Quotes About Paradox

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn't the night sky full of light? His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers' paradox.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them. - Niels Bohr

as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind—is one way the poem expresses the paradox.

Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change.

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.

A mystic doesn't say "I believe." They say "I know." A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

life seems to be a collision of opposites.

Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox—what's Three is one and what's One is three. We just can't resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

Love is a paradox. It often involves making a clear decision, but at its heart, it is not a matter of mind or willpower but a flow of energy willingly allowed and exchanged, without requiring payment in return.

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do. People who are so certain always seem like Hamlet's

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and "unknowing," and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.