Quotes About Paradox

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.

undertow'. It describes (...) how underneath our own everyday lives - the shopping and squabbles and weeding and trips to the vet - there's a sense of being dragged slowly off, not against our will but regardless of it. And fighting the undertow, as children are quick to learn, is not usually the best way of getting back to the beach. Floating along with it, on the other hand, can be fatal. It's really the struggle, the argument with oneself, that interests...

I realize now that this was circular reasoning impregnable to debate.

There was no explaining this thing, but it was so. he was on Xapur, and that fantastic heap of towering masonry was on Xapur, and all was madness and paradox; yet it was all true.

Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth:

Jesus not only revealed himself, he hid himself at the same time.

The paradox of hell, as the most contradiction-filled one of all, will in all likelihood be patient of no exposition but the most contradictory.

The kingdom grows, he says, because the kingdom is already planted. It grows of itself and in its own good time. Above all, it grows we know not how.

Nothing is more dangerous than a place of safety.

An Infinite personality is an infinite impossibility

He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he'd never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness.

Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps. (170)

We are, paradoxically, unkind to the present, ignoring the opportunity to project it into the future, forgetting it as soon as it is past. As we would injure children by spoiling them, we injure time by being too attentive to its ephemera.

Here lies the characteristic paradox of good and evil: for action, in terms of practical effects, is superior to inaction, and the congenitally active evil an can frequently win advantage over the sometimes inactive good. Indeed, the fundamentally stable and restful spirit of goodness is a lure to evil inspirations, an encouragement to villains who are aware that, in the moral and political chess game, they have the white pieces and the first move.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

their vaunted liberty no body pushes me around i have heard them say land of the free they sing what do they fear mistrust betray more than the freedom they boast of in their ignorant pride have seen the squalid ghettoes in their violent cities paradox on paradox how have the americans managed to survive

Weirdness is beauty, beauty weirdness.

I guess you might say that it was a paradox of sorts in that I prepared for long-term success by bracing myself against the effects of short-term failure. I again emphasize that this philosophy works only if you are prepared to succeed. It does not work if you simply use it as an excuse to fail in a situation where it may have been possible to succeed had you tried harder or been more persistent.

The human race puzzles me, with striving for freedom, and then basically just giving it away.

The world of affairs, as I have experienced it, is a very ambiguous one. The problem of preparing people to serve and be served by this society is, as Chesterton says, that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite. It is not illogical, yet it is a trap for logicians.

We realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.

My body which my dungeon is,And yet my parks and palaces.

I will catch Christ with a greased worm.