Paradoxical Quotes

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Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities ("exploitation") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labor-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct "terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services…), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terroristic" equality) - it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a ~ Slavoj Zizek
Paradoxical quotes by Slavoj Zizek
Or
to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win. ~ Donna Tartt
Paradoxical quotes by Donna Tartt
The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image. ~ Anne Geddes
Paradoxical quotes by Anne Geddes
Human hypocrisy: When one judges humanity as a whole, people have the habit of disagreeing, saying that everyone is different - unique. Yet people turn around and say that at the end of the day, everyone is the same. Ladies and gentlemen, the joyful paradoxical nature of humanity. If you really want to dismiss the paradox, show me that your an imaginary number, rather than a real number. ~ Lionel Suggs
Paradoxical quotes by Lionel Suggs
It is a paradoxical statement, but it takes incredible personal discipline to play with great freedom. ~ Dick Bennett
Paradoxical quotes by Dick Bennett
All rituals are paradoxical and dangerous enterprises, the traditional and improvised, the sacred and the secular. Paradoxical because rituals are conspicuously artificial and theatrical, yet designed to suggest the inevitability and absolute truth of their messages. Dangerous because when we are not convinced by a ritual we may become aware of ourselves as having made them up, thence on the paralyzing realization that we have made up all our truths; our ceremonies, our most precious conceptions and convictions - all are mere inventions. ~ Barbara Myerhoff
Paradoxical quotes by Barbara Myerhoff
Ironically, even as Khomeini empowered some women, he also found ways of oppressing their entire gender. The regime replaced the shah's secular law with an Islamic law, which allowed men to marry up to four wives, to divorce them whenever the husbands wished, and to retain custody of children. The law put the value of a woman's life at half of that of a man's life, and the value of her testimony at half that of a man's testimony.
Thus women in Iran became watchdogs and scapegoats, both the foot soldiers of the new regime and its victims. Newly empowered, they were also newly oppressed. Theirs was a paradoxical plight - and at the time, no one could have foreseen how it would one day make women a force of enormous change in Iran. ~ Nazila Fathi
Paradoxical quotes by Nazila Fathi
Her skin burned where he touched her.
And as his hands moved over her with paradoxical motion - light and rough, heavy and delicate, all at the same time - they left tiny, but definite imprints. These imprints touched her deeply and left more than a physical mark. Like scars they might change and fade with time, but like scars she would never be rid of them.
She didn't need any more scars from Greg. His took a long time to fade. But she wanted more and now she had them. Like the old marks, these new ones were ingrained into her psyche and written on her soul. No matter what she did from this day forward those marks would forever remain as a reminder of his touch and how he made her feel. ~ Olivia Fuller
Paradoxical quotes by Olivia Fuller
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don't belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone's right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border ha ~ Milan Kundera
Paradoxical quotes by Milan Kundera
Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
Paradoxical quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
Although it might seem paradoxical, growing up in a family of liberal-minded atheists, committed but never militant, tends to have devastating consequences. Being raised without a rigid backdrop of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs makes it hard to have a real crises later in life. There is no way forward if your point of departure is the comfortable passivity of someone who has been a self-professed agnostic since the age of twelve, without ever having considered those important - one might say grave - matters, such as God, death, love, failure, or fear. For a precocious agnostic, the virtues offered by skepticism become terrifying hands that strangle and suffocate the already rare capacity of an individual to question things. Conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believe is open to doubt - stark, brutal doubt - can truly enjoy a profound crises that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better. ~ Valeria Luiselli
Paradoxical quotes by Valeria Luiselli
It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system.

In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell fun ~ Gabor Mate
Paradoxical quotes by Gabor Mate
To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it. ~ Roland Barthes
Paradoxical quotes by Roland Barthes
In the modern world we are in a paradoxical situation; because although in theory man knows that he can extend his attention to something and then remove it, he very often does not do so. In many areas he does not look at something and then detach from it, and look at something else.
Once he has found something to interest himself in, he cannot detach himself from it efficiently, and therefore he cannot be objective. Note that, in most if not all languages, we have words like 'objectivity' which leads people to imagine that they have it, or can easily use it. That is equivalent (in reality if not in theory) to saying 'I know the word "gold", so I am rich. ~ Idries Shah
Paradoxical quotes by Idries Shah
It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. ~ Octavio Paz
Paradoxical quotes by Octavio Paz
Reading is a form of madness, and when you think it is necessary to you, you must relinquish your place among the living and enter the land of shades, feeling all the emotions you imagine the shades must feel; among them envy- for the living are outside, in constant motion- and it's paradoxical but necessary other, complacency, for the world is not worth taking notice of. ~ Ira Singh
Paradoxical quotes by Ira Singh
It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.
This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. ~ Milan Kundera
Paradoxical quotes by Milan Kundera
It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal. ~ Alan Hollinghurst
Paradoxical quotes by Alan Hollinghurst
Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy - these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They ~ James C. Collins
Paradoxical quotes by James C. Collins
Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes. ~ Elie Wiesel
Paradoxical quotes by Elie Wiesel
Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that's because they don't understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It's hard to measure new songs. ~ Malcolm Gladwell
Paradoxical quotes by Malcolm Gladwell
For me, as a physician, nature's richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life.
Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. [ ... ] Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too - for it they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force the nervous system into making other paths and ways, force on it an unexpected growth and evolution. ~ Oliver Sacks
Paradoxical quotes by Oliver Sacks
Allow me to contradict my clarifications and in no time we'll get to the bottom of nothing. ~ Brian Spellman
Paradoxical quotes by Brian Spellman
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other; it is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, as long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget - just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In short, the paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. ~ Ronald Reagan
Paradoxical quotes by Ronald Reagan
The distance between oneself - the audience - and a screen performer is an
absolute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerading as intimacy. ~ James Baldwin
Paradoxical quotes by James Baldwin
As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words. ~ Ruth Ozeki
Paradoxical quotes by Ruth Ozeki
Sometimes love doesn't look like what we think it should look like. Sometimes it's paradoxical. Sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zone. Sometimes we have to be more honest than we thought we'd ever have to be or more supportive than we are taught is appropriate. When we traverse those boundaries, that's when we really understand what this whole love thing is all about. We become more than just human. We become part of the giant, beautiful ever-changing reality of life. By loving without limits, we become wise, strong, and beautiful. We become more of what we already are. ~ Vironika Tugaleva
Paradoxical quotes by Vironika Tugaleva
Some people brag about standing for something so hard and so much, that they do not realize that they are actually sitting. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Paradoxical quotes by Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. ~ Thomas Ligotti
Paradoxical quotes by Thomas Ligotti
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow. ~ Stefan Zweig
Paradoxical quotes by Stefan Zweig
There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world ... It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play. ~ Leo Buscaglia
Paradoxical quotes by Leo Buscaglia
Remember, if you cannot live with yourself, you cannot live with anyone else. The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. ~ Osho
Paradoxical quotes by Osho
As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings. ~ Auguste Rodin
Paradoxical quotes by Auguste Rodin
Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug. ~ Isabelle Huppert
Paradoxical quotes by Isabelle Huppert
Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising. ~ Christopher Walken
Paradoxical quotes by Christopher Walken
If Samkhya-Yoga philosophy does not explain the reason and origin of the strange partnership between the spirit and experience, at least tries to explain the nature of their association, to define the character of their mutual relations. These are not real relationships, in the true sense of the word, such as exist for example between external objects and perceptions. The true relations imply, in effect, change and plurality, however, here we have some rules essentially opposed to the nature of spirit.
"States of consciousness" are only products of prakriti and can have no kind of relation with Spirit the latter, by its very essence, being above all experience. However and for SamPhya and Yoga this is the key to the paradoxical situation the most subtle, most transparent part of mental life, that is, intelligence (buddhi) in its mode of pure luminosity (sattva), has a specific quality that of reflecting Spirit. Comprehension of the external world is possible only by virtue of this reflection of purusha in intelligence. But the Self is not corrupted by this reflection and does not lose its ontological modalities (impassibility, eternity, etc.). The Yoga-sutras (II, 20) say in substance: seeing (drashtri; i.e., purusha) is absolute consciousness ("sight par excellence") and, while remaining pure, it knows cognitions (it "looks at the ideas that are presented to it"). Vyasa interprets: Spirit is reflected in intelligence (buddhi), but is neither like it nor different from i ~ Mircea Eliade
Paradoxical quotes by Mircea Eliade
What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. ~ Max Beckmann
Paradoxical quotes by Max Beckmann
Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny.

This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private association are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves.

The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite. ~ Robert H. Bork
Paradoxical quotes by Robert H. Bork
A few days into the illness, they'll get a rash. With Marburg and Ebola the throat and conjunctivae get inflamed and there are small transparent lesions like tapioca granules in the soft palate. Then they start to bleed with a paradoxical combination of blood clots and hemorrhaging. The clots lodge in the brain, liver, spleen, and the hemorrhaging accelerates until the body cavities fill up with blood. Death comes some six to seven days after the first symptom, either from a massive stroke, or from shock. ~ Patrick Lynch
Paradoxical quotes by Patrick Lynch
When avoidance of pain becomes the major emphasis of childbirth care, the paradoxical effect is that more women have to deal with pain after their babies are born. ~ Ina May Gaskin
Paradoxical quotes by Ina May Gaskin
It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind than is involved in the assertion of the unreality of Space or of the unreality of Matter. So decisive a breach with that natural position is not to be lightly accepted. And yet in all ages the belief in the unreality of time has proved singularly attractive. ~ J.M.E. McTaggart
Paradoxical quotes by J.M.E. McTaggart
For Jesus, it is clear, poverty is not the problem; it is the solution. Until human beings learn to live in naked contact and direct simplicity and equality with each other, sharing all resources, there can be no solution to the misery of the human condition and no establishment of God's kingdom. Jesus' radical and paradoxical sense of who could and who could not enter the Kingdom is even more clearly illustrated by his famous praise of children. ~ Andrew Harvey
Paradoxical quotes by Andrew Harvey
Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever. ~ Florence King
Paradoxical quotes by Florence King
He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool. ~ Brigham Young
Paradoxical quotes by Brigham Young
Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it's really an anti-contest. It's a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose. ~ Shinzen Young
Paradoxical quotes by Shinzen Young
If Zen is approached with the usual mental attitude, it will seem quite incomprehensible. Our average Western intellectuality would consider its paradoxical language simply as a play upon words. Its full significance is revealed only when we approach it in a different manner, making our minds available to the new processes of inner perception which it suggests. ~ Robert Linssen
Paradoxical quotes by Robert Linssen
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness ... Love should be love. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Paradoxical quotes by Charles Baudelaire
Evil is predicable; Good is paradoxical. ~ Lara Biyuts
Paradoxical quotes by Lara Biyuts
Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist's act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man's problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to ~ Charles Olson
Paradoxical quotes by Charles Olson
Poetry isn't important in today's culture, but the fact that it's useless and people still continue to write it makes it important, in that weird paradoxical, poetic sort of way. ~ Aaron Mc Collough
Paradoxical quotes by Aaron Mc Collough
Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world's population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us all into part or full-time administrators. ~ David Graeber
Paradoxical quotes by David Graeber
Most people do not know what epidemiology is or how it contributes to the health of our society. This fact is somewhat paradoxical, given that epidemiology pervades oir lives. ~ Ashengrau And Seage
Paradoxical quotes by Ashengrau And Seage
Paul's exciting and paradoxical proclamation is that "God's folly is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (1 Corinthians 1:25). He says that only Spirit can hold and absorb the seeming contradictions and allow us to see and to know from an utterly new and unitive vantage point, which is the deepening fruit of contemplation. Only Spirit-in-us can know non-dually or paradoxically and absorb contradictions - inside of and with God. Only God's Spirit-with-us can fully forgive, accept, and allow reality to be what it is. Neither logic nor law can fully achieve this, but participation with and in God can. (This does not make logic or law unnecessary; they are simply inadequate to the work of transformation.) ~ Richard Rohr
Paradoxical quotes by Richard Rohr
Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it is the truth. ~ Benjamin Peirce
Paradoxical quotes by Benjamin Peirce
One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Paradoxical quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
The paradoxical and tragic situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most. ~ Erich Fromm
Paradoxical quotes by Erich Fromm
Perhaps part of the uncanny allure of fashionable clothing resides in the paradoxical impact of its expressiveness: the act of covering up with mere dead matter--cloth, fur, leather, or even metal when it is ingeniously shaped to the purpose--appears to reveal something magical about the life inside. ~ Joseph Roach
Paradoxical quotes by Joseph Roach
This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view. ~ Christopher Essex
Paradoxical quotes by Christopher Essex
As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away. ~ Ralph Fiennes
Paradoxical quotes by Ralph Fiennes
Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[ ... ]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards "Them" (i.e., anyone who is not one of "Us") is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ~ Zeena Schreck
Paradoxical quotes by Zeena Schreck
The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness. ~ Stanislav Grof
Paradoxical quotes by Stanislav Grof
Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Paradoxical quotes by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and ... Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and ... And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling ... paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody. ~ David Almond
Paradoxical quotes by David Almond
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny. ~ Meghan O'Rourke
Paradoxical quotes by Meghan O'Rourke
Perhaps the mere existence of things undone should be a sort of satisfaction in itself, though the idea would appear to be paradoxical. Only one who is long since dead while still seemingly alive does not have many "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep," and that state of inertness is not to be desired. To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland
Paradoxical quotes by Sherwin B. Nuland
Laughter distances us from that which is ugly and therefore potentially distressing, and indeed enables us to obtain paradoxical pleasure and therapeutic benefit from it. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Paradoxical quotes by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical. ~ William Monahan
Paradoxical quotes by William Monahan
However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules - a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. ~ Colleen McMahon
Paradoxical quotes by Colleen McMahon
Nash's lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature. Just as the overconcreteness of a dream is related to the intangible themes of waking life, Nash's search for a piece of paper, a carte d'identité, mirrored his former pursuit of mathematical insights. Yet the gulf between the two recognizably related Nashes was as great as that between Kafka, the controlling creative genius, struggling between the demands of his self-chosen vocation and ordinary life, and K, a caricature of Kafka, the helpless seeker of a piece of paper that will validate his existence, rights, and duties. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion. Survival, both of the self and the world, appears to be at stake. Where once he had ordered his thoughts and modulated them, he was now subject to their peremptory and insistent commands. ~ Sylvia Nasar
Paradoxical quotes by Sylvia Nasar
There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell. ~ Jacques Monod
Paradoxical quotes by Jacques Monod
It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence. ~ Eric Ries
Paradoxical quotes by Eric Ries
Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard
Paradoxical quotes by Jean Francois Lyotard
There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market. ~ Benjamin Graham
Paradoxical quotes by Benjamin Graham
Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time. ~ Meghan O'Rourke
Paradoxical quotes by Meghan O'Rourke
In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane ~ Charlie Chaplin
Paradoxical quotes by Charlie Chaplin
We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy - these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar. ~ Jim Collins
Paradoxical quotes by Jim Collins
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. ~ Bertrand Russell
Paradoxical quotes by Bertrand Russell
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 ~ Glenn Close
Paradoxical quotes by Glenn Close
Without language we have no past, the present is unquantifiable, and we lack a means to recognize and express the paradoxical future challenges of humanity. In absence of a shared language, we cannot understand prior generation's conflicts, desires, and achievements, nor can we communicate with future generations our essential values and the wisdom we garner through undergoing our own socioeconomic crises ~ Kilroy J. Oldster
Paradoxical quotes by Kilroy J. Oldster
I wish I could be built so that stupidity and dullness wouldn't bother me as much, but I just can't help it. It may sound paradoxical, but with time one wishes to be a hermit instead of always being around people. - Doctor Doris Maza ~ Sarah Helm
Paradoxical quotes by Sarah Helm
We're all adults here - we all know the score. We know what they do to people like me and my mom, to paradoxical hybrids of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté. We know what happens to unreconstructed surrealist militants. Tortured. Marked for assassination. Imagine what awaits me out there. ~ Mark Leyner
Paradoxical quotes by Mark Leyner
God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence. ~ Kedar Joshi
Paradoxical quotes by Kedar Joshi
Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical. ~ Richard P. Feynman
Paradoxical quotes by Richard P. Feynman
Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions. ~ Fritjof Capra
Paradoxical quotes by Fritjof Capra
Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. ~ John Keats
Paradoxical quotes by John Keats
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales. ~ Stanley Fish
Paradoxical quotes by Stanley Fish
The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity.The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves. ~ David Foster Wallace
Paradoxical quotes by David Foster Wallace
An Apostle can never come to himself in such a way that he becomes conscious of his apostolic calling as a factor in the development of his life. Apostolic calling is a paradoxical factor, which from first to last in his life stands paradoxically outside his personal identity with himself as the definite person he is. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Paradoxical quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance. ~ Robert M. Pirsig
Paradoxical quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was ... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical. ~ Bill Gates
Paradoxical quotes by Bill Gates
It doesn't take a literary detective, scanning the passage above, to notice that he is partly saying of Orwell what Orwell actually says about Gissing. This half-buried resentment can be further noticed when Williams turns to paradox. I have already insisted that Orwell contains opposites and even contradictions, but where is the paradox in a 'humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror'? Where is the paradox in 'a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor'? The choice of verbs is downright odd, if not a little shady. 'Communicated'? 'Actualised'? Assuming that Williams means to refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first case, which he certainly does, would it not be more precise to say that Orwell 'evoked' or even 'prefigured' or perhaps simply 'described' an extreme of inhuman terror? Yet that choice of verb, because more accurate, would be less 'paradoxical.' Because what Williams means to imply, but is not brave enough to say, is that Orwell 'invented' the picture of totalitarian collectivism.

As for 'actualising' a distinctive squalor, the author of that useful book Keywords has here chosen a deliberately inexact term. He may mean Nineteen Eighty-Four again - he is obsessed with the 'gritty dust' that infests Orwell's opening passage - or he may mean the depictions of the mean and cramped (and malodorous) existence imposed on the denizens of Wigan Pier. But to 'actualise' such squalor is either to make it real - no contradictio ~ Christopher Hitchens
Paradoxical quotes by Christopher Hitchens
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual. ~ Hans Jonas
Paradoxical quotes by Hans Jonas
Of course, almost ali people, guided by the traditional manner of dealing with ethical precepts, peremptorily repudiate such an explanation of the issue. Social institutions, they assert, must be just. It is base to judge them merely according to their fitness to attain definite ends, however desirable these ends may be from any other point of view. What matters first is justice. The extreme formulation of this idea is to be found in the famous phrase: fiai fustitia, pereat mundus. Let justice be done, even if it destroys the world. Most supporters of the postulate of justice will reject this maxim as extravagant, absurd, and paradoxical. But it is not more absurd, merely more shocking, than any other reference to an arbitrary notion of absolute justice. It clearly shows the fallacies of the methods applied in the discipline of intuitive ethics. ~ Ludwig Von Mises
Paradoxical quotes by Ludwig Von Mises
It's paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they've been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle. ~ Bill Gates
Paradoxical quotes by Bill Gates
Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical. ~ Julian Jaynes
Paradoxical quotes by Julian Jaynes
Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well. ~ Christopher Hitchens
Paradoxical quotes by Christopher Hitchens
Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us. ~ Aldous Huxley
Paradoxical quotes by Aldous Huxley
The world is a globe - the farther you sail, the closer to home you are. ~ Terry Pratchett
Paradoxical quotes by Terry Pratchett
All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard. ~ Edward Norton
Paradoxical quotes by Edward Norton
Anybody who does not feel that he would be much happier were he only permitted to understand and obey the commandments of Jesus in a straightforward literal way, and e.g. surrender all his possessions at his bidding rather than cling to them, has no right to this paradoxical interpretation of Jesus' words. We have to hold the two together in mind all the time. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Paradoxical quotes by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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