A Paradox Quotes

#1. Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Charles Caleb Colton

#2. Rain never falls on a cloud.

Marty Rubin

#3. When I moved to the United States [from Asia] in 2001, I experienced a more rigid concept of gender, but somehow I was allowed to change my name and my gender marker. Why is there that paradox? How do I get those two things to be the same?

Geena Rocero

#4. They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone.

Billy Joel

#5. It's a wonderful paradox: only when you have a changeless sense of who you are, can real changes take place. It is the ground of your absolute value and everything that is truly worthwhile.

Ilchi Lee

#6. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery

#7. A totally healthy actor is a paradox.

Vittorio Gassman

#8. A knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of all of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine, the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots, and the path of paradox lies along the blade of the knife--the only path worthy of the mind without fear. . . .

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#9. Novikov self-consistency principle, which states that any event that would cause a paradox has a zero probability of happening.

John McWilliams

#10. Football is a sport of paradox. It requires reaction, not reflection. Yet you must use your mind to calculate, to anticipate - to think and not think at the same time.

Dhani Jones

#11. Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.

Jacques Barzun

#12. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?

Tom Robbins

#13. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you.

Blaise Pascal

#14. An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

Paul Samuelson

#15. Florida is a paradox that way, one of the youngest states, yet with some of the oldest European settlements. And this particular section of the northeast shore was home to a couple of the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish and French fortifications.

Tim Dorsey

#16. The strange paradox of science is that it does not explain reality, it explains our fantasy. It is a beautiful thing.

Laren Grey Umphlett

#17. The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#18. It's such a paradox. You come from this place where you want fame; you don't want to be bourgeois, but you want to be successful. You want to be accepted, but you also want to be going against the grain. You want to be on the outside, but you want to be on the inside.

Dan Colen

#19. It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

Hugo Black

#20. Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.

Thomas M. Disch

#21. For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

Robert Browning

#22. The paradox of life lies exactly in this: its resources are finite, but it itself is endless. Such a contradictory state of affairs is feasible only because the resources accessible to life can be used over and over again.

I.I. Gitelson

#23. New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.

Charles Emmerson

#24. Two identical things do not exist at all, so there is no need to be 'somebody.' You just be yourself, and suddenly you are unique, incomparable. That's why I say that this is a paradox: those who search fail, and those who don't bother, suddenly attain.

Rajneesh

#25. The paradox of questioning is that simple questions can lead to detailed, on-target answers, but complicated questions get you single-word answers from a subject who doesn't want to talk, and unrestrained answers from a person who does.

James Pyle

#26. At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.

Michael Moorcock

#27. At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.

William Poundstone

#28. If collapse is anything, it is a planetary immersion in the maelstrom of
paradox. Unless we understand and honor paradox, we will end up, like all of
the mainstream media on earth, asking all of the wrong questions.

Carolyn Baker

#29. Two paradoxes are better than one they may even suggest a solution.

Edward Teller

#30. To this day the Oriental Orthodox Church asserts that after the incarnation Jesus was "one united dynamic nature": "at once God and human . . ." Ultimately, a Divine mystery - a paradox.

Amos Smith

#31. A great paradox which should God make us understand, we will weep, laugh, wonder and ponder is the paradox of human ignorance

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#32. But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.

Jane Addams

#33. It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.

Erica Jong

#34. At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.

Thomas Jefferson

#35. It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.

Andrew Ferguson

#36. Our common status made talk easier. [...] She knew the paradox of being stared at and not seen. She knew what it felt like to walk out of a movie theater feeling ashamed or erased.

Alex Tizon

#37. The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

Colin Wilson

#38. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.

Freeman Dyson

#39. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

Barry Lopez

#40. He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

William Manchester

#41. I mention a paradox of psychiatry: mental illness is recognized by the patient's distorted thoughts, but treatment is largely indifferent to their content. (104)

Michael Greenberg

#42. By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us.

Edwin Markham

#43. The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.

Wendy Mogel

#44. The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.

Sydney J. Harris

#45. It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day.

Brad Henry

#46. The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

Madeleine L'Engle

#47. When a paradox is widely believed, it is no longer recognized as a paradox.

Mason Cooley

#48. Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science.

William Poundstone

#49. A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.

Banksy

#50. And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attack. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it!

Tom Peters

#51. A paradox: The things you don't need to live - books, art, cinema, wine, and so on - are the things you need to live.

Matt Haig

#52. Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

Jeremy Northam

#53. War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?

Thomas Mann

#54. Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

T. S. Eliot

#55. Knowing that a paradox is required for life as we know it to exist allows me to give up trying constantly to understand it and instead just feel it and enjoy it.

Richard Brancatisano

#56. Acts of violence
Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death
and the meaninglessness of killing.

Dag Hammarskjold

#57. Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.

Russell Brand

#58. There's a paradox in every paradigm.

Ani DiFranco

#59. I'm a real paradox. Because I'm a very serious person, and I take my work very seriously. But I wrap it up in a court jester and a clown and make people laugh and make them feel good about themselves.

Richard Simmons

#60. Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Salman Rushdie

#61. Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? - John Sulston Scholars

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#62. That's the point of Zeno's Paradox, isn't it? Whatever your goal, you're never more than halfway there.

Sam A. Patel

#63. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.

China Mieville

#64. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

Vladimir Nabokov

#65. The paradox is the seed of truth. This germ just needs a fertile ground to flourish and bear fruit.

Leo Errera

#66. an attempt at effortlessness is a paradox at the very least.

Ainslie Hogarth

#67. It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Herbert Hoover

#68. The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.

Raymond Williams

#69. I've seen the future all my life,' she says. 'It tends to work as a paradox, in my experience. You find out something is going to happen, and then you do it because you know that's what happens. It's a chicken-or-the-egg scenario.

Cynthia Hand

#70. If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.

Henry Adams

#71. Jesus brings mystery, paradox, and tension - rarely did someone get a straight answer out of Him

Mike Erre

#72. Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

Vince Lombardi Jr.

#73. The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat ... sleepy ... piggish. But in this land ... it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.

Stephen King

#74. Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.

Geoffrey Wood

#75. It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.

Ariel Gore

#76. Grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons - Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.

Joyce Carol Oates

#77. Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

Chuck Palahniuk

#78. It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness

Glenn Close

#79. The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox.

Kedar Joshi

#80. To be terrified and yet unafraid seems a great paradox of worship, but when one has tasted it, the notion of an eternity spent terrifyingly unafraid like that is remarkably appetizing.

Ben Palpant

#81. 'The Larry Sanders Show,' it's actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn't exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don't think the show was.

Garry Shandling

#82. The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain - although it may think it can - the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

Stephen King

#83. Paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.

G.K. Chesterton

#84. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

Madeleine L'Engle

#85. You cannot do silhouettes in fantasy. Ah, no, you must be faithful. It is, the art, a, what you call, paradox. It is always that you must be simple, and then, if you are simple, you will stimulate the imagination of the observer.

Ugo Mochi

#86. A street is a story in asphalt - so it's a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city's psyche.

Steve Erickson

#87. Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.

James Gleick

#88. Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational.

Frank Herbert

#89. A paradox is something which tests your spiritual eyesight.

John Bailey

#90. A paradox is a storm that rains on itself.

Shannon L. Alder

#91. He was the second snowman to be melting away before her eyes, only this one was different. It was a paradox. The colder he became, the more he melted.

Markus Zusak

#92. It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

David Brin

#93. The paradox is that I have no love for myself as a human being, but I have immense pride in the music I make, and I believe it has an important place. Others do, too, and the thousands of people with Morrissey tattoos certainly proves something.

Morrissey

#94. Memory is the same as water. It is a still lake bathed in moonlight, a vast ocean, a violent river ready to carry you away. It can calm you or it can harm you; it is both more powerful and weaker than you'd think. It is a paradox.

T. Greenwood

#95. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.

Denis Donoghue

#96. That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.

Tom Rachman

#97. It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.

Gore Vidal

#98. If you pursue the truth far enough you always wind up in the land of paradox. You reach a point where the apparent truth divides into two opposing truths and then you have to try to reach beyond them to grasp the ultimate truth, their synthesis.

Susan Howatch

#99. There is not a greater paradox in nature,
than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.

Laurence Sterne

#100. First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.

Boris Beizer