Paradoxical Quotes - Page 4

• There's this divergence out there between the very small and the very large with the middle disappearing. There is something paradoxical going on where there is this access and we can seek out things on the fringes, but that doesn't describe the overall reality, because the big are bigger than ever.

  Astra Taylor

  Reality, Fringe, Disappear

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Truth sounds paradoxical!

  Laozi

  Truth, Sound

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• As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings.

  Auguste Rodin

  Light, Play, Shadow

  Auguste Rodin (2012). “Rodin on Art and Artists”, p.22, Courier Corporation

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• The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Artist, Instant, Precarious

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• And, as soon as possible, be on the lookout for someone whose whole manner of speaking and being makes, as it were, a "sound" that draws your mind and heart. And then, little by little, try to see if that person can be of real help on the way to genuine self-knowledge and insight about what God is and is not. In this realm, more than any other even, the paradoxical marriage of both openness and scepticism is essential.

  Jacob Needleman

  Real, Heart, Mind

  Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com

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• Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.

  Ernst Haas

  Photography, Struggle, Technology

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• 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

  Facts, Theory, Reverse

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• There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world. ...It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Children, Play, Parent

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• 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

  Fall, Order, Way

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• The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.

  DJ Spooky

  Simple, Sampling, Eras

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• [I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

  Salvador Dali

  Men, Contradictory

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• My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention.

  Wayne Dyer

  Free Will, Intention, Partners

  Wayne W. Dyer (2010). “The Power of Intention”, p.15, Hay House, Inc

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• At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth.

  Mark Steyn

  Oakland, Government, Long

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• 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

  Psychics, Mind, Matter

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• A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.

  William Monahan

  Character, Interesting, Criminals

  Source: collider.com

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• We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Character, Profound

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Tolerance is an essential value in the modern world, and we have daily reminders of how awful the alternatives to it are. And despite its paradoxical flavor, there are many good arguments - moral, prudential, and epistemic - in favor of tolerance, and none that I know of against it.

  Samuel Scheffler

  Tolerance, World, Moral

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have no expertise of other religious traditions so I'm not going to opine on them, but in Islam the more you know about the religion, the more likely you're going to go to hell. Many people will find that paradoxical because we tend to think of religion as a way of making ourselves feel better and a way of damning and excluding infidels or reprobates or heretics or what have you. It was very hard for me to find an Islam that belongs to me and doesn't feel like it's been imposed on me.

  Haroon Moghul

  Religious, Feel Better, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• For Jesus, it is clear, poverty is not the problem; it is the solution. Until human beings learn to live in naked contact and direct simplicity and equality with each other, sharing all resources, there can be no solution to the misery of the human condition and no establishment of God's kingdom. Jesus' radical and paradoxical sense of who could and who could not enter the Kingdom is even more clearly illustrated by his famous praise of children.

  Andrew Harvey

  Jesus, Children, Simplicity

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• Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

  Dorothy Day

  Writing, Simple, Reality

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• 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

  Thinking, Order, Magic

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• Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

  Aldo Leopold

  Lying, War, People

  Aldo Leopold (1989). “A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There”, p.165, Oxford University Press, USA

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• 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

  Needs, Use, Records

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.146, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Writing, Musical, Sound

  "How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One". Book by Stanley Fish, 2011.

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• It's paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they've been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle.

  Bill Gates

  Children, Care, Problem

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