Quotes About Paradox

How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I'd tumble it over.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

El mejor modo de castigar a los humanos, es dándoles lo que tanto reclaman.

Only in humans, alone among the animals, did violence make victim mechanisms necessary and bring them into being. If original sin created the problem of violence, it found a solution in archaic religion. The paradox of human cultures is that violence expels violence: Satan casts out Satan. MSB

Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father.

When Jesus says something that seems banal, it is necessary to be wary.

d'ailleurs nous ne pouvons nous empêcher de constater que, comme tous les propagandistes, les apôtres de la tolérance sont très souvent, en fait, les plus intolérants des hommes.

il est curieux de voir à quelles extravagantes rêveries peut donner lieu une science aussi « positive » que veut l'être l'astronomie moderne.

On dit même que le diable, quand il veut, est fort bon théologien ; il est vrai, pourtaint qu'il ne peut s'empêcher de laisse échapper toujours quelque sottise, qui est comme sa signature

Just as Diana Prince is never around when Wonder Woman shows up, Venus is either a Morning Star or an Evening Star, never both simultaneously.

Thy gentleness hath made me great" (2 Samuel 22:36, Authorized Version). Where in the whole Bible do we have a more magnificent paradox than that which associates greatness with gentleness?

The way my life goes, I can't tell if there are pits in my cherries or cherries among my pits, philosophically speaking.

There is both joy and suffering on planet Earth because this beautiful world is a world of duality - a world of opposites. There is an opposite side to everything.

La vida duele pero es todo pero es nada pero es cierta.

How on earth did it come about that all the things denounced in the Gospels are violently defended by the Christian sects?

The conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleep-walking and in politics, every day.

Love's passives are his activ'st part.The wounded is the wounding heart.

Zen Buddhist dictum that "the opposite of a great truth is also true.

Richard Elliott Friedman

So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?

In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be.

It is strange how you shall hate a man, and yet pity him from the depths.

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

It was like so, but wasn't.