Top 100 Paradoxical Quotes
#1. The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.
Stanislav Grof
#2. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.
Whitley Strieber
#3. As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.
Ralph Fiennes
#4. Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.
Carl Jung
#5. God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.
Kedar Joshi
#6. How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.
Marcel Proust
#7. Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude - all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#8. One thing that everybody told me about directing was, 'Never compromise'. And the whole job is a compromise. So it's very paradoxical. How do you not compromise when the whole thing is about compromise?
Matt Dillon
#9. I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.
Henry A. Kissinger
#10. I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
Jean Baudrillard
#11. Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all.
Lawrence B. Lindsey
#12. The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.
Erich Fromm
#14. Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.
Terence McKenna
#15. The romantic love story is a paradoxical fusion of two extraordinarily potent messages. The first is that love, deep connection, is the most important, indeed the only truly important matter in the world. And the second is that true love cannot exist in this world.
Terrence Real
#16. Human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
George Eliot
#17. Q: How is it possible that humans invented something as amazing as an airplane and something as awful as a nuclear bomb? A: Human beings are mysterious and paradoxical.
Nicola Yoon
#18. But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?
Molly Peacock
#19. The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.
Daniel Pennac
#20. I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence - they look paradoxical - unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.
Rajneesh
#21. The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
Erich Fromm
#22. There is something so powerful about a person who in one moment can be confident enough to confront a client about a sensitive personal issue, and then in the next moment humble themselves and take a position of servitude. It's the paradoxical nature of it all that makes it work.
Patrick Lencioni
#23. The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber
#24. Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the same person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness instead of pain.
Haidji
#25. In the midst of uncertainty and the paradoxical tension of having to believe God for the impossible, real faith requires actually trusting in Him, despite our inability to always understand Him.
Ken Wytsma
#26. Cynophilist: paradoxical being that often despises man and adores the dog, apparently, mainly because of the unconditional love that the latter has for the first.
Luigina Sgarro
#27. It might seem paradoxical given my profession, but I'm not someone who likes to be in the limelight.
Audrey Tautou
#28. While nothing in the Bible is contradictory, many of the Bible's most provocative and profound truths appear to us paradoxical.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#29. The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.
DJ Spooky
#30. When avoidance of pain becomes the major emphasis of childbirth care, the paradoxical effect is that more women have to deal with pain after their babies are born.
Ina May Gaskin
#31. Paradoxes are less paradoxical in their reference to truth than most of the most plausible axioms.
Raheel Farooq
#32. This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.
Norma Field
#33. It might sound a paradoxical thing to say
for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time
but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms ...
Midge Decter
#34. Enlightenment seems paradoxical but all it needs is compassion
Priyanka Deshmukh
#35. The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.
Terry Tempest Williams
#36. God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?
Walter Kirn
#37. Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom.
G.K. Chesterton
#38. The truth often sounds paradoxical.
Laozi
#39. What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#40. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.
Lucy Soutter
#41. Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you're setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.
Beau Willimon
#42. This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.
Christopher Essex
#43. Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned
Roberto Calasso
#44. It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#45. I love to read theories without ever using them when working ... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.
Ernst Haas
#46. It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.
Alan Hollinghurst
#47. What I'm suggesting is that the essence of leadership is soundness and that the essence of soundness is soul, which paradoxical as you might think it is, is that child within.
Tim Macartney-Snape
#48. This is a paradoxical case where the normally presumed "safety in numbers" is a deadly betrayer instead of a savior. Given a choice, going it alone beats The Buffalo Jump every time, but it's very hard to bolt from the herd.
Matthew Bracken
#49. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.
Edgar Allan Poe
#50. But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for otherwise the believer's relationship to him would be direct instead of being paradoxical.
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. Paradoxical as it may at first appear, the fact is that, as W. H. George has said, scientific research is an art, not a science.
William Ian Beardmore Beveridge
#52. Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.
Joanna Scott
#53. Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.
Richard P. Feynman
#54. Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#55. Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
Alan W. Watts
#56. It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist.
Louis De Broglie
#57. I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.
Douglas Rushkoff
#58. Awakening is not a process of building ourselves up but a process of letting go. It's a process of relaxing in the middle - the paradoxical, ambiguous middle, full of potential, full of new ways of thinking and seeing - with absolutely no money-back guarantee of what will happen next.
Pema Chodron
#59. Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.
Timothy Morton
#60. Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.
Louise Bates Ames
#61. An interesting fiction ... however paradoxical the assertion may appear ... addresses our love of truth- not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and principals, which is a primitive law of the human mind.
James Fenimore Cooper
#62. It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#63. In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane
Charlie Chaplin
#64. Paradoxical as it may seem, God means not only to make us good, but to make us also happy, by sickness, disaster and disappointment.
C. A. Bartol
#65. The words of truth are always paradoxical.
Lao-Tzu
#66. Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.
Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury
#67. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.
J.G. Ballard
#68. But there is one thing that is privileged to be a paradoxical sign of God, in relation to which men are able to manifest their deepest commitment
our Neighbor. The sacrament of our Neighbor!'
Congar
Gustavo Gutierrez
#69. The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
Thomas Nagel
#70. We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell
#71. The ego says, 'I shouldn't have to suffer,' and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.
Eckhart Tolle
#73. [W]isdom consists in following Providence step by step. And you can be sure of the truth of a maxim which seems paradoxical, namely, that he who is hasty falls back in the interests of God.
Vincent De Paul
#74. Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
Steven Johnson
#75. It is indeed paradoxical that an industry which epitomizes all that is new and up-to-date at the same time harbours some of the oldest and least desirable attributes of work in manufacturing industry.
Peter Dicken
#76. So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
T. S. Eliot
#77. Evil is predicable; Good is paradoxical.
Lara Biyuts
#78. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.
Robin G. Collingwood
#79. I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.
Parker J. Palmer
#80. Level 5 leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves.
James C. Collins
#81. that traversing an infinite number of dimensionless mathematical points is not obviously paradoxical in the way that traversing an infinite number of physical-space points is.
David Foster Wallace
#82. I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.
Madeleine L'Engle
#83. One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#84. We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
Richard Dawkins
#85. Unfortunately, it's not until you've had children that you discover how selfish you actually are. That's one of the paradoxical aspects of becoming a parent: at the very same time you realize precisely how selfish you are, you are forced to become less selfish.
Mark Cleary
#86. As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was ... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.
Bill Gates
#87. It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy.
Michal Kalecki
#88. America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.
Malcolm X
#89. It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.
Eric Ries
#90. My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don't believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!
Jon Ronson
#91. It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.
Thomas Huxley
#92. The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.
Robert South
#93. Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.
Sharon Salzberg
#94. The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.
Ernest Becker
#95. My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention.
Wayne Dyer
#96. The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'.
Joyelle McSweeney
#97. It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.
Sigmund Freud
#98. As impossibly paradoxical as is seems, is it possible that our limp is the very thing that allows us to run? And without a limp, could we in reality run?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#99. Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.
Fritjof Capra
#100. Or
to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win.
Donna Tartt
