Quotes About Paradox

From the moment he took the oath of office in 1993 until he left the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton was a paradox in power. He presided over the United States prosperous and at peace - but never at peace with itself.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.

I still can't decide which is silliest; a person believing in a God who 'isn't there,' or a person offended by a God whom he doesn't believe exists.

One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

The idea of 'Freedom's Goblin,' to me, leads to a wild conversation. I would hope that father and son, driving home from the record store, could have a conversation about what that title means. Because to me, it's the duality of being free: the evil and the good, and how it's a constant paradox.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

The term 'serious actor' is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like 'Republican party' or 'airplane food.'

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

ONE must sometimes believe what one cannot understand. That is the method of the scientist as well as the mystic: faced with a universe which must be endless and infinite, he accepts it, although he cannot really imagine it. For there is no picture in our minds of infinity; somewhere, at the furthermost limits of thought, we never fail to plot its end. Yet—if there is no end? Or if, at the end, we are only back at the beginning again?

It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.

Irony that does not deem itself ironic is the most dangerous irony of all.

Have you ever head this theory about drinking yourself sober?' Eddie asked. 'It's a very popular theory. Amongst drunks, anyway.

Rationality will not save us.

He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable -- a routine miracle.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox.

The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.

and straightforward language. The researchers concluded that when the witness spoke simply the jurors could evaluate his argument on its merits. But when he was unintelligible, they had to resort to the mental shortcut of accepting his title and reputation in lieu of comprehensible facts. And so, another paradox: experts are sometimes most convincing when we don't understand what they're talking about.

In poetry a certain faith in the impossible,…as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place[;]

Thus, maintaining a good image of the parent is mistakenly perceived by the patient as being essential to stability and security; yet, paradoxically, its preservation perpetuates self-hatred.