Quotes About Paradox

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

His love was a poison: soft and loveable, hideous yet touchable.

A rabbit's foot may bring good luck to you, but it brought none to the rabbit.

I am not lucky. I am the type who would go to Lourdes and drown in the waters.

Life is strange, and often imponderable!

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.

Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.

In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.

From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.

So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!

this approach is exactly backward:

I count myself one of those).

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.