Top 100 Quotes About Paradox
#1. And that was the biggest paradox of all.
Amy Harmon
#2. 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
#3. Here is another paradox: We become better people only when we give up the quest to become better people. That
Charles Eisenstein
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I advance it therefore [...] that the blacks [...] are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
Thomas Jefferson
#10. The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. 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
#12. They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone.
Billy Joel
#13. 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
#14. This Force, by troth, I'll never comprehend!
It doth control and also doth obey?
And 'tis within and yet it is beyond,
'Tis both inside and yet outside one's self?
What paradox! What fickle-natur'd pow'r!
Aye: frailty, thy name
belike
is Force.
Ian Doescher
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. Novikov self-consistency principle, which states that any event that would cause a paradox has a zero probability of happening.
John McWilliams
#19. 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
#20. The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to ...
Ruth Stout
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. One of the great constants in life is change.
Heracleitus
#28. What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought.
Herman Kahn
#32. 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
#34. How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.
Edmund S. Morgan
#35. An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Paul Samuelson
#36. 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
#37. The strange paradox of science is that it does not explain reality, it explains our fantasy. It is a beautiful thing.
Laren Grey Umphlett
#38. 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
#39. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.
Matthew Syed
#40. 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
#41. The existence of God is the ultimate paradox.
Kedar Joshi
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.
Brandon Sanderson
#50. Humanity goes to stupidy, this part is hard to be changed it's like paradox. You can't fight with paradox.
...
Oh, you are genius, so genius with this stupidity!
Deyth Banger
#51. The authenticity paradox: vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me and the first thing I look for in you.
Brene Brown
#52. For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness... ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.
George Clayton Johnson
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Decent folk had to let indecent folk do their thing; that was the paradox of decency.
Piers Anthony
#61. The paradox of worship is this: we perform these acts of worship, but they are not actually for us. We do these things for God, and then we are the ones who are changed.
Robert Benson
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be.
Mark McCormack
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
William Poundstone
#68. Space is an environment of emptiness. It offers no possibility for natural adaptation to any living organism - and particularly not to the highly sophisticated creature, man. Yet man has the ability to resolve this paradox through his intellectual power and creative faculties.
Hubertus Strughold
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Two paradoxes are better than one they may even suggest a solution.
Edward Teller
#72. 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
#73. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The paradox of innovation is this: CEO's often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.
Patrick Dixon
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
Soren Kierkegaard
#91. 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
#92. Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it's too crowded.
Sol Luckman
#93. 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
#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. Have you ever struggled to find work or love, only to find them after you have given up? This is the paradox of letting go. Let go, in order to achieve. Letting go is God's law.
Mary Manin Morrissey
#97. I love paradox. I like to go where people don't expect me to go.
Richard Mille
#98. 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
#99. This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
Rebecca Goldstein
#100. The tourist's paradox: how to find somewhere that's free of people exactly like us.
David Nicholls
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
