Quotes About Paradox

The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

De ceux qui ne diffusent pas autour d'eux un relent d'échec, on peut difficilement dire qu'ils ont vécu. La décomposition est la seule trace que laisse la marche de la vie, cet étrange pourrissement de la matière. Création et destruction sont les différentes directions d'une même substance qui s'affirme en s'effilochant.

Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles . . .

I try to oppose the interest I take in her, I imagine her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her lips in a high state of putrefaction. No help for it: the indefinable element she releases persists. It is in such moments that one understands why life has managed to sustain itself, in spite of Knowledge.

A mesure que l'art s'enfonce dans l'impasse, les artistes se multiplient. Cette anomalie cesse d'en être une, si l'on songe que l'art, en voie d'épuisement, est devenu à la fois impossible et facile.

Man attracts and appalls me, I love and hate him with a vehemence which condemns me to passivity.

I am both wound and knife"—that is our absolute, our eternity.

What is more fruitful than the worst, for the man who knows how to desire it? For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer.

we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven.

We never follow the consistent rationalist for long; once we pluck out his mystery and know where he is headed, we abandon him to his system

Paradox is not suited to burials, nor to weddings or births, in fact. Sinister — or grotesque — events require commonplaces; the terrible, like the painful, accommodates only the cliché.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

The most palpable facts, are exactly the contrary to what we should expect.

A double error sometimes sets us right.

If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the others and yet none the less infinite—a contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of more than one.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.

The well-known paradox of the theory of probabilities is that, to all seeming, it can extract knowledge from ignorance and certainty from doubt.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Beauty and folly are generally companions.

The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.