Paradox Quotes - Page 27

• "Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask.

  Michio Kaku

  Mother, Children, Simple

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.191, OUP Oxford

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• There is no paradox. There is only irony.

  Philip K. Jason

  Irony

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• I didn’t think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.

  Otto Penzler

  Jobs, Thinking, Justice

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• It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

  Anthony Storr

  Men, Quality, Capacity

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• I do not think it is logical to try and outsmart the smartest people. Instead, my weapons are irony and paradox. The joy of life is partly in the strange and unexpected. It is in the constant exclamation 'Who would have thought it?'

  Hugh Jackman

  Thinking, People, Joy

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• The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

  Laura Hillenbrand

  Life, Pain, Believe

  Laura Hillenbrand (2010). “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, p.366, Random House

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• The paradox of faith is that when we conform our lives to Christ then we gain our true freedom. And its fruit is profound and lasting happiness.

  Vincent Nichols

  Lasting Happiness, Profound, Gains

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• But in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches an understanding that ego is the problem he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. This is the paradox - in the West ego is taught, in the East egolessness is taught. But in the West it is easy to dissolve the ego, in the East it is very difficult.

  Rajneesh

  Understanding, Ego, West

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• That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Epidemics, Order, Movement

  "How to start an epidemic" by Malcolm Gladwell, www.theguardian.com. 2000.

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• There are very few theorems in advanced analysis which have been demonstrated in a logically tenable manner. Everywhere one finds this miserable way of concluding from the special to the general and it is extremely peculiar that such a procedure has led to so few of the so-called paradoxes.

  Niels Henrik Abel

  Science, Special, Peculiar

  Letter to Professor Christoffer Hansteen (1826) "Oeuvres Complètes de N. H. Abel", mathematician, Nouvelle edition (1881) ed., Peter Ludwig Mejdell Sylow & Sophus Lie, Vol. 2, pp. 263-265, as quoted by Øystein Ore, "Niels Henrik Abel: Mathematician Extraordinary", p. 113, 1957.

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• A Dream of Undying Fame is a probing, elegant and balanced book. Louis Breger shows how Freud’s traumatic childhood shaped his ambitious, detached and authoritarian personality, and led to the betrayal of his mentor, Josef Breuer. Breger’s analysis exposes a fascinating paradox: Freud both invented psychoanalysis and impoverished its development. A must-read for everyone interested in how ideas can change the world.

  Brenda Webster

  Dream, Betrayal, Book

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• If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose.

  John Cowper Powys

  Purpose, Action, Compromise

  John Cowper Powys (1944). “The art of growing old”

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• There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos.

  Andy Hargreaves

  Creativity, Science, Diversity

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• If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

  George Carlin

  Inspirational, Funny, Witty

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• My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

  Mark Haddon

  Book, Simple, Literature

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• Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.

  Octavio Paz

  Ideas, Erotic, Desire

  Octavio Paz (1998). “An Erotic Beyond: Sade”, Harcourt

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• I see a huge paradox in me - the intense need to be loved and the search for approval juxtaposed with the need to nurture other people, to be the mother I never had.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Mother, People, Needs

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• We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Notebook, Lost Love, Taken

  FaceBook post by Nicholas Sparks from Dec 24, 2011

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• As far as possible, Arianne realized, each soul had to be content alone before plunging into love, because one never knew when the other would move out of that love. It was the greatest paradox: Souls need each other, but they also need to not need each other.

  Lauren Kate

  Moving, Soul, Needs

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• There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

  David Foster Wallace

  Vacation, Anxiety, Kind

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

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• New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

  Harry Connick, Jr.

  Sex, New Orleans, Cities

  "Sony" press release, January 2007.

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• Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

  Frank Herbert

  Freedom, Discipline, History

  Frank Herbert (1985). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, Putnam Publishing Group

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• We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless . . . ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants -- PUBLIC OPINION.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Struggle, Tyrants, Age

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• By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.

  Mark Nepo

  Bottles, Infinite, Walks

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• Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

  James Gleick

  Thinking, Language, Puzzles

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