Paradox quotes:

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  • Paradox likes contradictions with exits. -- Mason Cooley
  • By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox. -- Galileo Galilei
  • Soderquist's Paradox: There are more horses' asses than horses. -- John Peers
  • Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it. -- Mason Cooley
  • Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • [Paradox is] truth standing on its head to gain attention. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely. -- Lauren Groff
  • In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. -- Erich Fromm
  • The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. -- Carl Rogers
  • Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • The Paradox of Change: People can only change when they feel accepted as they are now. Dr. Arnold Beisser Pg 220 -- John Kuypers
  • I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love. -- Mother Teresa
  • It's the "Success Paradox." When a set of behaviors has gotten you somewhere, you keep doing them even though the circumstances have changed. -- Lewis Schiff
  • This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?" -- Bob Brookmeyer
  • The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. -- James A. Baldwin
  • Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science. -- William Poundstone
  • No one knows for sure that that tomorrow won't come, but most people assume that tomorrow will still exist as usual. This is Toba's Paradox, which means, hope overcomes doubt. -- Toba Beta
  • Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it. -- Joyce Carol Oates
  • It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own. -- Herbert Hoover
  • I don't really read 'business books,' and I didn't think 'The Paradox of Choice' was a business book. I'm very surprised and gratified that the business world thought it was one. -- Barry Schwartz
  • This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education. -- Bill Owens
  • In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. -- Norman O. Brown
  • Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense. -- Hans Christian von Baeyer
  • The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be. -- Mark McCormack
  • The Fundamental Regulator Paradox ... The task of a regulator is to eliminate variation, but this variation is the ultimate source of information about the quality of its work. Therefore, the better the job a regulator does the less information it gets about how to improve. -- Gerald Weinberg
  • To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock. -- Edward Abbey
  • A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being? -- Margaret Atwood
  • Life has three rules: Paradox, Humor, and Change. - Paradox: Life is a mystery; don't waste your time trying to figure it out. - Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure - Change: Know that nothing ever stays the same. -- Dan Millman
  • Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. -- Erica Jong
  • How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. -- Niels Bohr
  • It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. -- Hugh Black
  • The most exquisite paradox; as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. -- Ram Dass
  • The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye. -- Shana Alexander
  • Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. -- Oscar Wilde
  • The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism. -- Earl Warren
  • Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. -- T. S. Eliot
  • Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. -- George Eliot
  • Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar. -- Walter J. Phillips
  • The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valery
  • For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. -- Robert Browning
  • It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox. -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • You are doomed to make choices. This is life's greatest paradox. -- Wayne Dyer
  • Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good. -- George Will
  • My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. -- Mark Haddon
  • It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day. -- Brad Henry
  • The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. -- James Baldwin
  • The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. -- Os Guinness
  • The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall. -- Malcolm Gladwell
  • 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. -- Joy Page
  • Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together. -- Joan Jett
  • My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul. -- Paulo Coelho
  • That's the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have great joy as well. If we didn't have those things we'd just be numb. -- Kathy Mattea
  • Have you ever struggled to find work or love, only to find them after you have given up? This is the paradox of letting go. Let go, in order to achieve. Letting go is God's law. -- Mary Manin Morrissey
  • It's a paradox to be an actress, living in the city, taking planes all the time, trying to find the right balance in this life, which is not so eco-friendly, and still try to respect the environment. -- Marion Cotillard
  • Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. -- Barbara Januszkiewicz
  • 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. -- Jack London
  • You might find me outside with a can of hair spray, spraying it with the hope that the sun will burn a hole in the Earth. Another part of me hopes people will grow up and evolve and get smarter. That's the paradox of Marilyn Manson. -- Marilyn Manson
  • You have to think of your brand as a kind of myth. A myth is a compelling story that is archetypal, if you know the teachings of Carl Jung. It has to have emotional content and all the themes of a great story: mystery, magic, adventure, intrigue, conflicts, contradiction, paradox. -- Deepak Chopra
  • No paradox, no progress. -- Niels Bohr
  • All wisdom ends in paradox. -- Jeffrey Eugenides
  • There's a paradox in every paradigm. -- Ani DiFranco
  • A totally healthy actor is a paradox. -- Vittorio Gassman
  • If complexity doesn't beat you, paradox will. -- Tom Robbins
  • Morality without a sense of paradox is mean. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme. -- Mason Cooley
  • The existence of God is the ultimate paradox. -- Kedar Joshi
  • I'll just take amusement at being a paradox. -- Burgess Meredith
  • The only laws are paradox, humor and change. -- Dan Millman
  • There is no paradox. There is only irony. -- Philip K. Jason
  • Everything is paradox. The danger is one-dimensional thinking. -- Lesley Hazleton
  • Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions. -- Charles Caleb Colton
  • Every moment is the paradox of now or never. -- Simon Van Booy
  • He was a great thundering paradox of a man. -- William Manchester
  • The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox. -- Kedar Joshi
  • Together, we form a necessary paradox; not a senseless contradiction. -- Criss Jami
  • To be is the greatest paradox of life facing death. -- Sorin Cerin
  • --
  • The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative. -- Eric Hobsbawm
  • The paradox of challenges; we become what we ought to be. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
  • To fear and not be afraid- that is the paradox of faith. -- Aiden Wilson Tozer
  • Photographers are victims of paradox, tracking the impermanent to make it permanent. -- Ray Metzker
  • By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two -- Edwin Markham
  • A deeper thought on the surface is exactly the paradox we need. -- Nema Al-Araby
  • The paradox of simplicity is that making things simpler is hard work. -- Bill Jensen
  • The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, the resistance disappears. -- Adyashanti
  • Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics. -- Edward Kasner
  • We were an extraordinary paradox. We are finite creatures made for the infinite. -- Desmond Tutu
  • A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention. -- Alan Watts
  • To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox. -- Hannah Arendt
  • When a paradox is widely believed, it is no longer recognized as a paradox. -- Mason Cooley
  • ... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world. -- Susan Griffin
  • Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. -- Carl Sandburg
  • The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • The current situation with regard to theory is odd and maybe defined by a paradox. -- Simon Critchley
  • Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace. -- Matthew Fox
  • At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox. -- William Poundstone
  • Holland is a land of intense paradox. It is quite impossible, but it is there. -- M. E. W. Sherwood
  • That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much? -- Jodi Picoult
  • Live at the empty heart of paradox. I'll dance with you there, cheek to cheek. -- Rumi
  • An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed. -- Paul Samuelson
  • Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • It is a strange paradox: Humans drown in the water, fish drown in the land. -- Javad Alizadeh
  • The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea. -- Ian Hacking
  • --
  • The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox. -- James Clavell
  • The paradox of relaxation is the renewal of mind; rekindle of spirit and revitalize of strength. -- Lailah Gifty Akita
  • New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate. -- Harry Connick, Jr.
  • Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic]. -- Gregory Bateson
  • One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
  • Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition. -- Harold Rosenberg
  • The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man's right but we minimize his capacities. -- Joseph Wood Krutch
  • Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration. -- Emile M. Cioran
  • Jesus brings mystery, paradox, and tension - rarely did someone get a straight answer out of Him -- Mike Erre
  • The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation. -- Piero Scaruffi
  • The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be. -- Richard P. Feynman
  • That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox. -- Jorge Luis Borges
  • Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things. -- Karl Marx
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