Quotes About Paradox

The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

Explain me to myself, you'll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I'll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.

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.

I have a principle I often invoke in class: comfortable people don't grow. Good teachers need to engage in the paradox of making students feel comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.

beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with

Sometimes beauty is like curse

we, who have always thought of joy as rising . . . feel the emotion that almost amazes us when a happy thing falls.

Begreppet 'lycklig i alla sina dagar', illusionen om bestående lycka, är i själva verket en oxymoron. Antingen konstant lycka eller klimax. Evig lycka är inte någon lycka, på samma sätt som evig orgasm inte alls är någon orgasm.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else.

Perhaps there is nothing at all, perhaps the mystery is that there is no mystery at all. Perhaps she is empty, and there is no June at all." "But, Henry, how can an empty woman have such a vivid presence, how can an empty woman cause insomnia, awaken so many curiosities? How could an empty woman cause other women to take flight, as you tell me, abdicating immediately before her?

You are really strong. I like even your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.

Entre pelea y pelea somos intensamente felices. Infierno y paraíso a un tiempo. Somos a la vez libres y esclavos. En ocasiones parecía que supiésemos que la única atadura que puede unirnos es el frenesí, idéntica intensidad que entre amantes y queridas.

In between our quarrels we are acutely happy. Hell and heaven all at once. We are at once free and enslaved.

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

From one point of view becoming is a humiliation, and from another a royal procession.

L'esprit saura se priver de puissance, disait Alain, de toute espèce de puissance ; tel est le plus haut règne » et la leçon du calvaire2312. Et Simone Weil : « Quiconque prend l'épée périra par l'épée. Et quiconque ne prend pas l'épée (ou la lâche) périra sur la croix

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

My own experience is that night and day are more alike than different -- in which case they couldn't possibly be opposite.