Quotes About Paradox

In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.

half-right, half-wrong.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil - rich, fertile soil. She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

A paradox: The things you don't need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.

although within a country rich people were generally happier than poor people, richer countries did not have happier citizens than poor countries. Since then the 'Easterlin paradox

I am a mass of contradictions.

10/30/38 Where do you look for someone who's never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair

Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it.

Where do you look for someone who's never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair.

It was very pretty. It also made Marlene look very demure, which she probably hated. Ideally, Marlene probably wanted an outfit that had a special holder for a gun.

You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense." "Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean.

Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.

You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why - knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way - why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met.

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.

As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound.

For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.

It feels strange to me to be living in a box, hiding from the steadying influence of the moon; wearing the hide of a cow, which is supposed to be dyed to match God-knows-what, on my feet; making promises over the telephone about things I will do at a precise hour next year.

A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.

No, you shouldn't have come here. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world then yes and no.

because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y....There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.

I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.