100 Quotes About Paradox

The Universe is very, very big. It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules. Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever. Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies. Rule number two: Everything lasts forever. Craig Ferguson

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. George Orwell

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. Ernest Becker

From time to time I once wondered how one wanders from time to time And think up the paradox line Speak of Epoch's crime Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet But bet you better believe it's such a habit that I just said that in a past mindset Criss Jami

Omnipotent-benevolent simply means that God is all-powerful and well-meaning.'' I understand the concept. It's just . there seems to be a contradiction.'' Yes. The contradiction is pain. Man's starvation, war, sickness .''Exactly! ' Chartrand knew the camerlengo would understand. 'Terrible things happen in this world. Human tragedy seems like proof that God could not possibly be both all-powerful and well-meaning. If He loves us and has the power to change our situation, He would prevent our pain, wouldn't He?'The camerlengo frowned. 'Would He?'Chartrand felt uneasy. Had he overstepped his bounds? Was this one of those religious questions you just didn't ask? 'Well . if God loves us, and He can protect us, He would have to. It seems He is either omnipotent and uncaring, or benevolent and powerless to help.'' Do you have children, Lieutenant?'Chartrand flushed. 'No, signore.'' Imagine you had an eight-year-old son . . would you love him?'' Of course.'' Would you let him skateboard?' Chartrand did a double take. The camerlengo always seemed oddly "in touch" for a clergyman. 'Yeah, I guess, ' Chartrand said. 'Sure, I'd let him skateboard, but I'd tell him to be careful.'' So as this child's father, you would give him some basic, good advice and then let him go off and make his own mistakes?'' I wouldn't run behind him and mollycoddle him if that's what you mean.'' But what if he fell and skinned his knee?'' He would learn to be more careful.' The camerlengo smiled. 'So although you have the power to interfere and prevent your child's pain, you would choose to show your love by letting him learn his own lessons?'' Of course. Pain is part of growing up. It's how we learn.' The camerlengo nodded. 'Exactly. . Dan Brown

Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough. Criss Jami

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology–the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology–which takes us somewhere we wouldn’t be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love. Nanette Sawyer

Men have two greatest fears: the first fear is the fear of being needed, and the second fear is the fear of not being needed. C. Joybell C.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. Salman Rushdie

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.", December 6, 2011)] . Michael Michalko

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment. Criss Jami

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage. J.G. Ballard

Sometimes love doesn't look like what we think it should look like. Sometimes it's paradoxical. Sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zone. Sometimes we have to be more honest than we thought we'd ever have to be or more supportive than we are taught is appropriate. When we traverse those boundaries, that's when we really understand what this whole love thing is all about. We become more than just human. We become part of the giant, beautiful ever-changing reality of life. By loving without limits, we become wise, strong, and beautiful. We become more of what we already are. Vironika Tugaleva

How does she know it's the right room?' wondered Descant.Oh, I don't know; mabye it's the magical red glow coming from the doorway, or perhaps it's the deafening howl of the temporal winds.' said Mervall. Descant nodded.' You could be right, brother. And don't think I don't know sarcasm when I hear it. Eoin Colfer

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. Bob Hamilton

Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. . C.s. Lewis

Joshua to Angela: "Please, Angela, do it for me… and you never know you just might have fun." She looked at him warily. "I find that highly doubtful, Josh.""Well how will you know unless you actually try it?"" I just know. Do you have to drink a hot fish milkshake to know you aren’t going to like it?" She asked. Patti Roberts

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning. David F. Ford

The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people; a sign of the most common and ordinary human reality, it was rarefied and theorized nearly to death. Sara Miles

Paradoxes are what draws Wisdom like bees to honey! Hence, where there is no paradox (Complexity), there is no need for Wisdom.... Amit Chatterjee

The sacrifices we make to stay healthy, to look good, the tasty foods we skip, the guilt trips, the exercising - all these things require great discipline, care, and even a paradoxical, self-denying self-love of sorts in order to be properly executed. However it is regretful that so many of us today are not as passionate about our spiritual holiness as we are about our physical health. They are indeed both important - we should worship in every aspect of our lives - and one even, in a sense, entails the other. Although, this disproportion in said priorities is still very much expected: we humans have always taken a liking to trendiness and the temporal side of things, doing what is judged vainly in the eyes of man before that which is judged vitally and eternally in the eyes of God (i.e. "cleaning the outside of one's cup while leaving a filthy inside"). But in a way, it all goes to show that the man who fully hates discipline hates himself fully; for within the spirit is where The Holy One judges true wellness or malady. Criss Jami

This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His nature; it is not too difficult for us to also overthrow our evil will." Hymns of the Nativity, Hymn 1:97, pg. 74 in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989). Ephrem The Syrian

Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions. Michael Moorcock

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83 Frederick Buechner

In the middle of the night, I saw chaos bleeding out of darkness and peace. Everything that was said and seen before seemed like a paradox. I saw the graves of lies breaking open and the truth crawling out silently into the cold hearts. Akshay Vasu

Our cure for pain is the very root of it: Revenge. Felix O. Hartmann

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow. Criss Jami

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. Edith Wharton

The difference between time and money is that money can be stored for future use. Most people make the mistake of saving money by wasting their time. J.R. Rim

The funny thing about the heart is a soft heart is a strong heart, and a hard heart is a weak heart. Criss Jami

His mind It says survival of the fittest but His soul Revival of the idiots So good riddance, dancing Criss Jami

Fathers are ironic, they want democracy in their country but dictatorship in their home. Amit Kalantri

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. Unknown

They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors. Nayomi Munaweera

Most people don't mind being stupid, insomuch that they do not appear stupid; appearance and being are seldom simultaneous, congruent, and conclusive. Unknown

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. Isaiah Berlin

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things. . Don DeLillo

Glory: I look around at this world you're so eager to be a part of and all I see is six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who's not crazy? Look around, everyone's drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out 'cause they don't want 'em anymore. I'm crazy? Honey, I'm the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind, 'cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts. Douglas Petrie

Time goes fast, the world is one paradox full of answers and questions. Deyth Banger

I believe that the world is one strong matrix, to get out of it you can't safe somebody unless you make it such way so you both die. I believe then... at that moment you are out of the Matrix, but it's just kind of paradox which is 50-50. Deyth Banger

Here we have both a paradox, and a beautiful symmetry. It is a duality. I am the earth and you are the moon, and you are the earth and I am the moon. Joshua Edward Smith

...but that was the thing about reality. It didn't need to make sense. Mira Grant

Paradox /pera, daks/ noun1. Being told to wake up and come back to reality by your family and friends, while being dragged to church to hear a lesson on Jonah and the whale, followed by a sermon on believing in things you can't see without faith. Shannon L. Alder

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far. Niels Bohr

Living with contradiction may be nothing new to humans, but acknowledging it, and accepting it are. Even the dictionary has trouble accepting a paradox, calling it 'two things that seem to be contradictory but may possibly be true.' But that's not a real paradox--a real paradox IS contradictory and IS true. So I don't even call them paradoxes anymore, I call them 'contradictory co-existing realities, ' both in direct opposition to each other, both true at the same time. Shellen Lubin

It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind than is involved in the assertion of the unreality of Space or of the unreality of Matter. So decisive a breach with that natural position is not to be lightly accepted. And yet in all ages the belief in the unreality of time has proved singularly attractive. . J.M.E. McTaggart

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself. Geoffrey Wood

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

The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2, 000 birds, $78 to save 20, 000 birds, and $88 to save 200, 000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts. Hal Herzog

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue–reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present . Krista Tippett

He who speaks parables knows and understands the real meaning of parables better Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I'm not offended until you think I'm offended. Criss Jami

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. Shannon L. Alder

We are killing, every one of us, every moment of the day - just by living. And if one realizes this, is this very realization itself not a conscious consent to murder? If a truly circumspect Jain was truly serious about not killing anything, wouldn't his only recourse be to kill himself? Mark X.

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Carl R. Rogers

Love is not a purpose, it’s a paradox; it’s not an end-goal, it’s an auxiliary fuel source to help get there. A.J. Darkholme

Human freedom brings with it the burden of choice and of its consequences. As humankind is akin to claim for its own special privilege a certain unique destiny not afforded with equal measure to other organisms, so must it further–if paradoxically so–entertain the assumption that, in spite of this glorious determinism, there persists nonetheless a thread of free will–or, at the very least, some vague delusion thereof–woven seamlessly into the tapestry of collective experience. Of course, this conception that destiny is to be forged by one’s own hands more often engenders greater restriction than it does greater extension to the potential of human happiness. Ashim Shanker

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard . Michael Michalko

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace. Matthew Fox