Quotes About Paradox

Para odiar algo, primero debes amarlo.

Only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.

For silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.

I'm inconsistent, even to myself.

We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet, everywhere in our culture, everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed.

The idea of being charming and really nasty at the same time is a really difficult thing to do.

What a puzzle you are to me, Jander Sunstar! You feed upon lifeblood, yet mourn the life you take. You are a being of shadow and night, yet you yearn to be surrounded by beauty. You are dead, but you cannot bear decay. What exactly are you? You can hardly be a vampire!

The grand experiment of the last half-century confirms, then, the paradox of egalitarian feminism: when women are liberated from the domestic sphere, granted their full Enlightenment freedoms to pursue happiness, and no longer sequestered in the role of nurturer, many, perhaps most, persist in giving priority to the domestic sphere.

Almost invariably when my name was mentioned, it carried the added phrase, an ex-GI. There seemed to be something fascinating about the fact that I'd been in the army, and I wonder now if that paradox wasn't a large contributing factor in the mountains of publicity that followed.

It is of interest that from the seventeenth century the word 'vicious' was used to describe a fault in logic, when a conclusion was realized by false means of reasoning. Webster's third definition of the vicious circle cites this fault in logic: 'an argument which is invalid because its conclusion rests upon a premise which itself depends on the conclusion.

So we've gone from 'Don't trust anyone over thirty' to 'Don't drink any Scotch under thirty'? Is this what's become of your revolution?

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

In one way, I suppose, I have been in denial for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well.

The literal mind can never understand the ironic mind.

During all this I never quite lost the surreal sense that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have to register as the most acute one. ... For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

There's a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it's more complicated than that.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.