Top 193 Paradoxical Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy.

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.

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.

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 must be the truth.

Paradoxical as it may seem, God means not only to make us good, but to make us also happy, by sickness, disaster and disappointment.

Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding.

Tolerance is an essential value in the modern world, and we have daily reminders of how awful the alternatives to it are. And despite its paradoxical flavor, there are many good arguments - moral, prudential, and epistemic - in favor of tolerance, and none that I know of against it.

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

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.

The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'.

Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.

My friends and I have often discussed the plausibility of a connection between qualitatively bad music and quantifiably successful music, often citing the example of Candlebox and their paradoxical influence on culture.

I have serious concerns about the potential risks of taking lots of fish oil capsules. So much fish oil can have paradoxical effects, reducing immune function in later life.

The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labour lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.

It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.

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.

I love to read theories without ever using them when working... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.

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.

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time -- but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms . . .

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur-not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

[W]isdom consists in following Providence step by step. And you can be sure of the truth of a maxim which seems paradoxical, namely, that he who is hasty falls back in the interests of God.

The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

As paradoxical as life would have it, some of these same persons who were beaten are terrorized by the Nazis are assisting the die-hards of the Citizens' Councils in bringing about economic pressure on Negroes who pay their poll taxes and register in Humphry County.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

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.

My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don't believe in the secret rulers of the world. Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did!

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

We must remain, in a word, in an intellectual disposition which seems paradoxical, but which, in my opinion, represents the true mind of the investigator. We must have a robust faith and yet not believe.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.

There's this divergence out there between the very small and the very large with the middle disappearing. There is something paradoxical going on where there is this access and we can seek out things on the fringes, but that doesn't describe the overall reality, because the big are bigger than ever.

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

The new era of bottom-up politics has had politically paradoxical consequences in China. While it has made the system of governance more participatory, it has made the central government less authoritarian and, therefore, more bureaucratic and cautious.

I was graduated in 1940 with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Social Science but a major in Mathematics, a paradoxical combination that was prognostic of my future interests.

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.

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.

Walter Benjamin has this notion of the angel of history and in a way that's paradoxical itself. We don't have angels in history anymore. We don't believe in these mythical creatures anymore.

The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.

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.

It is paradoxical but nonetheless true that the nearer man comes to his goal to make his life easy and abundant, the more he undermines the foundations of a meaningful existence.

Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.

Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you're setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

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.

We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution

Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.

It is indeed paradoxical that an industry which epitomizes all that is new and up-to-date at the same time harbours some of the oldest and least desirable attributes of work in manufacturing industry.

I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.