Top 75 Dialectic Quotes & Sayings

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic.

The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

The link between peace and stability on the one hand, and social and economic growth on the other, is dialectic. Peace, poverty, and backwardness cannot mix in one region.

The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism.

It was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people.

A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced -- it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress.

It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with us for as long as there's injustice, and that doesn't seem to be in short supply.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.

[Roots of terrorism] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.

They [root causes of terror] come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East - those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security.

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

I want a big man physically as well as intellectually. l want a man with the thigh muscles to give me a good frolic in the sack, the kind who'll tear hell out of a thick steak, and yet who can go to the ballet with me and discuss Hegelian dialectic and know what the hell he's talking about.

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Rhetoric completes the tools of learning. Dialectic zeros in on the logic of things, of particular systems of thought or subjects. Rhetoric takes the next grand step and brings all these subjects together into one whole.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic - you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn't always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don't.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.

A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

I never sat down and wrote, but what I do is kind of act as a dramaturge for the piece. I am sitting with the writers. I'm discussing ideas with the writers and concepts. We're debating and having a dialectic where we are taking a lot of different ideas and trying to synthesize them into the right idea. I'm very much a part of that process. That's my job as the director.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic.

The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.

Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.

Our own self-awareness arises not in the Cartesian cogito, but in our finding ourselves in relation to other beings in whom we both actively recognize and do not recognize our own subjectivity, in an inexhaustible dialectic.

Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them.

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.

There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?