Paradox Quotes - Page 25

• Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Clever, Winning, People

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• Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.

  George Will

  Baseball, Team, Believe

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• Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it.

  Mason Cooley

  Contradiction

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• I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

  Tod Machover

  Thinking, Ideas, Long

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Desire, Jargon

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.

  Reid Hoffman

  Thinking, Classic, Founders

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• One talks much more about the evil than about the good. That is a paradox. We should only talk about the good to lighten up our existence. Chase anxiousness/fear away for a moment before it sneaks back in again to our life.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Evil, Moments, Should

  Source: sturm-lie.be

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• I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.

  Robert Dessaix

  Thinking, Europe, Important

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• The paradox is that, by children taking shortcuts through computer games, through fantasies, through movies that load on all the emotional stimulation of encountering life in a stylized way - all of this is the equivalent of mainlining of paleolithic emotions, emotions about combat, about personal success, about overcoming monsters, about making powerful friendships, about winning wars and entering new territory.

  E. O. Wilson

  Children, Powerful, War

  Source: blog.cleveland.com

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• When Pico [Iyer] talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" - a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Lying, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Country, Real, Land

  Interview with David Kupfer, progressive.org. February 1, 2005.

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• The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
  Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof.

  Zeno of Elea

  Science, Race, Example

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• The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior.

  Seth

  Senior, People, Decision

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• There's the paradox of making pop music when you're in your 50s. People weren't meant to be doing that originally and yet they are. Mick Jagger [used to say] we're not going to be doing Satisfaction when I'm in a wheelchair.

  Neil Tennant

  People, Satisfaction, Used

  "Pet Shop Boys: cab drivers ask us if we've retired". Interview with Dorian Lynskey, www.theguardian.com. September 13, 2012.

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• The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

  Tim O'Brien

  Struggle, Heart, Character

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• On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don't do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy. This is the paradox of happiness that has bewitched our age.

  Matthew Kelly

  Simple, Hands, Catholic

  Matthew Kelly (2015). “The Rhythm of Life: Living Everyday With Passion and Purpose”, p.22, BookBaby

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• For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken.

  Andrew Bernstein

  Men, Errors, Evil

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• Perhaps the grimmest aspect of this great paradox is that the very nations that are chiefly responsible for starting and for maintaining the Disarmament Conference are also the nations that have begun a new arms race.

  Arthur Henderson

  Race, Maintaining, Arms

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• My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.

  Mike Mills

  Dad, Writing, Gay

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• But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

  Michael Gruber

  Art, Character, People

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• The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

  Colin Wilson

  Girl, Sex, Offering

  Colin Wilson (1988). “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders”

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• I have a principle I often invoke in class: comfortable people don't grow. Good teachers need to engage in the paradox of making students feel comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.

  Erica Brown

  Teacher, Class, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Winter, Apples

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

  Edward Abbey

  Dream, Mean, Self

  Edward Abbey (1996). “The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader”, p.166, Holt Paperbacks

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• We have a tendency to assume people are a unity, and thus good people all good, etc. But the fact that Hitler was good to dogs and children isn't a paradox.

  Richard Posner

  Dog, Children, People

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