Top 100 A Paradox Quotes
#2. I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.
Peter Senge
#3. It's a paradox of modern times that the more we engage with social media in our virtual lives, the more antisocial we become in reality.
The School Of Life
#4. A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards Men?
Abigail Adams
#5. I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems ... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.
Madonna Ciccone
#6. My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.
Paulo Coelho
#7. Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.
Dana Spiotta
#8. It's a paradox of the true spiritual path, but the more conscious we become of what limits us, the more limitless becomes our life.
Guy Finley
#9. The main shift, you see, is from placing self at the center of our thoughts to putting others there. It is-what do you say?-a paradox that the more we can focus our thoughts on the well-being of others, the happier we become. The first one to benefit is oneself. I call this being wisely selfish.
David Michie
#10. Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.
Oscar Wilde
#11. It was too much happiness. Happiness puts you at too much risk - what if you were to lose it? Too much happiness is a paradox. It's a tragedy, even: getting something you've always wanted but being unable to keep it.
Jowita Bydlowska
#12. Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing.
Elbert Hubbard
#13. We must make believe that we are not what we are - contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox.
Thomas Ligotti
#14. It's such a paradox for them to say, "Oh, my God, I've thrown away my life," and continue to do that for the last month of their life. I shake them, physically shake them, and say, "What about now? What about now?"
Patch Adams
#15. The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
Ian Hacking
#16. Did you ever find that there is room between the two opposing rules of a paradox? That space between two almost opposite rules is the ground where I play and write.
Mu Xin
#17. To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.
Criss Jami
#18. The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.
Bridget Riley
#19. In the middle of the night, I saw chaos bleeding out of darkness and peace. Everything that was said and seen before seemed like a paradox. I saw the graves of lies breaking open and the truth crawling out silently into the cold hearts.
Akshay Vasu
#20. It is a paradox. The less you need someone's approval, the more you are able to love them.
Susan Jeffers
#21. All of the diseases that modern medicine declares war on never seem to touch any of those ninety-year-old farmers who have lived on bacon and eggs and butter for almost a century. The media, following current low-fat medical wisdom, calls that a paradox. We don't.
T.S. Wiley
#22. Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa's impoverishment.
Kwame Nkrumah
#23. Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
George Will
#24. to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.
Matthew B. Crawford
#25. Anyone who brings up gender in the workplace is wading into deep and muddy waters. The subject itself presents a paradox, forcing us to acknowledge differences while trying to achieve the goal of being treated the same.
Sheryl Sandberg
#26. Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.
Peter De Vries
#27. It is a paradox in the contemporary world that in our desire for peace we must willingly give ourselves to struggle.
Linda Hogan
#28. We are all the center of our own universe, and all of us in someone else's orbit. It's a paradox, but sometimes paradoxes are where the truth begins.
Claudia Gray
#29. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.
Amos Oz
#30. A paradox is simply an error out of control; i.e. one that has trapped so many unwary minds that it has gone public, become institutionalized in our literature, and taught as truth.
E.T. Jaynes
#31. My greatest sense of accomplishment has come from having two amazing sons, but it's also a paradox in that the times when I felt like the biggest failure have been times when I felt like, as a parent, I wasn't making the right decisions or succeeding in the way that I should.
Michael Franti
#32. This is a paradox of Whitefield's legacy: evangelicalism draws people of different churches while dividing those within the same denomination.
Melanie Ross
#33. One talks much more about the evil than about the good. That is a paradox. We should only talk about the good to lighten up our existence. Chase anxiousness/fear away for a moment before it sneaks back in again to our life.
Odd Nerdrum
#34. A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.
Alan Watts
#35. You're angry."
"Wow. You really are good."
"And guarded. You've been hurt, but you still crave connection. Understanding. So you throw yourself into risk in a calculated way. You're a paradox: a careful daredevil.
Leah Raeder
#36. You are not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.
David Leavitt
#37. We have a tendency to assume people are a unity, and thus good people all good, etc. But the fact that Hitler was good to dogs and children isn't a paradox.
Richard Posner
#38. It is a paradox. Life is that way. God designed it that way. I believe I met him once. He was full of mischief.
Christopher Pike
#39. A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.
Soren Kierkegaard
#40. The willingness to use force usually means you won't have to. It is a paradox because our modern culture conditions us to believe violence attracts violence, and violence never solves anything.
Marc MacYoung
#41. Is it not also a paradox that in our efforts to escape pain we all run immediately for salvation to human love where we find the greatest pain of all?
James Jones
#42. The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
Frank Miller
#43. To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.
Paul Theroux
#44. A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves.
Richard Rohr
#45. Do what we will, we are alone. The sooner we learn that, the better; and the more we are fit to be alone with ourselves, the more we are respectful to the individuality of others, and therefore the more we are fit to associate with our kind. This was a paradox she would have to learn for ourselves.
Howard Spring
#46. There's a paradox to most things in life. Acting is often dressing up in frocks and chasing your ego, but that doesn't mean you don't take it seriously.
Colin Firth
#47. If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.
Virginia Woolf
#48. Modern literature is a north-east wind
a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.
Thomas Love Peacock
#49. As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.
Felix Dennis
#50. It is a paradox to say the human body has no 'limit.' There must be a limit to the speed at which men can run. I feel this may be around 3:30 for the mile. However, another paradox remains - if an athlete manages to run 3:30, another runner could be found to marginally improve on that time.
Roger Bannister
#51. You know," King said, "I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down.
Stephen King
#52. Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#53. There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#54. Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
G.K. Chesterton
#55. You undergo too strict a paradox, Striving to make an ugly deed look fair.
William Shakespeare
#56. I am still learning and experiencing things and feel like I cannot state a truth. So I guess one truth I know for sure is that I cannot state one. A paradox.
Richard Brancatisano
#57. There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
Cynthia Ozick
#58. It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.
Eric Hoffer
#59. I consider myself pretty lazy, but I look back and check out the stuff I've done, and I say, 'God, that's a lot of stuff for a lazy guy.' It's a paradox, I suppose, being both things.
Jeff Bridges
#60. a paradox; the best opportunities we want are the best opportunities we miss; the best opportunities we wanted, are the best opportunities we missed and the best opportunities we seek for stay far away from us. In the end, we only settle for any opportunity. Life!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#61. 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a paradox; as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.
Bertrand Russell
#62. There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang.
Jonathan Gottschall
#63. The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#64. It's a paradox that most parents would never let their children associate with an undesirable person in their neighborhood, but many think nothing of letting them associate with the same type every day on TV.
Randall Wright
#65. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
Bee Wilson
#66. What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.
Sri Aurobindo
#67. Changelessness is decay."
"A paradox. There is no decay without a change for the worse."
"Changelessness is a change for the worse ...
Isaac Asimov
#68. The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox.
Simon Critchley
#69. Science can explain what's happening down inside atoms and what's happening at the edge of the universe, but it cannot explain consciousness. It's a paradox
withou t consciousness there would be no science, but science doesn't know what to do, at all, with consciousness.
Peter Russell
#70. The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite.
Fulton J. Sheen
#71. A paradox arises: the only way to meaning in freedom is through boundaries. The only way that boundaries make any sense at all is through freedom.
Clark Moustakas
#73. Like forgiveness, it was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of constant practice - to accept the notion of one's own mortality, and yet live fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates.
Diana Gabaldon
#74. I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign ... because like Jonah himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
#75. Love is not a purpose, it's a paradox; it's not an end-goal, it's an auxiliary fuel source to help get there.
A.J. Darkholme
#76. Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.
Rene Girard
#77. All their life, people work hard to earn money, and they never earn enough money to fulfill their dreams. Is this a paradox?
Saurabh Sharma
#78. 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
#80. A paradox is something which tests your spiritual eyesight.
John Bailey
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. '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
#85. The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox.
Kedar Joshi
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. an attempt at effortlessness is a paradox at the very least.
Ainslie Hogarth
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
