Quotes About Paradox

Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

My paradise is in the shadow of my sword.

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction.

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

I don't want to be a saint, and would rather be a buffoon...

I transform myself to fast: my today refutes my yesterday.

Even the worst thing has two good verso-sides.

dearest—every person is a prison and also a recess.

Man is beast and superbeast; the higher man is inhuman and superhuman: these belong together. With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other— or rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other.

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.

Die Dummheit der Guten ist unergründlich klug.

Conditions for God.-1' God himself cannot subsist without wise men, said Luther, and with good reason ; but God can still less subsist without unwise men,-good Luther did not say that!

Suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to know 'rejoicing to heaven' must be prepared for 'grieving onto death' as well? And such might be the case! At least so the Stoics believed, who were consistent when they sought as little pleasure as possible, that life might afford them as little pain as possible.

The psychological problem apparent in the Zarathustra type is how someone who to an unprecedented degree says no and does no to everything everyone has said yes to so far, – how somebody like this can nevertheless be the opposite of a no-saying spirit

Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.—and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

Así me dijo el demonio una vez: «También Dios tiene su infierno: es su amor a los hombres.»

At the moment when anyone begins to take philosophy seriously, all the world believes the opposite." —Human, All Too Human, "Assorted Opinions and Maxims

At times, one can win clever people over to a principle merely by presenting it in the form of an outrageous paradox.

In the words of a Zen poem, At dusk the cock announces dawn; At midnight, the bright sun.

It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside as we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.

The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite.

If it be true that the world has lost its respect for authority, it is only because it lost it first in the home. By a peculiar paradox, as the home loses its authority, the authority of the state becomes tyrannical.

This is the beautiful paradox of the Child Who made His mother; the mother, too, was only a child.