Paradox Quotes

The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.

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

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules

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.

It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.

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.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.

The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.

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.

A society, in the process of moving forward, often appears to be tearing itself apart. Certainly, an age of rapid change, such as ours, produces many paradoxes. But perhaps the most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

The most exquisite paradox; as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.

No paradox, no progress.

One of the paradoxes of globalization is that, in the developing world, we've seen massive reductions in property.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

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

The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, the resistance disappears.

In fact, every woman I met seemed disposable and replaceable. I was experiencing seducer's paradox: The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women. Success was no longer defined by getting laid or finding a girlfriend, but by how well I performed.

We live to survive our paradoxes.

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

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.

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

It is a great paradox - almost everyone wants to improve his circumstances but almost no one wants to improve himself.

We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.

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.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Only you can take responsibility for your happiness..but you can't do it alone. It's the great paradox of being human.

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

To fear and not be afraid- that is the paradox of faith.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Ayla, I looked for you all my life and didn't know I was looking. You are everything I ever wanted, everything I ever dreamed of in a woman, and more. You are a fascinating enigma, a paradox. You are totally honest, open; you hide nothing: yet you are the most mysterious woman I've ever met.

There's the paradox of making pop music when you're in your 50s. People weren't meant to be doing that originally and yet they are. Mick Jagger [used to say] we're not going to be doing Satisfaction when I'm in a wheelchair.

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

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?

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

There's a thing that if you - somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it's a kind of paradox.

All wisdom ends in paradox.