Paradox Quotes - Page 25

• I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

  Junot Diaz

  Real, Writing, Thinking

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• First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.

  Boris Beizer

  Law, Use, Pesticides

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• Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

  Betsy Lerner

  People, Trying, Life Is

  Betsy Lerner (2016). “The Forest for the Trees: An editor's advice to writers”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

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• 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.

  Richard Rohr

  Character, Looks, Sides

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• Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

  Simon Van Booy

  Now Or Never, Moments

  Simon van Booy (2014). “The Secret Lives of People in Love”, p.53, Oneworld Publications

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• I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

  Tod Machover

  Thinking, Ideas, Long

  Source: bigthink.com

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• All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

  Anne Carson

  Hate, Axes, Desire

  Anne Carson (2014). “Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay”, p.11, Princeton University Press

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• A totally healthy actor is a paradox.

  Vittorio Gassman

  Healthy, Actors

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• There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

  Paul Dirac

  Atoms, World, Opinion

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• A favorite Wired icon for the information feedback loop, a dragon curling in a circle to swallow its own tail, could become more apt as a symbol of the timeless libertarian paradox: Monopoly verging on feudalism emerges from unregulated competition to bite libertarianism in the posterior.

  Jedediah Purdy

  Dragons, Circles, Icons

  "The God of the Digerati". Essay in the American Prospect Magazine, prospect.org. March-April 1998.

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• ...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, People, Missing

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• 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.

  Bertrand Russell

  Numbers, Prime, Ifs

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• Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

  Fernand Braudel

  Inspirational, Motivational, History

  Fernand Braudel (1982). “On History”, p.16, University of Chicago Press

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• Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Clever, Winning, People

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• The absurdist is concerned with the search for meaning in the Universe. He believes this search to be meaningless--hence the disintegration of plot, character, and language in absurdist drama. Order is a falsehood that we, God, those who came before us, have imposed on a random universe. However, the absurdist is confronted with a curious paradox: though he believes the Universe to be meaningless, he cannot abandon the search for meaning--or he will die.

  Walter Wykes

  Drama, Believe, Character

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

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Conservative, Communism

  Eric J. Hobsbawm (1994). “Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914-1991”

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• You cannot do silhouettes in fantasy. Ah, no, you must be faithful. It is, the art, a, what you call, paradox. It is always that you must be simple, and then, if you are simple, you will stimulate the imagination of the observer.

  Ugo Mochi

  Art, Simple, Imagination

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• In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical - in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it.

  Antoni Tapies

  Art, Taken, Usual

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 28), 2004.

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• 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.

  Alister E. McGrath

  Violence, Intolerance, Century

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• It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.

  Nick Hornby

  Football, Hurt, Real

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• Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Hands, Years

  "Mapping Ideology" by Slavoj Žižek, p.1, 1994.

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• What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Possibility, Eternal, Hereafter

  Aurobindo Ghose, Sri Aurobindo (1989). “The Supramental Manifestation, and Other Writings”, Lotus Press (WI)

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• The paradox of innovation is this: CEO's often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.

  Patrick Dixon

  Ideas, Leader, Innovation

  "Building a Better Business". Book by Patrick Dixon, 2005.

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• The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently with very complex problems is to move away from pure logic.... Most of the time, reaching the right decision requires little reasoning.... Expert systems are, thus, not about reasoning: they are about knowing.... Reasoning takes time, so we try to do it as seldom as possible. Instead we store the results of our reasoning for later reference.

  Daniel Crevier

  Moving, Knowing, Decision

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• A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.

  Marlene Dietrich

  Fathers Day, Kings, Dad

  Marlene Dietrich (2012). “Marlene Dietrich's ABC: Wit, Wisdom, & Recipes”, p.45, Open Road Media

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