Quotes About Paradox

The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat…sleepy…piggish. But in this land…it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.

The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

The more you find, the wronger it gets.

Getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.

That's all I can tell you. once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual.

Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation.

Jesus—nailed to the cross—appears powerless and defeated (15: 29–30). As Mark so darkly paints it, the scene is a tragic paradox: Despite the seeming triumph of religious and political forces allied against him, Jesus is neither guilty nor a failure. The failure lies in humanity's collective inability to recognize the sufferer's inestimable value, to see in him God's hand at work.

Nothing fails like success.

Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It's a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand.

To value oneself and, at the same time, subordinate oneself to higher purposes and principles is the paradoxical essence of highest humanity and the foundation of effective leadership.

That is the paradox of white gold. Hope and despair run together for us.

If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.

The moment we try to capture and encapsulate Truth, we have paradox, confusion, contention [and] doubt[.]

W]hen we come up with any concept at all, we simultaneously create one or more opposite concepts.

Socrates pointed out that we carry on as though death were the greatest of all calamities—yet, for all we know, it might be the greatest of all blessings. What are we going to call good? What are we going to call bad? Good or bad is never our choice, or even the issue.

The operation was a success, but I'm afraid the doctor is dead.

Always...no wait...never.....

The Feynman Dilemma A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny

Design Is a Wicked Problem Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a wicked problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it (1973). This paradox implies, essentially, that you have to solve the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again to create a solution that works.

In Michael Roes, we once again see the fundamental paradox of self-help: If it works, people should emerge from their larval state and become the fully evolved individuals SHAM vowed to help them be.

God works in mysterious ways but at least he works, he's never on welfare in a mysterious way.

The coffeehouse model of creativity helps explain one of those strange paradoxes of twenty-first-century business innovation. Even as much of the high-tech culture has embraced decentralized, liquid networks in their approach to innovation, the company that is consistently ranked as the most innovative in the world—Apple—remains defiantly top-down and almost comically secretive in its development of new products.

Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and the explosion of this surplus over time is impossible to tabulate.

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.