Nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.
Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.
Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little,-diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God's mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness.
There are two contrary impulses which govern this man's brain-the one sane, and the other eccentric. They alternate at regular intervals.
Contrary to Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, I think that today in front of insatiable curiosity of the crowd, we would be better off to remain secret as long as possible, work in the denser part of shadows.
What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.
Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them.
Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.
My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them.
If a future Pope teaches anything contrary to the Catholic Faith, do not follow him.
It is the philosophers, theologians, and evangelists who are said to be filled with pride and bigotry due to the strong convictions that they represent. On the contrary, teachings can be either taken or dismissed; whereas voting is the only thing the average person can do to force everyone to live how they would prefer. A simple vote is among the largest yet most acceptable forms of bigotry, and that is because people play the card only when they feel that in doing so it conveniences themselves.
Commit no act that is contrary to love.
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
Contrary to reports, this boy is not a billionaire or going to be richer than any Beatle. . . and not just in the sense of money, by the way; the Beatles are untouchable - those billionaire reports are a joke.
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines; they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.
Delude not yourself with the notion that you may be untrue and uncertain in trifles and in important things the contrary. Trifles make up existence, and give the observer the measure by which to try us; and the fearful power of habit, after a time, suffers not the best will to ripen into action.