Top 641 Paradox Quotes & Sayings

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

I am interested in the paradox between identity and uniformity, in the power and vulnerability of each individual and each group. It is in this paradox that I try to visualize by concentrating on poses, attitudes, gestures, and gazes.

No paradox, no progress.

It is a paradox to say the human body has no 'limit.' There must be a limit to the speed at which men can run. I feel this may be around 3:30 for the mile. However, another paradox remains - if an athlete manages to run 3:30, another runner could be found to marginally improve on that time.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

There's a paradox in every paradigm.

A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.

The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

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

You are not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.

Paradox likes contradictions with exits.

Holland is a land of intense paradox. It is quite impossible, but it is there.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

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.

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

Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it.

To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox.

There is nothing absolute and final. If everything were ironclad, all the rules absolute and everything structured so no paradox or irony existed, you couldn't move. One could say that man sneaks through the crack where paradox exists.

There is no paradox. There is only irony.

Fighting in the name of god is the biggest paradox ever.

And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable to attack. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it!

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

When Pico [Iyer] talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" - a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.

When a paradox is widely believed, it is no longer recognized as a paradox.

With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

There's a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.

Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

Life has three rules: Paradox, Humor, and Change. - Paradox: Life is a mystery; don't waste your time trying to figure it out. - Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure - Change: Know that nothing ever stays the same.

The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

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.

The 'I' casts off the illusion of the 'I' and yet remains 'I'. Such is the paradox of Self-realization. The Realized do not see any paradox in it. Consider the case of the worshipper. He approaches God and prays to be absorbed in Him. He then surrenders himself in faith and by concentration. And what remains afterwards? In the place of the original 'I', self-surrender leaves a residuum of God in which the 'I' is lost. That is the highest form of devotion or surrender and the peak of detachment.

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

If complexity doesn't beat you, paradox will.

The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox.

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

A totally healthy actor is a paradox.

To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.

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

[Paradox is] truth standing on its head to gain attention.

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.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.

Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.

The only laws are paradox, humor and change.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics.

3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a paradox; as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.

By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two

The existence of God is the ultimate paradox.

All wisdom ends in paradox.

You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.

Everything is paradox. The danger is one-dimensional thinking.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

The existence of God is not logically necessary, and yet, on the basis of some profound peculiar empirical order in the universe, it seems that He exists as the ultimate uncreated Being, implying a paradox, as no logically unnecessary entity can be uncreated. This paradox is the ultimate question asked by God, who is nothing but the ultimate questioner.

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