Quotes About Paradox

The dove loves when it quarrels; the wolf hates when it flatters.

We hang between two seemingly irreconcilable facts / the capacity to Sing and the inevitability of Death.

In Ländern, deren Bürger sich in Gefängnissen nicht sicher fühlen, fühlt man sich in der Freiheit ebenso unsicher.

You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa.

This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.

We understand everything; that is why we understand nothing.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

Drei Männer treffen in einer Gefängniszelle zusammen und fragen einander nach dem Grund ihrer Verhaftung. Der Erste sagt, er sitzt wegen einer negativen Äußerung über Karl Radek, den führenden sowjetischen Publizisten und Politiker. Der Zweite sagt, er sitzt, weil er Karl Radek gelobt hat. Der dritte Häftling schweigt melancholisch. Als die beiden ihn fragen, antwortet er: "Und ich - ich bin Karl Radek ...

You know, it's a peculiar thing. At funerals one's inclined to laugh; and at weddings, weep.

Beauty comes from tension: between order and disorder, simplicity and complexity.

Querer jugar contra uno mismo representa, en definitiva, una paradoja tan grande como querer saltar sobre la propia sombra

je mehr sich einer begrenzt, um so mehr ist er andererseits dem Unendlichen nah; gerade solche scheinbar Weltabseitigen bauen in ihrer besonderen Materie sich termitenhaft eine merkwürdige und durchaus einmalige Abbreviatur der Welt.

Mais il suffit d'une seconde pour faire comprendre que, le hasard n'y ayant aucune part, c'est une absurdité de vouloir jouer contre soi-même. L'attrait du jeu d'échecs réside tout entier en ceci que deux cerveaux s'y affrontent, chacun avec sa tactique […] vouloir jouer aux échecs contre soi-même est donc aussi paradoxal que vouloir marcher sur son ombre.

Physician, heal thyself," runs the adage; but it was characteristic of Mary Baker as of so many mental healers, that the magician who cured thousands could never fully succeed in curing herself.

setting out to play against oneself in chess represents therefore the same sort of paradox as a man jumping over his own shadow.

Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death.

What I like about the Bible is that it doesn't make sense, which makes it more like truth than anything else I've ever read.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you.

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.

Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.