Paradox Quotes - Page 20

• All ultimately intermarried to produce a race of many strains, which may account for the paradox that a people famed for stolid, patient, practical common-sense; a nation as Napoleon said, of "shopkeepers", has produced more adventurers, explorers and poets than probably any other in history.

  Arthur Bryant

  Race, People, Common Sense

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Thinking, Order, Magic

  16 Copy quote

• But I didn't think about this beforehand. I just went ahead and did it, and that's the way it turned out. So I guess there are lots of paradoxes which I'll leave for other people to unscramble.

  Bill Reid

  Thinking, People, Way

  4 Copy quote

• The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

  Clement Greenberg

  Effort, Cezanne, Evolution

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171, 1961.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Book, Writing, Order

  Madeleine L'Engle (2017). “The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention”, p.32, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the paradoxes that makes the internet such a suggestive place is that, on the one hand, we perceive it as perpetually in motion and changing, and, on the other hand, it has this god-like immortality to it: It seems like it won't die and is not subject to decay, and that everything can be unwound, unlike present-tense experience, where you can't archive the present moment, you can't go back and read it over again. That's the fundamental hallmark of the internet.

  Virginia Heffernan

  Internet, Moments, Immortality

  Source: www.mtv.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

  F. L. Lucas

  Passion, Null, Done

  F. L. Lucas (2012). “Style: The Art of Writing Well”, Harriman House Limited

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Honesty, Men, May

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1841-1843”, p.37, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.

  Alain de Botton

  Happiness, Quests, Dynamics

  5 Copy quote

• I do consider even going to prostitutes, or seeing a hooker or an escort, as having an emotional component, even if it's not an emotion necessarily in the relationship. Even if you are paying in order to absolve yourself of any emotional involvement. That's the paradox.

  Esther Perel

  Emotional, Emotion, Involvement

  Source: wbur.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• You have to recognise your responsibility to your community for your actions. Liberty doesn't mean that you are not held accountable. Without accountability, there can be no freedom. I know it seems like a paradox.

  Billy Bragg

  Mean, Responsibility, Community

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos -and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Creativity, Light, Color White

  11 Copy quote

• Football is a sport of paradox. It requires reaction, not reflection. Yet you must use your mind to calculate, to anticipate - to think and not think at the same time.

  Dhani Jones

  Sports, Football, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

  Neil Gaiman

  Reading, Writing, Artist

  Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.28, HarperCollins

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self. The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds.

  Scott Barry Kaufman

  Self, People, Creative

  "18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently" by Carolyn Gregoire, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 4, 2014.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Two identical things do not exist at all, so there is no need to be 'somebody.' You just be yourself, and suddenly you are unique, incomparable. That's why I say that this is a paradox: those who search fail, and those who don't bother, suddenly attain.

  Rajneesh

  Motivational, Being Yourself, Unique

  10 Copy quote

• Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.

  Robert D. Richardson

  Strong, Mean, Thinking

  5 Copy quote

• There is some of the paradox of foreign policy polling. So on Iraq and Syria, the President is pretty much doing what Americans want, he's not very engaged, but they don't like the results, his polling numbers are going down. Americans may be ambivalent and disengaged with the world, they don't want a President who is ambivalent and disengaged with the world.

  Michael Gerson

  President, World, Foreign Policy

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

  Jacques Barzun

  Rights, Law, Practice

  "The Culture We Deserve" by Jacques Barzun, Wesleyan University Press, (p. 97), 1989.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Tradition, Radical

  Harold Rosenberg (1983). “Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations”, p.251, University of Chicago Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think in a way the great irony or paradox about America is that it makes it so hard for the sensitive person, the artist, the impressionable person, the person whose raison d'etre is to incarnate the creative will, rather than to just make money, and yet that extreme difficulty that the culture poses for us has created some of the best artists in the last hundred years.

  Hubert Selby, Jr.

  Artist, Thinking, Creative

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A human moment is a term I invented to distinguish in-person communication from electronic. Human moments are exponentially more powerful than electronic ones. I mean face-to-face, in-person contact and communication. I have identified several modern paradoxes and the first is that, for various reasons, we have grown electronically superconnected but we have simultaneously grown emotionally disconnected from each other.

  Edward Hallowell

  Powerful, Communication, Mean

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think writing kind of burns out the flaming question. Sometimes it might feel like when you're living with certain paradoxes and they're unarticulated, you feel pressure to choose. I feel more comfortable living in the paradoxes that I've named and laid out, whereas when I started they might have felt like real agitations. At least I see them more clearly after having sketched them for myself and made a place to stand in relationship to them that felt okay enough to last through the course of a book.

  Maggie Nelson

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whether you like it or not, France's history is unique in Europe. Not to put too fine a point on it, France is a country of regicidal monarchists. It is a paradox: The French want to elect a king, but they would like to be able to overthrow him whenever they want. The office of president is not a normal office - that is something one should understand when one occupies it. You have to be prepared to be disparaged, insulted and mocked - that is in the French nature.

  Emmanuel Macron

  Country, Unique, Office

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Character, Psychology

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source