Paradox Quotes

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

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.

That's a curious paradox that I don't think a lot of people out there know; that you get really scared before you go on. You come out in a nervous rash, and it's not like you actually love getting up there and showing off.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life's greatest paradox.

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.

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

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

That's the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have great joy as well. If we didn't have those things we'd just be numb.

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

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.

It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day.

This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.

The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul.

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

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.