Quotes About Paradox

Ak?ll? olmak gerektiÄŸini düÅŸünerek tam öyle olmaya çal??t???m?z s?rada yine aptallaÅŸmak gerektiÄŸini öÄŸreniyoruz.

How can a man be worthy as an educator if he have a natural, incorrigible penchant for the abyss? Much as we renounce it and seek dignity, we are drawn to it.

We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the one thing necessary may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.

Confucious and the Madman (excerpt) The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down! The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it. Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know How useful it is to be useless.

He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways.

ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.

The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ.

What a strange thing! In filling myself I had emptied myself

This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner "I" is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude.

Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.

What's this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they're not really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

She had heard all about excluded middles ; they were bad shit, to be avoided...

The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything's on its head, it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction…

Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.

Oh well, 'really'— it's like a woman isn't it, you look at each other, you think Of course not, she thinks Of course not,— yet the Alternatives hang about, don't they, like Wraiths.

She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?

The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.

In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate.

Unfairly, nature seems to have designed it so that the one person in the whole world who can best calm us down when we're terrified is unfortunately the same person who is terrifying us.

It doesn't come up ever, and yet it comes up always.

Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" eloquently captures the inherent paradox in living: every choice for contains within it all of the choices not for.