Quotes About Paradox

We're the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it's only the best thing for us if it's the worst thing for someone else.

I'm not a very gregarious person. I can't bear attention being called to me in a public place, which is ridiculous in a business that pays you to be noticed.

Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.

And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attack. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it!

It's a shame cars don't run on cognitive dissonance.

behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

None of us is okay and all of us are fine. It's not just one way. We are walking, talking paradoxes.

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.

we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.

One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castaneda 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.

like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange - is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understanding that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it?

An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what 'ought' to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be.

And then I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

Es beweist nichts; ist jeder Beweiskraft entzogen durch das Vorteile-Nachteile-Denken, das böseste der Lebensprinzipien. Alles hat nun einmal seine Vor- und Nachteile, und schon wird das Unzumutbare zumutbar - als Nachteil der wiederum nichts als eine notwendige Eigentheit jedes Vorteils ist.

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, I am. We are ontological oxymorons.

Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.

Paradoxically, sloth reigns most in our technologically busy world where leisure has been abolished and life has been programmed and scheduled down to the last detail.

Corruptio optimi pessima." The corruption of the best things are the worst things.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

And on earth, pain and pleasure are strangely akin at their peak, like death and life. When a thing is enormously beautiful, it hurts.

Socrates says we must be either fools because we think we are wise, or wise because we know we are fools. Christ says we must be either sinners who think we are saints, or saints who know we are sinners. Even

Chesterton said once that there is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians. And

these relativists turn out to be not relativistic at all about one thing: their relativism. That's their one nonnegotiable absolute.