Quotes About Paradox

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.

Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.

The good is mostly in the absence of bad";

what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

Things are not as simple as that. We

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

My problem is that I'm not rational.

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

But since abundance would bring the opposite effect

You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.

La grande courtisane, la petite sainte.

The sun is a joke.

The union two abysses does not produce a height.

it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity?

If we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find [the] same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud.

You see, natural beauty creates such excitement that the existence of the weight is negated. And once it is negated, the heavier it is to bear.

The thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin. They torture and thrill all at once.

It's my pleasure to be your displeasure.