Paradox That Quotes

#1. The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

G.K. Chesterton

#2. 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

#3. Love made room for conflict. It allowed for the expression of more than one view and invited the paradox that disagreement was vital to harmony. Love required accepting and meant changing oneself rather than demanding change of others.

Jo Goodman

#4. 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

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

Brad Henry

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Thus the little mermaid learned her world's greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts.

Esther Dalseno

#9. Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

Harold Rosenberg

#10. Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal

Soren Kierkegaard

#11. I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

Mother Teresa

#12. It is an interesting paradox that the more you surrender the credit for something you've done, the more memorable you become, and the more you actually end up receiving credit.

Dale Carnegie

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera ... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.

Vilem Flusser

#16. I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

Mother Teresa

#17. It's all about the "French Paradox," that much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Julie Powell

#18. It's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading and yet is so valued by society

Samuel Shem

#19. All ultimately intermarried to produce a race of many strains, which may account for the paradox that a people famed for stolid, patient, practical common-sense; a nation as Napoleon said, of "shopkeepers", has produced more adventurers, explorers and poets than probably any other in history.

Arthur Bryant

#20. Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.

R.D. Laing

#21. It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.

Gail Sheehy

#22. The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

Os Guinness

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

G.K. Chesterton

#26. 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

#27. They immediately spent a moment in bemused silence in honor of the perilous little paradox that was the English female

Julie Anne Long

#28. 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

#29. And therein lies the paradox that would haunt me for almost ten years: the tug-of-war between two worlds. A world of freedom versus a world of stability and family. A world of dreams versus a world of tradition.

Ira Wagler

#30. 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

#31. Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

Walter J. Phillips

#32. 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

#33. You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle.

David Liss

#34. There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

David Foster Wallace

#35. I am interested in the paradox between identity and uniformity, in the power and vulnerability of each individual and each group. It is in this paradox that I try to visualize by concentrating on poses, attitudes, gestures, and gazes.

Rineke Dijkstra

#36. Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

Ram Dass

#37. It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.

Wilbur Smith

#38. your mother
is in the habit of
offering more love
than you can carry


your father is absent


you are a war
the border between two countries
the collateral damage
the paradox that joins the two
but also splits them apart

Rupi Kaur

#39. It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

Anthony Storr

#40. The information paradox- that the more data we have, the stupider we become- has a social corollary, too: that the more frantically we connect, one to another, the more disconnected our relationships become.

Susan Maushart

#41. We miss the paradox that a pure world can't come from a sick and unloved people.

Jason Garner

#42. That's a curious paradox that I don't think a lot of people out there know; that you get really scared before you go on. You come out in a nervous rash, and it's not like you actually love getting up there and showing off.

Jacqueline McKenzie

#43. For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal

Soren Kierkegaard

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.

Jeanette Winterson

#47. I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.

Peter Senge

#48. And that was the biggest paradox of all.

Amy Harmon

#49. They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.

Nayomi Munaweera

#50. Here is another paradox: We become better people only when we give up the quest to become better people. That

Charles Eisenstein

#51. Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the "mystery of the universe" only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.

Alan W. Watts

#52. The quest for enlightenment illustrates the paradox of desire - the fact that you must have desire to be motivated to transcend being ruled by desire.

Paul O'Brien

#53. It's for sure that nobody wants to be played from somebody out son logically bets are something from paradox world.

Paradox is now the comming future, so get prepared.

Deyth Banger

#54. I advance it therefore [...] that the blacks [...] are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Thomas Jefferson

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

John McWilliams

#58. The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to ...

Ruth Stout

#59. In the context of stress, the great paradox of the modern age may be that there is not more hardship, just more news - and too much of it. The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keeps the amygdala flying.

John J. Ratey

#60. 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

#61. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

Bill Bryson

#62. The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#63. 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

#64. The irony is that when we're standing across from someone who is hidden or shielded by masks and armor, we feel frustrated and disconnected. That's the paradox here: Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you. If

Brene Brown

#65. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Paul Samuelson

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

Laren Grey Umphlett

#68. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.

Matthew Syed

#69. The second paradox, and the subtler of the two, is that while information is ubiquitous in wealthy societies, it is often too hard to find, to make sense of, and to use.

John Palfrey

#70. The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.

Sam Harris

#71. 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

#72. The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

Laura Hillenbrand

#73. The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior ...

Seth

#74. Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.

Desmond Tutu

#75. 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

#76. That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Garrison Keillor

#77. I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke.

John Barth

#78. 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

#79. Decent folk had to let indecent folk do their thing; that was the paradox of decency.

Piers Anthony

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.

Soren Kierkegaard

#84. 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

#85. Birds that cannot fly high into the sky rejoice exceedingly and sing sweet melodies when they get to the top of the tallest tree on the highest mountain!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.

Clayton Christensen

#90. As far as possible, Arianne realized, each soul had to be content alone before plunging into love, because one never knew when the other would move out of that love. It was the greatest paradox: Souls need each other, but they also need to not need each other.

Lauren Kate

#91. I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'.

G.K. Chesterton

#92. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

Soren Kierkegaard

#93. Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it's too crowded.

Sol Luckman

#94. 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

#95. Sometimes things seem out of our hands. They are, mostly. The great paradox is that this thing is totally out of our hands, or are we creating this as we go along? Then the issue is, "Who is the Creator.

Art Hochberg

#96. The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

James Surowiecki

#97. The tourist's paradox: how to find somewhere that's free of people exactly like us.

David Nicholls

#98. 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

#99. There is an ironic paradox in that courage requires fear. Fear provides the opportunity for courage. However, one must be willing to face the hard demands of courage, confront that fear, and ultimately triumph over it.

Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco

#100. The profound paradox is that the great man became more confident in his approach to others, including the man of his own Cabinet, but he recognized that his major confidence was not himself but in Another.

Elton Trueblood