Quotes About Paradox

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.

Paradox is a characteristic of truth.

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

So do extremes meet; and such is sometimes the all-embracing capacity of the approval of a fool!

For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.

Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant.

In death there are smaller premises, littler ironies.

I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons Shudders hell through all its regions.

Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

Every harlot was a virgin once

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally true. This place is called Beulah. it is a pleasant lovely Shadow, where no dispute can come, because of those who sleep.

Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!

As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

Roses are planted where thorns grow, and on the barren heath sing the honey bees.

The best often seem the worst

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one's agenda and suited nobody's version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.

The very fact that he could and did see no paradox in the fact that he took an active part in a partisan war and on the very side whose principles opposed to his own, was proof enough that he was two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist.