Quotes About Paradox

The conclusion is that the original assumption of ordering leads us into contradiction, and so that assumption must be false.

Wetiko doesn't objectively exist, and yet, at the same time, it is not merely our projection or imagination. Instead of an either/or universe, where phenomena like wetiko are either real or unreal, there is an area in between in which it is both/and--both real and unreal at the same time.

paradox? It is that we can be a child sitting on a window ledge knowing everything and we can be the universe knowing the child at the same time.

A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

It doesn't matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you're right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn't work – it's like that, or maybe it isn't, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody's throat….

There are chickens, there are eggs, there are deaf girls singing karaoke. Nothing makes sense anymore.

It takes a special, ironic kind of person to use their own impending death as an impetus to finally live.

And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.

Sometimes it's possible for a decision to be right and wrong at the same time

Too thick to drink," as the boatmen used to say about the water of the Mississippi River, "too thin to walk on.

The wrong answer is the right answer to a different question.

read a story about a Zen seeker who goes to the master and sits across the table at tea time. The Zen master holds a stick in his hand, and he says, "If you drink your tea, I will hit you with this stick. If you don't drink your tea, I will hit you with this stick." So what do you do? Well, I think I figured it out. Take away the stick.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love.

Self-affirmation, for Tillich, is the paradox of "participation in something which transcends the self" (165).

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

De postmoderne mens lijdt aan een vreemde dissociatie, een nieuwe vorm van persoonlijkheidsverdubbeling. We klagen het systeem aan, staan er vijandig tegenover en voelen ons machteloos om het te veranderen. Anderzijds gedragen we ons op een manier die het systeem voortdurend bevestigt en uitbreidt.

That's obviously, isn't it?' she said. 'A hawk is always a hawk, except'- and here she raised on heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile - 'except when the hawk is a cabbage.' 'What?' Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed. 'Exactly,' Gertrude said.

Love Contains Both "Yes" And "No

It had been about as fun as a fun run, an oxymoron if she had ever heard one, with heavy emphasis on the moron part.

Nace el ave, y con las galas que le dan belleza suma, apenas es flor de pluma, o ramillete con alas, cuando las etéreas salas corta con velocidad, negándose a la piedad del nido que dejan en calma; ¿y teniendo yo más alma, tengo menos libertad?

She was secretly amused by the man who managed to give the impression of moving in all directions while standing still.