Paradox Quotes
-
And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.
Terence McKenna
-
A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
Conditions in the movie industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
-
Is that the ultimate paradox of life, she wondered, that the universe should become less clear with age?
Gillian Anderson
-
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
-
The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.
Ernest Becker
-
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
-
The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."
Richard Feynman
-
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
-
In fighting a bull you're always aware of a paradox concerning your perceptions of the bull. On the one hand it's your perceptions of the bull that give you the upper hand. You read the bull, you learn to read the bull more and more accurately, and this reading of the bull is how you deploy your intelligence against the bull's intelligence. Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull's weapons. On the other hand, you're human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.
Bette Ford
-
The absurdist is concerned with the search for meaning in the Universe. He believes this search to be meaningless--hence the disintegration of plot, character, and language in absurdist drama. Order is a falsehood that we, God, those who came before us, have imposed on a random universe. However, the absurdist is confronted with a curious paradox: though he believes the Universe to be meaningless, he cannot abandon the search for meaning--or he will die.
Walter Wykes
-
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
-
That's the paradox. Since we can spend as long as we want, we worked so much faster than we used to. I think that when you don't have the pressure anymore, the ideas come faster.
Nicolas Godin
Air
-
New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.
Paul Goldberger
-
This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously "creative".
Will Self
-
To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.
Hannah Arendt
-
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
-
The Fundamental Regulator Paradox ... The task of a regulator is to eliminate variation, but this variation is the ultimate source of information about the quality of its work. Therefore, the better the job a regulator does the less information it gets about how to improve.
Gerald Weinberg
-
In the rush to become all things to all people, the federal government has lost sight of its core responsibilities. As a result we're stuck in this frustrating paradox where Washington actually neglects things it's clearly supposed to be doing, while interfering in other areas where they are neither welcome nor authorized.
Rick Perry
-
But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch?” Jenny asked. “Make me”, I replied. “Beg pardon?” “Make me”, I repeated. Her eyes widened like saucers. “You mean like incest?” she asked. “Don’t give me your family problems, Jen. I have enough of my own.” “Like what, Oliver?” she asked, “like just what is it he makes you do?” “The ‘right things’”, I said. “What’s wrong with the ‘right things’?” she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox.
Erich Segal
-
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
-
The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.
William Poundstone
