Quotes About Paradox

This house could have been a prison or a hospital, but a prison where they locked up the innocent to prevent them from suffering, or a hospital where one goes to recover from the labor of life. And Monelle was both the jailer and the nurse.

Monelle found me in the plain where I was wandering and took me by the hand. "Do not be surprised," she said. "It is I, and it is not I; "You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; "Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; "And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.

It was like that old riddle about replacing the handle of an axe, and later the head—when you were done, was it a new axe or the old one?

We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.

There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.

There is nothing so ridiculous absurd* but some philosopher has said it.

I have so much hate that it has turned into love.

IF YOU BELIEVE THE DOCTORS," Salisbury once remarked, "nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

It's so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.

La vita, credimi, non è un fascio di speranze perdute, un puzzolente ricamo di mimose, la vita raglia e cavalca nel suo incessante splendore.

It's a funny old world.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

He arrives carrying a forest, and you said he walks his cat on a leash, and he's the one assessing other people's mental health?

On this view, our capacity to mourn—or, more properly, our capacity to not be intimidated by the inevitable prospect of mourning—is what makes satisfaction and enjoyment possible; our happiness cannot be divorced from our understanding of mourning as a process that, paradoxically enough, facilitates, rather than impedes, life.

They'll never forgive me, except they love me, so they will.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

I honestly cannot tell whether you are the most practical women I have ever met or the most deranged." "Why can't I be both

Well I am glad I have something of the fool in my disposition--foolishness being the only quality that makes wisdom possible.

Even a stopped clock is right two times a day.

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

Fear is peace and Peace is fear

The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.

Nobody likes the phenomenon of death, and death hates the phenomenon of life