Quotes About Paradox

When avoidance of pain becomes the major emphasis of childbirth care, the paradoxical effect is that more women have to deal with pain after their babies are born.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses. - Ovid

How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd...

But your eyes were bequeathed to me— As anathema And a blessing.

There's a great deal going on in the world, and nothing happening—precisely because so much is going on—

Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

Even in warmest glow how cold my shadow

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.

again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it:

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.

KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be. POLO: And here, in fact, we are.

L'Abate passò il resto dei suoi giorni tra carcere e convento in continui atti d'abiura, finché non morì, senza aver capito, dopo una vita intera dedicata alla fede, in che cosa mai credesse, ma cercando di credervi fermamente fino all'ultimo.

Ancient beauty is powerless against new ugliness.

The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.

Dodju tako ponekad vremena, kada pamet zacuti, budala progovori, a fukara se obogati.