Quotes About Paradox

The world is strange, but simple

We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between "cause" and "effect.

Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?

O dente morde a fruta envenenada a fruta morde o dente envenenado o veneno morde a fruta e morde o dente o dente, se mordendo, já descobre a polpa deliciosíssima do nada.

Desde que el mundo es mundo, vivir y morir vienen siendo la cara y la cruz de una misma moneda echada al aire, pero si sale cara es todavía más absurdo. Para mí, si quieren que les diga la verdad, lo raro es vivir.

World is all backward… It's like…we're through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for truth are considered crazy.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,' sir.

Nothing is certain, but if nothing is certain, how can we be certain that nothing is certain?

You're so clean that you're dirty.

The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.

So maybe this was another example of nothing ever being just one thing. No motive is pure. No one is good or bad—but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

Criminals are free and make choices. Responsibility accrues and repentance is required. Among Dostoevsky's many complaints against socialism . . . was its promise to replace this radical freedom with material and mental security. Hence one of Dostoevsky's great paradoxes: the healthy, free mind demands continual destabilization and doubt if it is to exercise acts of faith, but our deeds are stable, answerable, and belong to us alone.

Where there is love, there is often also hate. They can exist side by side.

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

Tis strange - but true; for Truth is always strange, Stranger than Fiction

There is a flip side to every concept which has ever been coined.

Life is both much simpler and more complicated than it appears to be.

In managing our transport systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the paradox of mass movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and coralled, divided, re-formed and forced into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

If ice can burn," said Jojen in his solemn voice, "then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one.

To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.

I will say, I think it odd that I am loved by one for a kindness I never did, and reviled by so many for my finest act.

The world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.

To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.