Paradoxical quotes:

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  • Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age. -- Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all. -- Lawrence B. Lindsey
  • The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible. -- Robert South
  • But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. -- George Eliot
  • We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. -- Bertrand Russell
  • Paradoxical as it may seem, God means not only to make us good, but to make us also happy, by sickness, disaster and disappointment. -- C. A. Bartol
  • Paradoxical as it may at first appear, the fact is that, as W. H. George has said, scientific research is an art, not a science. -- William Ian Beardmore Beveridge
  • It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them. -- Leo Buscaglia
  • The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell
  • 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. -- Arnold J. Toynbee
  • The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. -- Erich Fromm
  • It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects. -- Nikola Tesla
  • Human experience is usually paradoxical. -- George Eliot
  • The words of truth are always paradoxical. -- Laozi
  • He who confronts the paradoxical exposes himself to reality. -- Friedrich Durrenmatt
  • It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors. -- Thomas Huxley
  • God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence. -- Kedar Joshi
  • The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness. -- Stanislav Grof
  • Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it. -- Charles Caleb Colton
  • Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently. -- Fritjof Capra
  • I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell
  • So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. -- T. S. Eliot
  • I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance. -- Parker J. Palmer
  • 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. -- Eckhart Tolle
  • Power is paradoxical. -- Friedrich Durrenmatt
  • Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. -- Tom Robbins
  • The words of truth are always paradoxical. -- Laozi
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  • 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. -- Andy Rooney
  • Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising. -- Christopher Walken
  • 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. -- Ralph Fiennes
  • 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. -- Edward Norton
  • 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? -- Matt Dillon
  • It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence. -- Eric Ries
  • It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. -- Clive Barker
  • I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life. -- Douglas Rushkoff
  • I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding. -- Hugh Laurie
  • Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? -- Jonathan Safran Foer
  • We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race. -- Mikhail Gorbachev
  • It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed. -- Martin Rees
  • Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled. -- Jerry Saltz
  • Truth sounds paradoxical! -- Laozi
  • Truth is always paradoxical. -- Henry David Thoreau
  • The truest sayings are paradoxical. -- Laozi
  • The truth often sounds paradoxical. -- Laozi
  • [I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man. -- Salvador Dali
  • My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention. -- Wayne Dyer
  • Man is a paradoxical being-the constant glory and scandal of this world. -- Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
  • Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned -- Roberto Calasso
  • The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception. -- Georges Bataille
  • It is a paradoxical statement, but it takes incredible personal discipline to play with great freedom. -- Dick Bennett
  • Paradoxes are less paradoxical in their reference to truth than most of the most plausible axioms. -- Raheel Farooq
  • Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game -- Louise Bates Ames
  • Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game. -- Louise Bates Ames
  • How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory. -- Marcel Proust
  • The words of truth are always paradoxical. To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. -- Laozi
  • I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view. -- Henry A. Kissinger
  • How do you know when it's over?" "Maybe when you reach a paradoxical state-hating to love someone -- Pooja Bhatia
  • America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up. -- Malcolm X
  • The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most. -- Erich Fromm
  • The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original. -- DJ Spooky
  • It might seem paradoxical given my profession, but I'm not someone who likes to be in the limelight. -- Audrey Tautou
  • It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist. -- Louis de Broglie
  • Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another. -- Hugh Nibley
  • The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it. -- Daniel Pennac
  • The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. -- Robin G. Collingwood
  • God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast? -- Walter Kirn
  • Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. -- Carl Jung
  • Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love. -- Charles Baudelaire
  • If you start from a position of I'm a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable. -- Philippa Perry
  • The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer. -- David Antin
  • It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it. -- Karl Marx
  • Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen. -- Joanna Scott
  • Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. -- Thomas Ligotti
  • I love to read theories without ever using them when working... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse. -- Ernst Haas
  • There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market. -- Benjamin Graham
  • To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
  • As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical. -- Bill Gates
  • Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions. -- Fritjof Capra
  • It has always seemed somewhat paradoxical to me that we must constantly have the Lord command us to do those things which are for our own good. -- Marion G. Romney
  • The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering. -- Terry Tempest Williams
  • I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. -- Chris Kraus
  • Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs. -- Malcolm Gladwell
  • 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
  • It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical,--but, in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation. -- Edmund Burke
  • It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales. -- Stanley Fish
  • I was graduated in 1940 with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Social Science but a major in Mathematics, a paradoxical combination that was prognostic of my future interests. -- Kenneth Arrow
  • I have serious concerns about the potential risks of taking lots of fish oil capsules. So much fish oil can have paradoxical effects, reducing immune function in later life. -- Joel Fuhrman
  • 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. -- Erich Fromm
  • In True Meditation, we're in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself. -- Adyashanti
  • The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one. -- Bridget Riley
  • Human beings do not wish to be modest; they want to be as expressive - that is, as immodest - as fear allows; fashion helps them solve that paradoxical problem. -- Edward Sapir
  • Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything. -- Terence McKenna
  • All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution -- Richard Dawkins
  • It is paradoxical but nonetheless true that the nearer man comes to his goal to make his life easy and abundant, the more he undermines the foundations of a meaningful existence. -- Franz Alexander
  • Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration. -- Timothy Morton
  • In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow. -- Stefan Zweig
  • Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it is the truth. -- Benjamin Peirce
  • Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical. -- Alison Gopnik
  • One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical"for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • It is indeed paradoxical that an industry which epitomizes all that is new and up-to-date at the same time harbours some of the oldest and least desirable attributes of work in manufacturing industry. -- Peter Dicken
  • Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. -- Paul Tillich
  • We must remain, in a word, in an intellectual disposition which seems paradoxical, but which, in my opinion, represents the true mind of the investigator. We must have a robust faith and yet not believe. -- Claude Bernard
  • The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic. -- John Bradshaw
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