Paradox Quotes - Page 10

• 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.

  Russell Brand

  Sexy, Recovery, Vegetarianism

  FaceBook post by Russell Brand from May 11, 2012

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• If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

  Douglas Adams

  Hurt, Cutting, Space

  Douglas Adams (2016). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.215, Simon and Schuster

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• It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

  Northrop Frye

  Important, Identity, Problem

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham, Jean O'Grady, David Staines (2003). “Northrop Frye on Canada”, p.346, University of Toronto Press

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• To fear and not be afraid- that is the paradox of faith.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

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• I'm a real paradox. Because I'm a very serious person, and I take my work very seriously. But I wrap it up in a court jester and a clown and make people laugh and make them feel good about themselves.

  Richard Simmons

  Real, Serious Person, People

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• What I am anxious to see in Christian believers is a beautiful paradox. I want to see in them the joy of finding God while at the same time they are blessedly pursuing Him. I want to see in them the great joy of having God yet always wanting Him.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Beautiful, Christian, Joy

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• Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure.  That is the essential paradox of expert performance.

  Matthew Syed

  Progress, Foundation, Essentials

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• A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits.

  Molly Crabapple

  Nice, Thinking, Guy

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• The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Discovery, Weapons, Facts

  Alfred North Whitehead (1997). “Science and the Modern World”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• It is a great paradox - almost everyone wants to improve his circumstances but almost no one wants to improve himself.

  Sterling W Sill

  Discipline, Want, Circumstances

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• Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego-but not until you suffer consciously.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Ego, Suffering, Purpose

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• The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

  Rebecca Solnit

  Journey, Hiking, Mountain

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• The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

  Franz Kafka

  Art, Lying, Telling The Truth

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• The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Inspirational, Science, Light

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• Part of being a big winner is the ability to be a big loser. There is no paradox involved. It is a distinctly Harvard thing to be able to turn any defeat into victory

  Erich Segal

  Victory, Able, Loser

  Erich Segal (1970). “Love Story”

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• Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Art, Block, Stupid

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• if you pursue the truth far enough you always wind up in the land of paradox. You reach a point where the apparent truth divides into two opposing truths and then you have to try to reach beyond them to grasp the ultimate truth, their synthesis.

  Susan Howatch

  Wind, Land, Two

  Susan Howatch, Bruce Johnson, Charles Adolph Huttar (2005). “Scandalous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch”, p.81, Susquehanna University Press

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• The Second Rule is that the greatest harm can result from the best intentions. It sounds a paradox, but kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong, and can cause harm. The only counter to it is knowledge, wisdom, forethought, and understanding the First Rule. Even then, that is not always enough.

  Terry Goodkind

  Kindness, Understanding, Sound

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• Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Lying, Knives, Fearless

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.103, Modern Library

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• In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

  James A. Baldwin

  Journey, Reality, Darkness

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• Station is the paradox of the world of my people, the limitation of our power within the hunger for power. It is gained through treachery and invites treachery against those who gain it. Those most powerful in Menzoberranzan spend their days watching over their shoulders, defending against the daggers that would find their backs. Their deaths usually come from the front." -Drizzt Do'Urden

  R. A. Salvatore

  Powerful, People, Gains

  R.A. Salvatore (2009). “Homeland: The Legend of Drizzt”, p.12, Wizards of the Coast

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• What’s this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Thinking, Rockets, Chance

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• The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Pain, Unending

  Twitter post from Mar 17, 2011

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• 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.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Solitude, Looks, Elbows

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• Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

  Tom Robbins

  Psychics, Data, Challenges

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