Quotes About Paradox

The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.

The great thing about the public is that they're quite capable of believing two absolutely contrary views at the same time.

A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other.

Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

As much as they deny it, I think people want to be scared. It's a phenomenon, why people want to be scared when there is so much violence and craziness in the world. People still really enjoy being scared. It's a conundrum to me. It's hard to explain. It's an unconscious thing, really, why people like that so much.

For me comedy and violence has a lot in common. Just as you expect, comedy always lurks behind the most unexpected of circumstances.

We must recognize the chief characteristic of the modern era - a permanent state of what I call violent peace.

Only in the English countryside could violent death remain something that is 'cosy.'

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

One of the best paradoxes of leadership is a leader's need to be both stubborn and open-minded. A leader must insist on sticking to the vision and stay on course to the destination. But he must be open-minded during the process.

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.

I try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me.

For Rita, joy isn't pleasure; it's anticipatory pain.

This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they're already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention.

Nature could be both wondrous and cruel, creating immense beauty and then offsetting it with ugliness.

Relativity keeps anything from happening at once. Quantum mechanics keeps everything from really happening at all.

My greatest fear had always been: The more you get to know me, the less there is to know.

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.

Most cats, when they are Out want to be In, and vice versa, and often simultaneously.

Let the old Muse loosen her stays Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders And a smile like a cat, With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat. ... Give me a houri but houris are too easy, Give me a nun; We'll rape the angels off the golden reredos Before we're done.

Louis Sébastien Mercier

Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

They believe in a virgin birth, a resurrection, walking on water and some old guy with a white beard floating in the sky and running the world, but this they find unbelievable?" Gamache was quiet for a moment, then nodded. "It is interesting," he agreed, "what people choose to believe." And what they'd do in the name of that faith.