Quotes About Paradox

Why is it, Miranda,' she whispered, 'that such a sweet pretty creature is a schoolteacher – of all dreary things in the world . . .?

True freedom is the willingness for life to be as it is, no matter how it appears. This willingness is expressed in the Abrahamic religions as "Thy will be done." Paradoxically, in completely accepting everything just as it is, there is space for something truly new and creative to enter the picture. And this space is never not here.

Later, they began to explore the secret idea that Deborah shared with all the ill—that she had infinitely more power than the ordinary person and was at the same time also his inferior.

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description.

It's strange, isn't it, how we can push people away because we want to be near them? Isn't that the silliest thing?

The tongueless torturer and the flower of chivalry. An unlikely alliance.

When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.

Hoping for a thing often seems the best way o' bringing on the opposite

Here's the paradox. We can fully embrace God's love only when we recognize how completely unworthy of it we are.

Monstrously giving birth to yourself, Admiring yourself and choking on yourself, Are you not, alas, the only tie Between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? It seems to me that you are always on the boundary.

No, one could speak neither of distressed or of destitute; this street was, instead, smiling and terrible, much like the expression of intelligence and generosity that the faces of the dead have. It was a dead street, or at least that's how I defined it to myself, hoping to be able to find later a less vehement and irrational description, something that turned out to be impossible.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.' Mother Teresa of Calcutta

With Beijing Memory No. 5, what is uncanny is that the "machine" refuses to come to life, and in its lifelessness, imagines what life might have been. And it is in this very paradox of "might have been" that we experience the prospective and prosthetic quality of our ontology.

As lover you reach forward to a point in time called "then" when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as "then" supervenes upon "now," the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. Ismene: Who said that? Antigone: Hegel. Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett. Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel. Ismene: I don't think so.

to carry one's own door will make a person clumsy, tired and strange on the other hand, it may come in useful if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind

My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.

The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.

Probably I am a fool…most poets are fools…but for some reason I love faith, but have none.

Who are they" "Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost" say the peasantry.

It is a lovely hell, but hell nonetheless.

Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.