Quotes About Paradox

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.

In love, it is the weak who strike and the strong who caress.

Future hipsters will love me ironically.

Why do insurance companies, when they want to describe an act of God, invariably pick on something which sounds much more like an act of the Devil? One would think that God was exclusively concerned in making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts, and dry rot. They seem to forget that He also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom, and Siamese kittens. However, that is, perhaps, a diversion.

I felt sad and a whole lot better at the same time.

Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can't wait to frolic in it.

Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.

J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward

Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: "Bohr once commented that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said." Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: "Don't try.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people – in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don't begin to understand it

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no.

head over heels is not just a cliché; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.