Quotes About Paradox

the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.

But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time. The demand for perfection and the craving for ever more control over a world that paradoxically seemed ever more out of control eventually bred impatience with story.

Only an atheist can be a good Christian.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

Governments change, files remain. The paradox remained: in the dossiers of the State the fact that I had risked my neck for it was simultaneously listed forever as treason. When my name was mentioned, the exalted file clerks in the government offices, who sat on their chairs only because I and people like me allowed them to, made a wry face.

There is no defect without its own virtue and vice versa.

Al parecer se considera paradójico el que un guerrero hable de la paz. Frente a eso cabe decir que su firma es la única que otorga crédito a esa palabra. No en vano los antiguos hacían que a los tratados de paz asistiesen sus dioses nacionales de la guerra, representados por el sumo sacerdote.

If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

The second may well be beyond human understanding.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

THE STRIKING CONTRAST

If it was occasionally ludicrous, it was always sublime. [Estelle Jussim on the 19th century Cult of the Beautiful.]

We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.

Whenever someone acts one way in public - goes overboard, if you know what i mean - it'll turn out they have an opposite side. The quietest person will have the worst temper. The happiest person will suffer the worst depressions. The best thing about a person is the worst thing.

Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat.

Take a perfect circle, caress it and you'll have a vicious circle.

But he who has it, said the Master with a subtle smile, would do well to have it as though he did not have it.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong" is the warning posted by H. L. Mencken.

The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.

Even though innocent, anything I say incriminates me; blameless as I am, my defense just makes me sound worse.

realized that consistency, a trait I had long esteemed, was sometimes not such a virtue after all.

Jesus] said "Follow me" and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn't after the best but the worst.