Paradox Quotes

“Samuel Beckett já disse: "Toda palavra é uma mancha desnecessária no silêncio e no vazio". Por outro lado, ele DISSE isso.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began

“An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“capital has become very sophisticated about absorbing people's free time because it doesn't want you to have free time because you might THINK...”
― David Harvey

“Right now you feel stuck in the web of Time and Space. But when you become free from Time, you will realize that you were never stuck. Because you will become free from past too.”
― Shunya

“And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, defeaned. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. They could not bear that it should cease.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“You claim to want love, but how can that be if you have not yet met the person you love? Rather, you desire its advantages: touch, security, and company. Love is born from another person—their touch, their company, their ideas. Love is a hand that knocks on our doors and owns no door of its own for you to knock on. When dealing with people, we are each too unique and changing to be labeled and be fitted to another person’s prerequisite needs. And so, it is our lovers who introduce us to our desire. Until then, it is not love that we want. If we claim, alone in our homes, to so badly want love, or marriage, we likely want that other thing.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that, if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up!”
― stephen hawking, A Brief History of Time

“The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will And Representation, Volume 1

“It’s time to be wild again. Take a prophet or poet on the journey and float out into the mystic. Dive deep into the mysteries of life and let yourself sink long enough to know what can only be imagined, not defined. Take a step out into the desert with those that have ventured there and find mystery and paradox and nuance, not certainty and doctrine.”
― Karl Forehand, Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity

“We lose people who are dear to us on the way to reaching our dreams and goals. In the end, we don’t even understand how we allowed this to happen. After a while, all of a sudden, you open your eyes and realize that you have lost somebody you cared for, just because you were not right beside them recently. All these remote conversations, correspondence, likes on social media, all this worthless virtual reality will never replace the physical presence of someone valuable in your life. And what is the result? The paradox of this situation is that nothing special seems to have happened. You did not quarrel, you did not hold grudges against each other, but in the end, you became strangers.”
― Ash Gabrieli, Petrichor

“The love of absurdity and paradox is the animal happiness of the sad.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Im Paradoxen erscheint die Wirklichkeit.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt

“To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men. However, he attempted it.”
― Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 02

“And here lies our conundrum: we hate the world when we talk about it, but if all of us hate the world for being mean, there is no world to hate. We’re stuck in theory and are entertaining an invisible villain. Up close, you get along with those supposed monsters. The world is made up of individual people who despise the world, but when meeting, they get along all the same. There is no evil society, only people we haven’t met yet.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“If Yui had to describe this feeling, this pain, she would say it was like the stabbing contractions that preceded childbirth, the wonder of the process she had experienced when her daughter was born: closing to open again, contracting to then dilate, clamp and hold, then spread your legs wide and push.

A total paradox, essentially, like one of those things you only find when you've stopped looking for it. Like love, true love, or children that won't come.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in life the best proof for something lies in its opposite.”
― Valentin Rasputin, Siberia on Fire: Stories and Essays

“When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“How he handled those different perspectives would reflect his true strength as a leader – his ability to manage the paradox of diverse viewpoints on a single piece of the truth.”
― Dan Perryman

“When a free lion starts proving himself before the circus lions, he no longer remains free.”
― Shunya

“Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Be careful, get comfortable, don't make any waves,' whispers the DNA. Conversely, the yearning for freedom, the risky belief that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, is also in our DNA. But it's of much more recent evolutionary origin ... It has arisen during the paste couple of million years, during the rapid increase in brain size and intellectual capacity associated with our becoming human. But the desire for security, the will to survive, is of much greater antiquity. For the present, the conflicting yearnings in the DNA generate a basic paradox that in turn generates the character – nothing if not contradictory – of man. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? But, since the genetic bent for freedom is comparatively recent, it may represent an evolutionary trend. We may yet outgrow our overriding obsession to survive. That's why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and always cut against the grain. By pushing it, goosing it along whenever possible, we may speed up the process, the process by which the need for playfulness and liberty becomes stronger than the need for comfort and security. Then the paradox ... holding the show together may lose its equilibrium.”
― Tom Robbins

“Let’s face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let’s face this, too: they did.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“As I found out back in the reservation, fear can suppress sexual desires, but it can also arouse them. It’s a strange paradox.”
“Yes, I see,” Kier said. “I’m afraid of you too … a little. Sometimes it deprives me of potency, but more often this fear, hmm … terribly excites me. Of course, it looks different from your side. I would like you to trust me more, in bed, in particular.”
― Andrew Orange, The Outside Intervention

“All days are today. That is the relative paradox of the universe.”
― Anthony T, Hincks

“The feelings Kera externalized, came from deep within, as though she both loved and hated herself, like she was trapped in a paradox that she could not find her way out of”
― Sara Niles, The Journey

“Incidents sometimes occur as a paradox”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra, Lines of Fate: First Love and Other Stories

“The 1st rule of logic club is that the 2nd rule is false. The 2nd rule of logic club is that the 1st rule is true. The 3rd rule of logic club has never been read.”
― Makuochukwu Okigbo

“Maybe humans aren't emotional enough, Lieutenant. (Outside the Wire Movie)”
― Rowan Athale, Rob Yescombe