Quotes About Paradox

We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.

It's a dirty self-cleaning universe.

The machine captured that old sense of irony in death: you can know how it's going to happen, but you'll still be surprised when it does.

God: You should always believe in God because he is real, but you should never trust him because he is pure evil.

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical. —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.

Take away the paradox from a thinker and you have a professor.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

The logic in our minds had always been at odds with the logic of life itself

The reason why everyone is not naturally enlightened is simply this: people have categorized the world into good and bad, God and Devil, high and low, sacred and filthy, pure and impure, heaven and hell. These are parallel lines that will never meet. Once

The whole idea behind fashioning such an image – that embodies life and death all at once – is to make the point that whatever you call divine is something that can never be logically understood. It can be experienced, but never grasped. There

Now, if my talks were about quoting from a scripture, such friendship and affection would be impossible. Scripture means memory; memory means hierarchy. This hierarchy turns one thing into sacred, another into filthy. What we consider sacred becomes an authority; what comes from an authority becomes our truth. And this kind of truth renders us incapable, paradoxically, of ever experiencing real truth!

Todo lleva a creer que existe un cierto punto donde la vida y la muerte, lo real y lo imaginario, lo comunicable y lo incomunicable, lo alto y lo bajo cesan de ser percibidos contradictoriamente.

The willingness to use force usually means you won't have to. It is a paradox because our modern culture conditions us to believe violence attracts violence, and violence never solves anything.

Nothing is more scandalous than a man that is proud of his humility.

Truly a rare opportunity was given to Marcus Aurelius of showing what the mind can do in despite of circumstances. Most peaceful of warriors, a magnificent monarch whose ideal was quiet happiness in home life, bent to obscurity yet born to greatness, the loving father of children who died young or turned out hateful, his life was one paradox. That nothing might lack, it was in camp before the face of the enemy that he passed away and went to his own place.

And faith came to mean what Bishop Robinson called it some thirty-five years ago: believing forty-nine impossible things before breakfast.

Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.

Marcus J. Borg

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?