Paradox Quotes - Page 19

• In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound.

  Robert Thurman

  Self, Practice, Meditation

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• Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Teacher, Children, Freedom

  Parker J. Palmer (2012). “The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life”, p.87, John Wiley & Sons

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• So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.

  John Green

  Running, Distance, Race

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• 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

  War, Names, Doe

  Elie Wiesel (2011). “From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences”, p.165, Schocken

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• The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Hands, Literature

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• Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Individuality, Hollywood, Propose

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• A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Stupid, Teeth, Doe

  Friedrich Nietzsche; (2016). “Human, All Too Human”, p.51, Xist Publishing

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• Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Art, Glasses, Silence

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

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• A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.

  China Mieville

  Cities, Opposites, London

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• The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.

  William Poundstone

  Grandfather, Assumption

  "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge". Book by William Poundstone, 1988.

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• The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.

  William Poundstone

  Raises Questions, Kind, Contradiction

  "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge". Book by William Poundstone, 1988.

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• Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity , then of our wisdom , ultimately of our coercion.

  Lionel Trilling

  Men, Goes On, Fellow Man

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.221, New York Review of Books

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• The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.

  Bill Moyers

  Country, Beach, Hero

  "FactCheck.org is Sponsored by Decidedly LEFTIST Organization: ANNENBERG Public Policy Foundation" by Biochemky, www.freerepublic.com. October 13, 2008.

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• If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream.

  Jean Piaget

  Dream, Baby, Hands

  "The First Year of Life of the Child". Book by Jean Piaget, "The Egocentrism of the Child and the Solipsism of the Baby", translated by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche, 1927.

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• OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family's based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand '55.

  Mike Mills

  Mom, Dad, Crazy

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• Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.

  John Myers

  Believe, Men, Host

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• This is Darrow, Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart, And his drawl, and his infinite paradox And his sadness, and kindness, And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Kindness, Heart, Sadness

  Edgar Lee Masters, “Clarence Darrow”

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• There are great jazz educators that I meet all the time. I met a guy named Paul Luchessi who has a high school jazz program in Fresno. And Bob Athayde who runs a junior high program in Lafayette, California. And man, we walked into these schools and Paul Luchessi said, "Jon is the composer of Paradox." A hundred or something kids started to applaud. "What? You guys know that? I'm so blown away.

  Jon Gordon

  Running, School, Kids

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• Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

  Noam Chomsky

  Gun, Hands, Doe

  Source: chomsky.info

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• 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.

  Steve Erickson

  Two, America, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Did you ever find that there is room between the two opposing rules of a paradox? That space between two almost opposite rules is the ground where I play and write.

  Mu Xin

  Writing, Opposites, Play

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• Many things are linked to being able to live with uncertainty, ...with paradoxes. But this can be a strength of an organisation and a situation.

  John Elkann

  Able, Situation, Organisation

  "Unlikely heir who saved the family jewels". Financial Times, Marh 06, 2011.

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• I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Pain, Grief, Illumination

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• 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.

  Earl Warren

  Moving, Age, Found

  "Saturday Review" Magazine, (p. 16), October 23, 1971.

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• It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Firsts, Innocence

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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