Paradoxical Quotes - Page 4

• Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

  James P. Carse

  Strong, Play, Wish

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• In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

  Stefan Zweig

  Games, Play, Intellectual

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• The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

  John Bradshaw

  Stars, Powerful, Shame

  John Bradshaw (2010). “Healing the Shame that Binds You”, p.34, Health Communications, Inc.

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• In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane

  Charlie Chaplin

  Attitude, Laughing, Tragedy

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• I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

  Chris Kraus

  Thinking, Self, Talking

  "I Love Dick". Book by Chris Kraus, 2015.

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• Truth sounds paradoxical!

  Laozi

  Truth, Sound

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• Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned

  Roberto Calasso

  Inspirational

  Roberto Calasso, William Weaver, Stephen Sartarelli (1994). “The Ruin of Kasch”, p.48, Harvard University Press

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• Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

  Meghan O'Rourke

  Loss, Tiny, Enormous

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• Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.

  Fritjof Capra

  Communication, Knowledge, Science

  "The Tao of Physics". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

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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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• It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

  John F. Kennedy

  Running, Cutting, Long

  Address to the Economic Club of New York, delivered 14 December 1962, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York

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• Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Song, Doors, Judging

  "Think fast" By Todd Leopold, www.cnn.com. February 22, 2005.

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• America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.

  Malcolm X

  America, Cracks, Ifs

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• Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Reality, Space, Mind

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• The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

  Rajneesh

  Capacity To Love, People, Looks

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• Power is paradoxical.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Power

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• Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another.

  Hugh Nibley

  Perfectly Good, Views, Impossible

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• Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

  Tom Robbins

  Philosophical, Reality, Thinking

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• While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

  Thomas Ligotti

  Soon Enough, Vision, Needs

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• To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Grace, Gone

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.188, New World Library

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• No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.

  Paul Davies

  Successful, World, Becoming

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• A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

  Ken Wilber

  Ocean, Unity, Trying

  Ken Wilber (2001). “No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth”, p.52, Shambhala Publications

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• Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.

  Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury

  Christian, Atheist, Believe

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• Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice. Therefore the Master remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his heart. Because he has given up helping, he is people's greatest help. True words seem paradoxical.

  Laozi

  Strength, Truth, Heart

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• It’s paradoxical that the death of your quarry is besides the point and at the same time the whole point. A chase without a kill as its object is like a journey without a destination; a kill without a chase employing all the hunter’s craft is killing, not hunting.

  Philip Caputo

  Journey, Hunting, Hunters

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