Top 100 Paradoxically Quotes
#1. Even in the case of a god, audiences - paradoxically - enjoy recognizing the human traits.
Kenneth Branagh
#2. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.
Margaret Atwood
#3. Kind of paradoxically, men are very open minded or very even handed with their votes of women.
Christian Rudder
#4. His arm pulled her a little off balance, and paradoxically it steadied her at the same time. That was what Charles did to her heart, too. He knocked it off balance into what felt like the right position, a safe place that was still exciting, exhilarating, and terrifying.
Patricia Briggs
#5. To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
#6. Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#7. Paradoxically, we fail to disclose ourselves to other people because we want so much to be loved. Because we feel that way, we present ourselves as someone we think can be loved and accepted, and we conceal whatever would mar that image.
Sidney Jourard
#8. Paradoxically, life is worth living for those who have something for which they will gladly give up life.
A.J. Muste
#9. The essential thing about mothers is that one needs to know that they are there, particularly at that age when, paradoxically, one is trying so hard to break away from parental influence.
Margot Fonteyn
#10. Our grandparents' generation never expected too much out of life and, paradoxically, were happier for it. It never occurred to my granddad that he would enjoy work. He hated it from the day he walked through the factory gates at 14 to when he left at 65.
Mark Barrowcliffe
#11. Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected.
Yuval Noah Harari
#12. Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.
Laurence Heller
#13. They stood there eclipsed by concrete columns, paradoxically trapped
Anonymous
#14. Studies show that neurotic and psychiatric disorders are more common among those who attempt to keep conscious control of life and suppress its unwelcome quirks. Sanity, paradoxically, may lie in accepting that you are not in control.
Michael Brooks
#15. I believe that true identity is found ... in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#16. China's critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime's obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion.
Anonymous
#17. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
#18. Paradoxically, the more you truly love that person, the more love you receive.
Seth Adam Smith
#19. Perhaps, as with advancing age, the physical life becomes less important and yet, paradoxically, more precious, this green revolution against the temporary death of winter is a reminder that the earth, like our own lives, is a gift.
Willem Lange
#20. Faith is underrated. Paradoxically, religion is vastly overrated.
Seth Godin
#21. Paradoxically, a saint like [Albert] Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother.
Chinua Achebe
#22. Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.
Anne Lamott
#23. Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.
Gloria Steinem
#24. To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it. To define is to eliminate.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#25. Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
P.D. James
#26. Freedom has become a commodity whose availability, paradoxically, keeps society in check. The threat of its loss seems to enable us to tolerate its imposition.
Andrzej Stasiuk
#27. The human condition is essentially the conflict between the human need for control and a universe that provides little if any of it. Once we accept this and get into the flow of life, we are free and, paradoxically, able to get better results.
Oli Anderson
#28. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order .
Albert Camus
#29. What I've learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.
Tom Robbins
#30. Eventually, however, the star will run out of its hydrogen and other nuclear fuels. Paradoxically, the more fuel a star starts off with, the sooner it runs out. This is because the more massive the star is, the hotter it needs to be to balance its gravitational attraction.
Stephen Hawking
#31. Matteo lived inside her like a memory that paradoxically stopped the pain and which she could never get enough of ... because there was, and never would be, anything that was like him. Wherever she went, whatever she did, he was the only thing she truly loved, and which she sadly no longer had.
Llarjme
#32. But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other.
Lawrence Kasdan
#33. To consume the Eucharist is an act of anticonsumption, for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self, yet in a way in which the identity of the self is paradoxically secured.
William T. Cavanaugh
#34. The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.
C.S. Lewis
#35. I believe the film paradoxically generates a visceral, almost tactile 'live' experience.
Anonymous
#37. A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.
Alain De Botton
#38. People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
Adam M. Grant
#39. writes Madeleine L'Engle, "in kairos we are completely un-self-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time."10
Sarah Arthur
#40. As we dreamers make our souls into evolved fields, our genius is nutured and our presence and everything we create becomes charged and capable of positively altering the fields of others. In this process, we become more essentially human-which is to say, paradoxically, more divine.
Carolyn Elliott
#41. Jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.
Penelope Gilliatt
#42. Fatigue, paradoxically, is almost always a result of living a life of too little action.
Steve Chandler
#43. Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
Eckhart Tolle
#44. Ashoka's dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.
Karen Armstrong
#45. Paradoxically, the more I learned to let go of my own wishes and desires (in this case, the desire not to be hit), the more they became possible.
Peter Ralston
#46. Paradoxically, the toddler's "No" is also a preliminary to his saying yes. It is a sign that he is getting ready to convert his mother's restrictions and prohibitions into the rules for behavior that will belong to him.
Louise J. Kaplan
#47. Paradoxically, the more Michael kept me at a distance, the more I trusted him - perhaps because he was always willing to help me with tips and introductions even though he wanted absolutely nothing from me (and never reciprocated my nosiness with personal questions of his own with me).
Zack Love
#48. Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Mark Hyman
#49. Those who believe the gospel - who believe that they are the recipients of undeserved but unshakable grace - grow in a paradoxically loving yet joyful fear.
Timothy Keller
#50. The search for truth can be compared to a cat chasing her tail: frantic in her pursuit, her quarry nevetheless eludes her; despite the fact that all the world can see it's right there, it remains just beyond her reach. It cannot be possessed because, paradoxically, it is already part of her.
Gina Barreca
#51. The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.
Alan Watts
#52. Paradoxically, the man who has failed and one who is at the peak of success are in exactly the same position. Each must decide what he will do next, choose the course that will lead him to the future.
Kano Jigoro
#53. I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#54. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
James Surowiecki
#55. A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it's because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.
Ken Follett
#56. Borders may divide us, but, paradoxically, they're also the places where we're nearest to one another.
Ken Jennings
#57. Community in the American university is paradoxically a private and individual decision.
Rebekah Nathan
#58. Introverts paradoxically pull away from culture and create culture.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#59. This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted ... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.
Amal El-Mohtar
#60. I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.
Franz Kafka
#61. You may go through two, three, or more iterations of the product, and by the nth iteration, the model you created for the first iteration will be hopelessly inappropriate. Paradoxically, emphasizing a business model prematurely, you may block yourself from the best money-making opportunities.
Howard Love
#62. There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.
Gregory Maguire
#63. Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.
Luke Harding
#64. Paradoxically, the United States' determination to protect its troops can be self-defeating. Allies and adversaries see U.S. forces living in secure compounds, eating fancy chow and minimizing their exposure to potential terrorist assaults.
David Ignatius
#65. Being "too pushy" is paradoxically not a display of too much strength, but of weakness. What's more impressive than ambition is the power to control it.
Lou Kasischke
#66. So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#67. But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.
Karl Rahner
#68. In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.
Jonathan Nolan
#69. If everyone was really having sex, they why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and -in-the-cafeteria thing? If everyone was really having sex, why weren't more girls sporting baby bumps? I know the statistics.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#70. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments - these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.
Sarah Waters
#71. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear
civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Arundhati Roy
#72. Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.
David Deutsch
#73. Paradoxically, when females reject the male, they usurp the masculine role and abandon the feminine one.
Henry Makow
#74. Time, though infinite, is paradoxically also short, and, to be blunt, getting shorter.
James Treadwell
#75. Paradoxically, when 'dumb' money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.
Warren Buffett
#76. Prayer is, paradoxically, both a gift and a conquest, a grace and a duty. Does that not mean, is it not a special case of the truth, that all duty is a gift, every call on us a blessing, and that the task we often find a burden is really a boon?
Peter Forsyth
#77. There is a strong religious commitment to the sanctity of human life, but, paradoxically, some of the most fervent protectors of microscopic stem cells are the most ardent proponents of the death penalty.
Jimmy Carter
#78. Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.
Kenzaburo Oe
#79. It's rarely pointed out, even though it's so obvious, that the artistic triumph of the small screen has paradoxically come at the expense of advertising.
Andrew Essex
#80. Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.
Thomas Ligotti
#81. This mixture of Polish, not Polish, of being European, gives me a perspective to see Poland through "new eyes" - paradoxically, more closely ... because it's from a kind of distance.
Malgorzata Szumowska
#82. Somebody said that part of my reaction to British cinema is actually, paradoxically, a patriotic one. I'm so disappointed that we're not better.
Kevin Brownlow
#83. Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#84. Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.
Howard Barker
#86. To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.
David Treuer
#87. Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader-a dictator-willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ.'
Michael A. Ledeen
#88. Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed
John Maynard Smith
#89. My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.
Seth Godin
#90. Humans, I finally decided after a few more minutes of watching him, are paradoxically capable of both unattainable depths of kindness and unimaginable depths of cruelty, sometimes within the same body ...
Kiley MacLeod
#91. Paradoxically, the few eras of peace were times when men of war had high influence. The Pax Romana was enforced by Caesar's Legions. The Pax Brittanica was enforced by the Royal Navy and His Majesty's Forces.
Jerry Pournelle
#92. Decisions are made in life, you make them and you stand by them, they're what make us who we are, they define us in the end" Paradoxically a Woman by T. Darshan
T. Darshan
#93. Paradoxically, the more deeply one grows in enlightenment, the more clearly one discerns one's own frailties and limitations.
Kim Hee-jin
#94. I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence.
Mark Nepo
#95. One growing threat to the stability of the U.S. economy, and therefore to its capability to continue to direct the global order, paradoxically emerges from its success in establishing capitalism around the world.
Herbert Schiller
#96. Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.
Peter Singer
#97. Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.
Mark Kingwell
#98. Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.
Cedric J. Robinson
#99. Paradoxically, Islam is the most decentralized and yet, at the same time, the most rigid religion in the world. Everyone feels entitled to rule out free discussion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#100. My (paradoxically) Christian name was bestowed in compliment to a godfather, sir. I am no Jew. I have already enough to know the curse of having more.
Bernard Capes