Olbers Paradox Quotes

If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees. ~ Henry Adams

Procrastinate now, don't put it off. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

such are the emotions of the human mind; an unavoidable event is going to happen, the mind says 'no', then if the event doesn't happen soon enough the mind says 'when?' Such is the paradox of having the privilege of consciousness. We think too much. ~ David York

Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival. ~ Josephine Hart

He was a committed ladies' man and obtained a great deal of sustenance from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of women, but he guarded himself vigilantly against addiction, fearful of becoming fodder for that feminine allure which is so paradoxically generous to those who take from it and so destructively cruel to those who give. ~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? ~ Sam Harris

This was a golden age, in which we solved most of the major problems in black hole theory even before there was any observational evidence for black holes. In fact, we were so successful with the classical general theory of relativity that I was at a bit of a loose end in 1973 after the publication with George Ellis of our book The Large Scale Structure of Space–Time. My work with Penrose had shown that general relativity broke down at singularities, so the obvious next step would be to combine general relativity - the theory of the very large - with quantum theory - the theory of the very small. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black hole, formed in the early universe? My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way - like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes.
To answer this, I studied how quantum fields or particles would scatter off a black hole. I was expecting that part of an incident wave would be absorbed, and the remainder scattered. But to my great surprise I found there seemed to be emission from the black hole itsel ~ Stephen Hawking

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable. ~ Carson McCullers

It is a strange paradox: Humans drown in the water, fish drown in the land. ~ Javad Alizadeh

If Jesus had been an actual historical figure we have a thorny paradox. Either this Jesus was a remarkable individual who said and did a host of amazing, revolutionary things – but no one outside his fringe cult noticed for over a century. Or he didn't – and yet shortly after his death, tiny communities of worshipers that cannot agree about the most basic facts of his life spring up, scattered all across the empire. The truth is inescapable: there simply could never have been a historical Jesus. ~ David Fitzgerald

There are so many beautiful lives with wrong 'colors'! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I've learned, sometimes in very difficult situations, to operate confidently in paradox. ~ J. Michael Martinez

Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan. ~ James Gleick

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

His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles. ~ Millicent Fenwick

Enriched by a singular event that is larger than life, I no longer have the luxury of being ordinary. To stand on the lunar surface and look back at our Earth creates such a personal sense of awe that even Alan Shepard wept at the view. Trying to exist within the paradox of being in this world after visiting another may be why some Moon voyagers tend to be reclusive. I ~ Eugene Cernan

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism. ~ Earl Warren

We constantly lived in the paradox of precariousness. The money was never there when you needed it, and it was always on time. ~ Gregory J. Boyle

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths. ~ Christopher Hitchens

To make a statement that one knows is false is more honest than to make a statement that one knows is true. ~ Lionel Suggs

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is at best, unintentional and reflexive; at worst, it's stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready made filing system. It's so handy when we want to quickly characterize people. But, yet we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away. ~ Brene Brown

Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love of ourselves is something we owe to others. ~ Thomas Merton

The Paradox of Change: People can only change when they feel accepted as they are now. Dr. Arnold Beisser Pg 220 ~ John Kuypers

What a paradox is there: flying higher into heaven, at the same time being forced to work deeper into the hell of my addiction, the hell of my own unconscious body. ~ Marion Woodman

Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead. ~ Paul Auster

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much? ~ Jodi Picoult

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I have always been fascinated by youth.

This fire that makes us feel glorious, insolent, immortal.

I will have to come to terms with it - everything has been reduced to ashes.
(I tried in vain not to burn myself in the way.)

I believe that the deep tenderness I feel for man comes from the fact that he is so full of certainty – yet, he doubts all the time. It is a funny paradox. He is constantly misled.

He gives great importance to things that do not have any, and misses those which have.

I would like to be like a flower. Going through life, just like this, regardless of whether I will be born again or if anyone will remember my beauty.

Just passing by like this, to make the world a little more beautiful, or a little more breathable, for a little while.

I would like to be a flower of those in the bouquets for the hospitals. Of those who are plucked to die near those who are going to die.

Or those who are just born.

So that we can watch life together for a moment, as long as it is there.

To die because I am beautiful and I represent life.

To die because the love of the flower never offers itself as a trophy, for the love of the flower is always humble.

And I love to love with humility.
We should always love with humility. ~ Emmanuelle Soni-Dessaigne

In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be. ~ Richard Holloway

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far. ~ Niels Bohr

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.
It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life. ~ Ariel Gore

The 'violent wrenching' of the world into constant movements has remained constant. Indeed, the only constancy of the past several decades has been change itself, that is, constant inconstancy. The paradox of this syndrome causes those who suffer from it to hope that change - or the right kind of change - will eventually put an end to the dread it induces through its endless turnover of the new. This is strange hope to hold to, yet it may be the only one available at a time when the unworlding of the world seems a fait accompli. ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive. ~ Tennessee Williams

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest). ~ Rebecca Solnit

To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme. ~ Mason Cooley

Our society imposes on us a moral duty to live and, hence, to condemn suicide. However, with her apparent admiration for antiquity, Anna may have found her prop in the Greek philosophers, who thought every person should choose for themselves when they die. Nietzsche also considered that the individual had a full moral right to take his own life. He used the word freitod or voluntary death.' Aune raised a pointed index finger. 'But she had to confront another moral dilemma. Revenge. Insofar as she professed to be a Christian, Christian ethics demand that you should not take revenge. The paradox is, naturally, that Christians worship a God who is the greatest avenger of them all. Defy him and you burn in eternal hell, an act of revenge which is completely out of proportion to the crime, almost a case for Amnesty International, if you ask me. ~ Jo Nesbø

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside
you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. ~ David Foster Wallace

Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself. That at the age of twenty or so, with little knowledge of each other and a dangerous overdose of self-confidence, two human beings should undertake to commit themselves for life – and that church and state should receive their vows with a straight face – all this is absurd indeed. And it is tolerable only if it is reveled in as such. A pox on all the neat little explanations as to why it is reasonable that two teenagers should be bound to each other until death. It is not reasonable. It happens to be true to life, but it remains absurd. Down with the books that moralize reasonably on the subject of why divorce is wrong. Divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility. It is an attempt to do something about life rather than with it - to work out the square root of –I rather than to use it.
Up with the absurdity of marriage then. Let the peasant rejoice. He is a very odd ball on a very odd pool table, and his marriage is one of the few things left to him that will roll properly in this game. And up with the marriage service. Let the peasant go back and read it while he rejoices - preferably in the old unbowdlerized version still used by the Church of England. It is full of death and cast iron. And it is one of the great remaining sanity markers. The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is ~ Robert Farrar Capon

I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the galley reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. I was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come. ~ Robert Penn Warren