Quotes on Paradox

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird's death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.

This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.