot of fun, but no more or less miraculous than your twenty-ninth vertebra.”
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous

“He saw everything external as being separate from himself, and fell into the trap of dualism, rather than seeing the mind as a mirror with the capacity to reflect without dualistic notions of good and bad. Her home is the first thought before we solidify what we perceive, when we let perception in without putting all impressions into pigeonholes.”
― Tsultrim Allione, Women of Wisdom

“The irony lies in the dagger he holds, ghameh. A homonym for both dagger and sorrow in Farsi.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“There is no good or evil in this world, only people trying to survive in the best way they know how, and sometimes, this means doing things that are horrific.”
― Rove Monteux

“At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I'd never be able to let go.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Sessiz Ev

“Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex?”
― Jennie June, Autobiography of an Androgyne

“I am the angel who dwells in the point where lines fork. Whoever retraces the way of divided things encounters me, whoever descends to the bottom of contradictions runs into me, whoever mingles again what was separated feels my membraned wing brush his cheek!”
― Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies

“Since we cannot think from a different frame of mind or perception except the one given to us by nature and established paradigms, we can hardly rationally comprehend where this dualism's secret lies or that there is no absolute dualism.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE