Quotes About Paradox

The malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.

The NRA was laying down its weapons. Yankee fans were rooting for the Boston Red Sox. The French were eating English food and loving it. Matthew was sure all those things were happening.... This was the proverbial cold day in hell, and Matthew was living it.

Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises..:

The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

But sometimes there's a moral rightness in stupidity. Ever hear of a holy fool?

Fully human and fully divine" is, to use a loaded word, a mystery. Something not to be solved, but to be pondered.

Every state of life, every decision, includes some pain that must be accepted if you are to enter fully into those decisions, and into new life. "All symphonies remain unfinished," said Karl Rahner. There is no perfect decision, perfect outcome, or perfect life. Embracing imperfection helps us relax into reality. When we accept that all choices are conditional, limited, and imperfect, our lives become, paradoxically, more satisfying, joyful, and peaceful.

Gehenna is lovely these days.

because everyone's life is full of absurdity, improbability, and general craziness.

It is with this thought that many believers would call up Kierkegaard's famous phrase, the 'leap of faith,' pictured perhaps as a leap from here to there, leaving out the in-between... What is usually overlooked, however, is that Kierkegaard said nothing about a safe landing; there was only the leap, and no guarantee of solid ground beyond it.

The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong. Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.

The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.

The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.

The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others. The paradox is precisely that they play only when others go on with the game. Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means rather that they are political without having a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.

If the goal of finite play is to win titles for their timelessness, and thus eternal life for oneself, the essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Meister Eckhart called "eternal birth.

So this is a fundamental problem, being out of a loop that I don't even believe in.

I don't think I'd like it if people liked me, I'd think that something had gone wrong.

I looked like a million bucks. An unarmed million bucks, which isn't necessarily the best combination.