Quotes About Paradox

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.

Alive without breath, As cold as death; Never thirsty, ever drinking, All in mail never clinking.

My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

I do not believe in my death.

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

Death was no less a miracle than birth.

I keep thinking how young can you die from old age

We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.

acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—

what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.

The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter-thought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear.

if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor's prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette's feast—spread for me.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created . . . BLAISE PASCAL1

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

The gospel is not at all what we would come up with on our own.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is required. The stars neither require it nor demand it. ANNIE DILLARD

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it's still got two sides.

What a strange thing that which men call pleasure seems to be, and how astonishing the relation it has with what is thought to be its opposite, namely pain! A man cannot have both at the same time. Yet if he pursues and catches the one, he is almost always bound to catch the other also, like two creatures with one head.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

que es dueño de sí mismo es también esclavo, y el que es esclavo, dueño; ya que en todos estos dichos se habla de una misma persona.

el placer y el dolor no se encuentran nunca a un mismo tiempo; y sin embargo, cuando se experimenta el uno, es preciso aceptar el otro, como

if it be shown that absolute unity is also many and the absolute many again are one, then I shall be amazed.

Tutti scoprono, più o meno presto nella loro vita, che la felicità non è realizzabile, ma pochi si soffermano invece sulla considerazione opposta: che tale è anche una infelicità perfetta.