Quotes About Paradox

#1. The most exquisite paradox ... as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

Ram Dass

#2. The paradox is the result of two opposing truths existing side by side, which can be both right.

Pearl Zhu

#3. Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.

Tony Schwartz

#4. I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

Romola Garai

#5. The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously (sort of how Richard Linklater describes The Wizard of Oz to an uninterested cab driver in the opening sequence of Slacker).

Chuck Klosterman

#6. The paradox of liberal tolerance is that it extends to Marxists, transsexuals, and Islamic radicals, but not to conservatives or Christians.

Dinesh D'Souza

#7. 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

#8. A deeper thought on the surface is exactly the paradox we need.

Nema Al-Araby

#9. The paradox of indecisiveness lies in uncertainty.

Pearl Zhu

#10. What I really want is to be recognized as a writer; that someday, my poetry - this is an interesting paradox - would be taught in English classes; for my name, along with my poetry, to exist 500 years from now.

Harley King

#11. The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

Cornel West

#12. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

G.K. Chesterton

#13. The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.

Jack Bruce

#14. No one knows for sure that that tomorrow won't come,
but most people assume that tomorrow will still exist as usual.
This is Toba's Paradox, which means, hope overcomes doubt.

Toba Beta

#15. It matters./It doesn't matter. Build space in your head for this paradox. Build as much space for it as you can. Build even more space. You will need it. And then go deep within that space - as far in as you can possibly go - and make absolutely whatever you want to make. It's

Elizabeth Gilbert

#16. You are doomed to make choices. This is life's greatest paradox.

Wayne Dyer

#17. I do my own thing. I'm very much in the paradox of things. I enjoy the little things in life, what's big is small and what's small is big. It might not be the coolest thing to do, but it's important to me.

Katerina Graham

#18. The great paradox is that our lack of faith in love and miracles is what blocks us from receiving love and miracles.

Gabrielle Bernstein

#19. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love.

A.W. Tozer

#20. We fear what we long for. This is the paradox.

Tony Brasunas

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

Paul Monette

#25. As a citizen, of course. As a parent, of course. But as an artist, that's where the paradox is - your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about political or social responsibility, you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist.

David Cronenberg

#26. The cherished dream of every chessplayer is to play a match with the World Champion. But here is the paradox: the closer you come to the realization of this goal, the less you think about it.

Mikhail Tal

#27. 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

#28. The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

Earl Warren

#29. In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

Norman O. Brown

#30. To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.

Mason Cooley

#31. In a critical sense, doing nothing can mean doing something. Inaction can be action and embracing this paradox can save your life.

Ben Sherwood

#32. 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

#33. Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.

Terry Tempest Williams

#34. The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.

Soren Kierkegaard

#35. He begins to introduce us to the great kingdom paradox: at the end of me, I find real life in him.

Kyle Idleman

#36. Paradox
/pera,daks/ noun
1. Being told to wake up and come back to reality by your family and friends, while being dragged to church to hear a lesson on Jonah and the whale, followed by a sermon on believing in things you can't see without faith.

Shannon L. Alder

#37. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity
became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a
malady, or a madness, or both.

Oscar Wilde

#38. 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

#39. He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

William Manchester

#40. Dangerously well' - what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling 'too well

Oliver Sacks

#41. 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

#42. He said it like he assumed I knew what the grandfather paradox was, because, if I didn't know, then I was a moron. I hate when people do that.

Rick Yancey

#43. I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial-largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox-in other words,-all the things I love the most.

Luis Bunuel

#44. The existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

Calvin Trillin

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Cormac McCarthy

#48. I didn't think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.

Otto Penzler

#49. But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

Soren Kierkegaard

#50. Nigeria is a country with abundance of wealth, but because of lack of truth and integrity, the wealth are stolen, but the paradox of the whole thing is, this stolen wealth always find their way to nations with no apparent natural wealth, but with a high credit of degree of truth and honesty.

Sunday Adelaja

#51. Photographers are victims of paradox, tracking the impermanent to make it permanent.

Ray Metzker

#52. I don't believe in objectivity. I observe the observer's paradox every moment I'm filming. Your presence is changing everything; there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility.

Lucy Walker

#53. It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.

Nathaniel Branden

#54. 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

#55. Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

Emma Donoghue

#56. 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

#57. As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

Henry Giroux

#58. But still he must have recourse to the paradox. For when the individual by his guilt has gone outside the universal he can return to it only by virtue of having come as the individual into an absolute relationship with the absolute.

Soren Kierkegaard

#59. it's a troubling paradox -i have total control, but only to the extent i have control over myself.

Blake Crouch

#60. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

James Baldwin

#61. 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

#62. The translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.

Lydia Davis

#63. I haven't written a whole lot of nonfiction, but what I have written leads me to believe that it's an entirely different muscle. The ongoing paradox is that sometimes it's harder to get to the emotional truth of something when you only have the facts at your disposal.

Ron Currie Jr.

#64. The paradox: is God a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semetic? Or is God testing to see if I am?

Chuck Palahniuk

#65. Here is the paradox of Christian living. We must give up control of self to gain self control.

Andy Mineo

#66. 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

#67. This is Darrow, Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart, And his drawl, and his infinite paradox And his sadness, and kindness, And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

Edgar Lee Masters

#68. The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast ... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.

Andre Bazin

#69. It is a great paradox - almost everyone wants to improve his circumstances but almost no one wants to improve himself.

Sterling W. Sill

#70. The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Alfred North Whitehead

#71. It is the wonderful paradox," he continued, "that the best way to achieve happiness for oneself is to give happiness to others.

David Michie

#72. New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

Harry Connick Jr.

#73. There is nothing absolute and final. If everything were ironclad, all the rules absolute and everything structured so no paradox or irony existed, you couldn't move. One could say that man sneaks through the crack where paradox exists.

Itzhak Bentov

#74. Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.

Steven James

#75. Iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.

Oscar Wilde

#76. Only you can take responsibility for your happiness..but you can't do it alone. It's the great paradox of being human.

Simon Sinek

#77. To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

Hannah Arendt

#78. The paradox of healing is that it is both holding on and letting go.

Molly Fumia

#79. I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That's the paradox of me.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#80. Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.

Rosalind E. Krauss

#81. Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Joyce Carol Oates

#82. 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

#83. She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

Truman Capote

#84. Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

Gregory Bateson

#85. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

Franz Kafka

#86. The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors - there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.

Adam Mansbach

#87. 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

#88. The paradox is that, while a concern with past and future is obviously central to psychological functioning, to behave as though one were indeed in the past or future, as many do, pollutes the lively possibilities of existence.

Erving Polster

#89. A very interesting paradox seen in individuals possessed by demons is that they are incredible bright when analyzing others beyond appearances, but incredible stupid when not noticing the obvious in front of their nose.

Robin Sacredfire

#90. 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

#91. But I will say that most comedians are the saddest people I know. That is the biggest paradox to me.

Jean Reno

#92. The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction - the tragedy of American domestic

Morris Berman

#93. The Boardroom Paradox: Harden the softest like culture, and soften the hardest like number.

Pearl Zhu

#94. Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.

James Buchan

#95. That is the fantastic intolerable paradox of my life, that I have gone questing for what I possessed initially -- a belief to invest my days with dignity and meaning, a pattern of behavior through which man might most articulately express his devotion to his fellows.

Milton Steinberg

#96. 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

#97. Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

Charlie Munger

#98. The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard

#99. Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.

Terry McMillan

#100. I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

Dani Shapiro