Paradox Quotes - Page 15

• Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

  Laozi

  Inspiring, Spiritual, Strong

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• I mean, the paradox is that whereas the screen, it seems to me - the cinema can absorb endless amounts of music, it cannot really with comfort absorb large amounts of words. Not nearly as many words, that is to say, as a stage can.

  Bob Mondello

  Mean, Comfort, Cinema

  "British Playwright Peter Shaffer, Who Wrote 'Equus,' Dies At 90". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. June 6, 2016.

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• Knowing that a paradox is required for life as we know it to exist allows me to give up trying constantly to understand it and instead just feel it and enjoy it.

  Richard Brancatisano

  Giving Up, Knowing, Trying

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I am still learning and experiencing things and feel like I cannot state a truth. So I guess one truth I know for sure is that I cannot state one. A paradox.

  Richard Brancatisano

  Experiencing Things, States, Feels

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I wanted to feel like I could extend someone else's joy and not crush it, and that is the giant paradox nowadays of being a powerful woman: you want to live in a space of compassion and helpfulness and joy and expression, and the world is standing there, pointing the finger at you and telling you that you're greedy and domineering and attention-grabbing, and all you can do is shrug and just say, "Hopefully, someone out there understands and isn't misinterpreting."

  Amanda Palmer

  Crush, Powerful, Compassion

  "Amanda Palmer: Artist. Music Icon. Crowdfunding Legend. Disrupter. Feminist". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

  Dani Shapiro

  Past, Wish, Want

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• I nurture my close relationships like priceless lamps. That's part of why the job itself is inherently difficult and kind of a paradox, because you're out there touring and traveling and going a million miles a minute, but the things that are keeping you steady and stable can be really hard to nurture when you're going fast, and your relationships, which are the number one thing that help me through.

  Amanda Palmer

  Jobs, Numbers, Lamps

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• As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

  Henry Giroux

  Art, Offering, People

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• The soul lives forever by giving, not receiving. This is the grand paradox. You get most by giving most. Conversely, by receiving much you impoverish yourself. By selfish accumulation you become bankrupt.

  Julian Johnson

  Selfish, Giving Not Receiving, Forever

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• The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.

  Ellen Goodman

  Children, Motherhood, Focus

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• It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  May, Mood, Application

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.71, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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• Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Blessed, Writing

  "See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore - wit without malice" by Claire Messud, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2018.

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• All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

  Nancy Friday

  Writing, Effort, Has Beens

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• A cat is a purring parcel of paradox, a cunning collection of contradictions. A cat is lazy and busy, dainty and savage, affectionate and aloof, greedy and finicky, sound asleep in one instant, and awake and stalking in the next. A cat is a limp puddle of softness, surrounding a steel-hard and ever-alert set of muscles. ... A cat has the face of a pansy flower, and is just as velvety. A cat holds infinity in her eyes, and your heart in her front paws.

  Leonore Fleischer

  Flower, Heart, Cat

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• The only way I can access all my strength is to relax. ... The paradox is that you must learn to be relaxed while using all your power.

  Lynda Obst

  Relax, Way, Access

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• But I will say that most comedians are the saddest people I know. That is the biggest paradox to me.

  Jean Reno

  People, Comedian, Saddest

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• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Dark, Night, Long

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• Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

  James Hollis

  Black And White, Journey, Today

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• most of us persist in regarding leadership as synonymous with - indeed solely derived from - high position. Perhaps the notion of grass-roots leadership strikes us as too much of an oxymoron; confronted with apparent paradox, our imaginations fail. ... I believe that in the future, our ideas about the nature of leadership will undergo a radical transformation. As the instrumental use of knowledge continues to redefine the nature and purpose of organizations, we will begin to look at those on the front lines for leadership.

  Sally Helgesen

  Leadership, Believe, Organization

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• The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.

  Margaret M. Lock

  Struggle, Mind, Enemy

  Margaret M. Lock (2002). “Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death”, p.203, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Christian, Mother, Identity

  Amin Maalouf (2001). “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”, p.16, Arcade Publishing

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• Pattern-finding is the purpose of the mind and the construct of the universe. There are an infinite number of patterns, some of which are known; those still unknown hold the key to unresolved enigmas and paradoxes.

  Agnes Denes

  Keys, Numbers, Mind

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• Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

  Hans Christian von Baeyer

  Two, Common Sense, Mind

  Hans Christian Von Baeyer (2004). “Information: The New Language of Science”, p.204, Harvard University Press

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• The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Art, Hands, Stories

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• To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

  Paul Theroux

  Animal, People, Tough Times

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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