Quotes About Paradoxical

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

One thing that everybody told me about directing was, 'Never compromise'. And the whole job is a compromise. So it's very paradoxical. How do you not compromise when the whole thing is about compromise?

Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.

As a system of hybrid communicating vessels, the human interior consists of paradoxical or autogenous hollow bodies that are at once tight and leaky, that must alternate between the roles of container and content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and outer walls.

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling', for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

You know when actors are very shy and self-effacing? Well, I really love it when people like my work, but I'm also really embarrassed about it. It's strange. And a bit pathetic really.

An interesting fiction... however paradoxical the assertion may appear... addresses our love of truth- not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and principals, which is a primitive law of the human mind.

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness.

It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic.

Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical.

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the same person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness instead of pain.

Lawrence C. Becker puts it, "Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish."16 In the words of the historian Paul Veyne, "Stoicism is not so much an ethic as it is a paradoxical recipe for happiness.

My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don't believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!

Deep down, he's shallow.

Love is a circular emotion that surrounds you, like a hug. Or a noose.

The invitation to imitate the desire of Jesus may seem paradoxical, for Jesus does not claim to possess a desire proper, a desire "of his very own." Contrary to what we ourselves claim, he does not claim to "be himself"; he does not flatter himself that he obeys only his own desire. His goal is to become the perfect image of God. There-fore he commits all his powers to imitating his Father. In inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation.

That sounds like one of those clever things people say that mean precisely nothing!

Another is the common use of print or visual media to present case histories of adolescents who have attempted or committed suicide. The purpose is to teach students how to identify friends who may be at risk for suicidal behavior. However, the method may have a paradoxical effect in that students may closely identify with the problems portrayed by the case examples and may come to see suicide as the logical solution to their own problems.