Quotes About Paradox

One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all.

Awakening is not a process of building ourselves up but a process of letting go. It's a process of relaxing in the middle—the paradoxical, ambiguous middle, full of potential, full of new ways of thinking and seeing—with absolutely no money-back guarantee of what will happen next.

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

To every argument an equal argument is opposed.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

An argument which proves too much, proves nothing.

When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

It is either easy or impossible.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

Fashion: a beautiful thing that becomes ugly. Art: an ugly thing that becomes beautiful.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

Thou art most rich, being poor; Most choice, forsaken; and most lov'd, despis'd! Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.

Art manifests itself in paradoxical ways. At times it creates and at times it gets created!

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

I want to be famous but unknown!

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

Hypothesis: To burn and not consume. Hypothesis: To consume and not extinguish.