Paradox Quotes

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

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

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

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

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

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

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.

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.

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.

It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.

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.