Quotes About Paradox

A pauper in the midst of wealth.

A desgraça só atinge o paroxismo quando se esteve muito próximo da felicidade.

Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.

Opposites are joined at the hip. Night and day, poisons and pleasures, innovation and destruction are usually different facets of the very same thing. [...] Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem - not tearing each other to bits or threatening to annihilate each other.

Geronimo [is]...an example of our practice of destroying those who oppose us and then honoring them.

I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.

This paradox exists because most investors think quality, as opposed to price, is the determinant of whether something's risky. But high quality assets can be risky, and low quality assets can be safe. It's just a matter of the price paid for them...Elevated popular opinion, then, isn't just the source of low return potential, but also of high risk.

Everything about it was wrong. Thats why it worked so good.

I was working on the principle, you see, that the more obvious you are, the less obvious you are.

Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another.

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

Those who set out nobly to be their brother's keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

Now to think of concrete as both natural and artificial demands a greater degree of mental agility than most of us can manage. So much is invested in the absoluteness of this distinction between natural and artificial , so necessary is it to our whole cosmology, that to admit that something can be both of these would be just too anxious-inducing. To avoid this, we habitually operate on the assumption that concrete is just artificial, or alternatively, just natural, but never both.

I've got a lot of ideas about God. I pray about as much as anybody, even though i am tough , yet I'm not too sure I liked God. It seems to me that is he is what they say he is, he has a very funny way of showing it.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

At the smallest levels, the universe operates according to very different rules from those of the sensual world. There are contradictions and impossibilities, paradoxes and strangenesses, a Lewis Carroll logic; yet this is the most accurate description of how reality works.

The great lie of democracy, its essential paradox, is that democracy is first to be sacrificed when its security is at risk. Every state is totalitarian at heart; there are no ends to the cruelty it will go to to protect itself.

Tell me, how is it that Courtney Hall can have all her life mapped out for her from beginning to end for the maximum personal happiness and satisfaction and still be neither happy nor satisfied?

He is a gross man-mountain balanced on strangely tiny feet. Not fat, vast.

He had to get off the booze. He had to get off the ciggies. They were killing him, yet they were the only things keeping him alive.

trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessarily lacking the belief to believe.

Honey in the mouth, Dagger in the stomach

What can you do with a person who says that he is absolutely uncertain about everything, and that he is absolutely certain about that?