Dissonance Quotes

“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When we lose our integrity, we fail socially and, above all, emotionally because we must struggle with shame, dissonance, and creeping awareness of becoming a stranger to ourselves. ("The Power and the Glory")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“This is the greatest mystery of the human mind--the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.”
― John Steinbeck , Sweet Thursday

“Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“She’s confident in her abilities. But that’s not where I hit her. It’s called dissonance. You believe one thing deeply enough that it’s central to your identity. Then something, me, steps in to challenge that belief. It’s a hell of a leap of faith to go from believing something and understanding how much of the world works, to saying ‘I don’t know’. Some deny, and you can get stupid-as-hell behaviors from those who see something plain as day but deny it because it conflicts with something they believe. Some get angry, some distract themselves until they can figure out how to deal with it… but very few will turn around and throw themselves headlong into more questions. More dissonance.”
― wildbow, Twig

“Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Dissonance is as fatal in ailments of the mind as it is in those of the body.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-La-Morte

“A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“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

“You have a consistent character yourself and you wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are. For instance you despise public service because you want work always to correspond to its aims, and that never happens. You also want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide––and that doesn't happen either. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If you could imagine dissonance assuming human form - and what else is man? - this dissonance would need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 163. (p.154)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He had very few doubts, and when the facts contradicted his views on life, he shut his eyes in disapproval.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

“Rather than adjust his expectations in the face of disappointment, he (Jefferson) tended to bury them deeper inside himself and regard the disjunction between his ideals and the worldly imperfections as the world's problems rather than his own.”
― Joseph Ellis

“The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.”
― Ellen Cushing

“To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Consider yourself and the cello. As you play the music moves out to the listener, and also enters the core of your own being, for somehow you are tuned to the cello. Well, I am persuaded that this is because you are a chord. I am a chord. Our DNA dictates our physicality-made up of billions of little notes-on a basic level. Add to that our geography, background et cetera, and you have your original score. Life is the layering of chords, but the underlying one that we are will never change. This brings us to string theory and love. Our personal chord resonates with the personal ones of others, and sometimes we encounter another person who is completely harmonious with us. It is a dominant, overwhelming attraction on the DNA level. However, such a person can appear to be our opposite-and that's where this 'opposites attract' notion comes from-because they have tuned their chord in a different way. In reality, we are attracted to the person we have chosen not to become, an alternative adjustment to a chord that is nearly the same as our own. The clashing portions of the chords sounding together advance the richness of it. So when you make love you aren't expressing emotions or showing affection, you are merging melodies. You are players in the same symphony.”
― Sarah Emily Miano, Encyclopaedia Of Snow

“Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don't chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before. -- Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs”
― Stephen Batchelor

“All things need some degree of order; of substance, form and structure. Show me a storm or the most beautiful day without form, and I’ll show you chaos and dissonance that is not unlike a symphony of wailing scorched cats.”
― Duane Hewitt

“I think about the half notes of dissonance, between what I hear and what someone else hears, and those moments where the world is so cold, and when someone reaches their hand out to you. In those symphonic, connected moments where another soul joins you and feels what you feel, and you can breathe again. Like right now.”
― Bill Konigsberg, The Music of What Happens

“The years of life attain such a journey that no one knows where it ends; therefore, travel and avail it, in harmony, not in dissonance.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“I sometimes think the entire human species is just a fucked-up tapestry woven out of little particles of prolonged sadness, living next to one another in sustained dissonance, reacting to each other and to the bitter truths of the Universe, replicating themselves and their sorrow on and on and on, with no end in sight save for the virus that finally wipes us and our grotesque dysfunction from the surface of the planet once and for all.”
― Michael Vito Tosto, Elsewhere and Otherwise: Essays

“Depression is what naturally occurs when the conditions of reality do not match our misguided expectations, when the fruition of what we think ought to characterize existence fails to manifest. It’s the ensuing dissonance we feel when what we believe should be falls short of what is.”
― Michael Vito Tosto, Elsewhere and Otherwise: Essays

“However, it is on the grand scale of cities like Amsterdam or Bruges and towns like Goslar that the archetypal contest between order and anarchy is played out with gusto. They are a kind of parable, externalising the triumph of order and harmony over dissonance, remembering that harmony depends as much on clash as correspondence.”
― Peter F. Smith, The Dynamics of Delight

“Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Perhaps the greatest lesson of dissonance theory is that we can't wait around for people to have moral conversions, personality transplants, sudden changes of heart, or new insights that will cause them to sit up straight, admit error, and do the right thing. Most human beings and institutions are going to do everything in their power to reduce dissonance in ways that are favorable to them, that allow them to justify their mistakes and maintain business as usual. They will not be grateful for the evidence that their methods of interrogation have put innocent people in prison for life. They are not going to thank us for pointing out to them why their study of some new drug, into whose development they have poured millions, is fatally flawed. And no matter how deftly or gently we do it, even the people who love us dearly are not doing to be amused when we correct their fondest self-serving memory ... with the facts.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.”
― Charles Ives

“Sometimes it feels easier to change our beliefs about God rather than do the emotional, spiritual, and physical work necessary to explore the dissonance.”
― Ashley Elliott, I Used to Be ___: How to Navigate Large and Small Losses in Life and Find Your Path Forward

“Son, those sentiments still sing the same to this very day. Why are you trying to change the tune when its off key? There's no harmony here. Ring the bell elsewhere for your unruly reasoning.”
― Daniel Taotua

“You can wrap a shotgun in flowers, but that doesn't make the blast less lethal.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home