Paradoxes quotes:

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  • Paradoxes are the only truths. -- George Bernard Shaw
  • Paradoxes are useful to attract attention to ideas. -- Mandell Creighton
  • Paradoxes only stump sane people. Nuts have irrational on our side. -- Brian Spellman
  • Paradoxes are less paradoxical in their reference to truth than most of the most plausible axioms. -- Raheel Farooq
  • Intelligence is to spot paradoxes. Wisdom is to live by them. -- Raheel Farooq
  • A deeper thought on the surface is exactly the paradox we need. -- Nema Al-Araby
  • Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution. -- Edward Teller
  • I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • If wool shrinks when you wash it, why don't sheep get smaller when it rains? -- Ron Brackin
  • There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore. -- Evan Parker
  • The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere. -- Ridley Scott
  • Of all the logical impasses, unknowings, paradoxes, and terrors that provoke laughter, death by its finality and unsolvable mystery is paramount. -- Andrew Hudgins
  • The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr
  • ...they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve, and if you do, you never get the results you expected. -- E.A. Bucchianeri
  • If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. -- Alan Watts
  • I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections. -- Junot Diaz
  • I collect axioms, paradoxes, maxims, teaching stories, proverbs, and aphorisms of all sorts, because I love to see complex ideas distilled into a few words. -- Gretchen Rubin
  • When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored. -- Wendell Willkie
  • It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. -- Anatole Broyard
  • The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity. -- Amin Maalouf
  • Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • 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. -- Paul Dirac
  • 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
  • Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them. -- Oscar Wilde
  • The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace. -- Marcel Proust
  • I'm a kindhearted but highly competitive pragmatist. When I seek to win something, I always make certain it's never at the expense of anything more serious than the inadequate efforts of others. -- Jonathan Kieran
  • Somehow this change was even scarier than all the people downstairs, because Jordan could have an identical twin; there could be kids who looked like his parents' childhood pictures. The bunk beds were impossible. -- Margaret Peterson Haddix
  • Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such endless variety of forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct. -- Henry Theophilus Finck
  • Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life. -- Fernand Braudel
  • I got a lot of paradoxes in my life. I guess I'm a real confused person, but there are some focused parts to my life now, and I'm slowly trying to put all the pieces back together. -- Stevie Ray Vaughan
  • One of the best paradoxes of leadership is a leader's need to be both stubborn and open-minded. A leader must insist on sticking to the vision and stay on course to the destination. But he must be open-minded during the process. -- Simon Sinek
  • The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. -- Ogden Nash
  • 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
  • My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love. -- Mike Mills
  • And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days. -- Howard Thurman
  • People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby. -- Neil Kinnock
  • Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures. -- Graham Hancock
  • Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them. -- Octavio Paz
  • --
  • Much of the conventional analysis of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people. -- Shashi Tharoor
  • We live to survive our paradoxes. -- Gordon Downie
  • Life is full of ironies and paradoxes. -- John Hurt
  • In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound. -- Robert A.F. Thurman
  • In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound. -- Robert A.F. Thurman
  • Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns. -- Fernando Pessoa
  • Two paradoxes are better than one they may even suggest a solution. -- Edward Teller
  • The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes. -- William Poundstone
  • Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes. -- James Gleick
  • Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics. -- Edward Kasner
  • The only way to be completely self-consistent is to be constantly uttering paradoxes. -- Bauvard
  • All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life. -- Nancy Friday
  • The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible. -- William Poundstone
  • Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret. -- Charles Caleb Colton
  • One of the paradoxes of globalization is that, in the developing world, we've seen massive reductions in property. -- Tony Blair
  • The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. -- Oscar Wilde
  • I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. -- Maxine Hong Kingston
  • This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes. -- Reid Hoffman
  • One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories. -- Philip J. Davis
  • I'm almost never serious, and I'm always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I'm like a collection of paradoxes. -- Ferdinand de Saussure
  • I'm into paradoxes. I wanted to make an album about them, but the group told me I was a pretentious fart. They were right. -- Brian May
  • It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print. -- Andrew Ferguson
  • Many things are linked to being able to live with uncertainty, ...with paradoxes. But this can be a strength of an organisation and a situation. -- John Elkann
  • What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh! -- Agnes Repplier
  • The world is full of paradoxes and life is full of opposites. The art is to embrace the opposites, accommodate the paradoxes and live with a smile. -- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
  • The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Periods of change are full of paradoxes. They're difficult but exciting, frightening but freeing. Letting go of old patterns that no longer work for us is exhilarating. -- Sue Thoele
  • --
  • Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes. -- Elie Wiesel
  • I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted. -- Horace Walpole
  • Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles. -- Millicent Fenwick
  • Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
  • This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null. -- F. L. Lucas
  • Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found. -- Galileo Galilei
  • There are three paradoxes of the Christian life: You must give in order to receive, you must let go in order to possess, and you must die in order to live. -- B.G. Lavastida Los Pinos Nuevos
  • One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it. -- Scarlett Thomas
  • We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full. -- Thomas Merton
  • If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels. -- Alain de Botton
  • This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don't suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him. -- Randy Alcorn
  • 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. -- Joan Smith
  • We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable. -- Ana Castillo
  • The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise. -- Okakura Kakuzo
  • . . . in one sense a foundation is a security blanket: If you meticulously follow the rules laid down, no paradoxes or contradictions will arise. In reality there is now no guarantee of this sort of security . . . -- Saunders Mac Lane
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