Quotes About Paradox

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Religious energy is in the dark questions, seldom in the answers.

As the old joke put it: It is forbidden to smoke while you are praying! But it is wonderful and meritorious to pray while you are smoking!

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.

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

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the spiritual journey is this: wisdom and love do not come from success but from continuing failure.

Grace is always a punishment for us.

Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?

He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.

He hated when his own advice applied to himself.

But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.

I LIKE my rivers the way I like my enemies—slow, wide, and lazy. I rarely get what I like.

Sometimes, even Loki can be right.

This is the paradox: victory comes through surrender. Surrender doesn't weaken you; it strengthens you. Surrendered to God, you don't have to fear or surrender to anything else.

You can't have it both ways," one of her girlfriends said. "Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it's one or the other." Tough and tender, a contradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?

But in truth,' said Bull, 'we are going nowhere. That my friend, is the irony of our constant movement.

Belle laide, Athénaïs calls me,' I replied with a little shrug. The expression was usually used to describe a woman who was arresting despite the plainness of her looks.

is a beautiful place, she thinks, yet somehow an inhospitable one. It's a place of secrets, one that has seen too much and concealed too much to be at peace with itself.

Iago says, I am not what I am, and for this he is called deceitful, a villain. Odd, isn't it? I have always found him to be the most truthful of Shakespeare's creations. We are none of us who we are.

It's crazy isn't it? She shook her head. You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful. She shook her head again. It's crazy.

Even a prince may be a fool

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. "It's crazy, isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.