Quotes About Paradox

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.

Jesus's message to his contemporaries, and the church's message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don't fit what the church itself expects.

To begin with, you have to grasp the fact that Christian virtue isn't about you—your happiness, your fulfillment, your self-realization. It's about God and God's kingdom, and your discovery of a genuine human existence by the paradoxical route—the route God himself took in Jesus Christ!—of giving yourself away, of generous love which constantly refuses to take center stage.

Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?

Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic. That

This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole.

The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold—and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

Suppose a cannibal eats a Christian, and suppose the cannibal is then himself converted. The Christian's body has become part of the cannibal's body; who will have which bits at the resurrection?

Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.

Inasmuch a real mover does not move, and a non-mover does not move, apart from a mover and a non-mover, what third thing could move?

Motion does not begin in what has moved, nor does it begin in what has not moved, nor does it begin in what is moving. In what, then, does motion begin?

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

The fruit in the garden was not about knowledge, but about not knowing, about looking into a face and having no idea whether you should kiss it or strike it. Hell is a thousand such small abysses.

Hope is the greatest gift and the greatest evil...Hope saved us and hope might yet kill us.

How is it possible for me to feel so young and so old at the same time?

How can something make you so weak and so strong at the same time?

Libertins et talibans c'est blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc à cet égard : les premiers veulent l'érotisme sans la procréation, et les seconds la procréation sans l'érotisme ; dans les deux cas, ce qui coince c'est la mère qui s'envoie en l'air !

An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity—which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself.

When a postmodernist asserts that there is no universally valid truth, he is implicitly claiming that his own assertion is universally valid and true. To make the statement, he has to occupy the transcendental position that postmodernism says is not there to be occupied. Thus every time a postmodernist states his position, he contradicts it. The position is self-refuting.

Allie says: Are you trying to tell me there's literally no right choice here? The voice says: There's never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.

There's never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.