Quotes About Paradox

Humanity is a crazy contradiction. I accept us for who we are. We're not that great. Every time we take a step forward we go back to the same primitive behavior. We're meant to be this way. It's not our fault, it's just who we are.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?

The master Wen-yu summed it up when he answered a demand for the First Principle of Ch'an with, "If words could tell you, it would become the Second Principle.

Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.

The Institute of Confound and Demoralize is something that Mimi has made up to deal with the contradictions that seem to arise with alarming frequency. Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. Red win helps blood health. Red wine reduces your ability to fight infection. Exercise is essential for general fitness. Exercise contributes to inflammation of the joints. Kale, the silent killer.

And cranky old Jacques Derrida notwithstanding, we do love our dichotomies.

This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

we must make believe that we are not what we are—contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox.

For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards into life.

Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.

Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above, Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth. (There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear them up, and throw them in someone else's garbage.

If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book.

Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Once and for all, lets us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willing consume the terror of the tomb... and find them to our liking.

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

To state this matter in the most lucid terms: each of these hyper-organisms, even as they scintillated with an obscene degree of vital impulses, also, and at the same time, had degeneracy and death written deeply upon them.

All supernatural horror depends on a confusion of what we believe should be and should not be. As scientists, philosophers, and spiritual figures have attested, our heads are full of illusions; things, including human things, are frequently not what they seem…No one can prove that our existence is a paradox and a horror. Everything is alright with the world.

Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.

A paradox of life: The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them.