Quotes About Paradox

We're both clever and stupid in equal measure.

Heisenberg removed the conceit that the workings of Nature should necessarily accord with common sense.

Tommy Cooper finds a painting and a violin in the attic; takes them to an expert who says, 'You've got a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made awful violins.

She was a whole girl made of two half girls, but wrongly made, of two of the same halves.

Brian Evenson

quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

As Feynman once wrote, "[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is—absurd.

comparing infinities is a treacherous business

THERE ARE times in life when the wrong thing to do is actually the right thing to do. Maybe vice versa, too. I don't know. I haven't gotten around to testing that theory yet.

Simplicity is the most difficult of all concepts.

The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn't been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.

HUMOR, LIKE METAPHOR, is simply two things placed side by side that don't belong together.

She has a job where she is around swarms of people all day long, and she's still lonely. He

The sun shines in a bucket of water and doesn't get wet.

It's weird like, you can see the cruelest part of the world. The cruelest part. But then on the other side you see the most beautiful part, do you know? And it's like you go from one extreme to the next and they're both worth it, because you wouldn't see one without the other. But that cruel part, is damn cruel and you'll never forget it. But that heaven…is heaven.

But smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.

where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love" (p. 183).

Nothingness cannot be defined; the softest thing cannot be snapped.

A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously to contradictory ideas. Slave owners were a case in point. They

A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously to contradictory ideas.

Your blessings and your curses often come in the same package.

The thrill of the uncanny lies in the piquancy of oxymoron.

To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.