Paradox Quotes

1. "Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long."
Author: Andrew Davidson

2. "Freedom has become a commodity whose availability, paradoxically, keeps society in check. The threat of its loss seems to enable us to tolerate its imposition."
Author: Andrzej Stasiuk

3. "It's paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone."
Author: Andy Rooney

4. "It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos."
Author: Ariel Gore

5. "It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it."
Author: Arnold J. Toynbee

6. "The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify."
Author: Arundhati Roy

7. "Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you."
Author: Blaise Pascal

8. "As we dreamers make our souls into evolved fields, our genius is nutured and our presence and everything we create becomes charged and capable of positively altering the fields of others. In this process, we become more essentially human-which is to say, paradoxically, more divine."
Author: Carolyn Elliott

9. "In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane"
Author: Charles Chaplin

10. "Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no "natural" confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond."
Author: David Bentley Hart

11. "You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle."
Author: David Liss

12. "To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them - while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease."
Author: Eckhart Tolle

13. "Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution."
Author: Edward Teller

14. "Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there."
Author: Elizabeth Bowen

15. "Always, in Lincoln's mature theology, there is paradox. There is starting this, yet there is also tenderness; there is melancholy, yet there is also humor: there is moral law, yet there is also compassion. History is the scene of the working out God's justice, which we can never escape, but it is also the scene of the revelation of the everlasting mercy."
Author: Elton Trueblood

16. "The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep."
Author: Erich Fromm

17. "Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

18. "Der Mensch ist für mich ein Wesen, das nur durch paradoxe, komödiantische Mittel, Formen, dargestellt werden kann, denn der Mensch geht nicht auf wie eine Rechnung, und wo der Mensch so aufgeht, ist die Rechnung sicher gefälscht."
Author: Friedrich Dürrenmatt

19. "As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

20. "A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme...but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony."
Author: Gina Marinello Sweeney

21. "Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought."
Author: Herman Kahn

22. "There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive."
Author: Jack London

23. "Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes."
Author: James Gleick

24. "One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt."
Author: Joan Smith

25. "After an eternity of seeking the sudden threshold of seeing and finding leaves one filled with a strange paradox of ecstasy and grief. I was born to see."
Author: Joy Page

26. "Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.""The words of truth are always paradoxical."
Author: Lao Tzu

27. "That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

28. "Riddles: They either delight or torment. Their delight lies in solutions. Answers provide bright moments of comprehension perfectly suited for children who still inhabit a world where solutions are readily available. Implicit in the riddle's form is a promise that the rest of the world resolves just as easily. And so riddles comfort the child's mind which spins wildly before the onslaught of so much information and so many subsequent questions.The adult world, however, produces riddles of a different variety. They do not have answers and are often called enigmas or paradoxes. Still the old hint of the riddle's form corrupts these questions by the echoing the most fundamental lesson: there must be an answer. From there comes torment."
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

29. "The seeming paradoxes of beauty and truth collide and individuality emerges from the debris. We spend our lifetimes dusting it down."
Author: Martin Cosgrove

30. "And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world - man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying."
Author: Maurice Blanchot

31. "I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."
Author: Mother Teresa

32. "That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus."
Author: Nicolas Bouvier

33. "Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies."
Author: Paul Berg

34. "There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world."
Author: Paul Dirac

35. "Paradoxically, in descending into the depths of the unconscious in order to deal with the prima materia of the shadow, we are simultaneously on the path of ascending to the truly real, as we become introduced to the higher-dimensional light worlds of spirit."
Author: Paul Levy

36. "An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed."
Author: Paul Samuelson

37. "As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away."
Author: Ralph Fiennes

38. "The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible."
Author: Robert South

39. "I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other."
Author: Romola Garai

40. "Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox."
Author: Russell Brand

41. "Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess."
Author: Russell D. Moore

42. "I no longer follow the voices of the sane. I follow the ill because they see farther, feel much more and change what the sane will not. This is the paradox of philosophers---trying to understand mass delusion among great people that have faith and knowledge, yet they can't graduate from their institutions of religious theology to apply the knowledge they have gained for the shifting of Zion---- from words to action; from comfort to uncomfortable; from self serving to self giving; from competition to supporting; to tradition to unity; from bias to acceptance; from me to us."
Author: Shannon L. Alder

43. "It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialecticalconsequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form ofproblemata, in order to seewhat a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming amurder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back toAbraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there wherethinking leaves off."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

44. "An Apostle can never come to himself in such a way that he becomes conscious of his apostolic calling as a factor in the development of his life. Apostolic calling is a paradoxical factor, which from first to last in his life stands paradoxically outside his personal identity with himself as the definite person he is."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

45. "Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanisation, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labour necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us."
Author: The Invisible Committee

46. "Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love."
Author: Thomas M. Disch

47. "Options - the ability to choose - is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money - a lot more money - by doing half of what you are doing now."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

48. "Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow."
Author: Tony Schwartz

49. "If a society has no moral foundations then success is a threat. Every successful person thinks everyone else is a failure, and this is the proof of failure. Conquering the world and dying empty-handed on foreign shores is a paradox of such success."
Author: Wasif Ali Wasif

50. "I tell you, they were not men after spoils and glory; they were boys riding the sheer tremendous tidal wave of desperate living. Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. Try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself."
Author: William Faulkner

Paradox Quotes Pictures