Quotes About Paradox

There are some things in life we can never understand, things we are better off not understanding.

What sort of a world is it where evil is born of an act of goodness? -Vancha March

Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.

This had happened to him before - in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds. —Thomas Sowell

The world is upside down. Good is bad and bad is deified.

Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.

One of the most famous paradoxes ever articulated is often known by the title 'the liar's paradox'. At its simplest you can express it just by saying: 'I am lying'. The liar's paradox is a complicated business, discombobulating to think about because after all, if I'm lying, then my statement 'I am lying' must itself be a lie, unless I was actually telling the truth, in which case I would have been telling a lie.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside -- you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that's extremely easy to terrify.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like Yeah, but, you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else. and Who cares? and It's all bullshit anyway.

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror.

Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.

Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

Devils are actually angels.

You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed

that traversing an infinite number of dimensionless mathematical points is not obviously paradoxical in the way that traversing an infinite number of physical-space points is.

Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged

David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously