Quotes About Paradox

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

A comfortable prison was still a prison.

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.

Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.

It solves the problem of "free will" by ignoring it. How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything

someone like Grace. Someone exactly like Grace, with her Ted Bundy rantsand her calming presence and—hello, irony.

Don't be fooled by strength you can see," he said at last. "Yahweh often hides His power in the simple things, the weak things, and so His strength seems foolish in man's eyes.

My strength is my weakness and weakness is my strength

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.

The only way I can access all my strength is to relax. ... The paradox is that you must learn to be relaxed while using all your power.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks

Computer Science: A study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter.

The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

My secret for success? I don't know what the hell success means.

It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

What a pathetic creature is man! His senses are awakened by the hope for the very thing whose consummation puts him to sleep.

I often feel more disgust than pride about this kind of success. So there's no regret whatsoever.