Selected paradox quotes

1. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

2. How can we still speak of the salvation and reformation of Europe, when we have to ask Europe's destroyer for help?

3. Unlike most other people, I'm just an average person.

4. Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

5. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

6. If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

7. You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

8. The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

9. 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.

10. That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

11. Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand.

12. Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent.

13. Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.

14. We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

15. I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

16. Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

17. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

18. It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

19. We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

20. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

21. I can't concentrate when I'm thinking.

22. The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

23. Now that I have found someone I'm feeling more alone Than I ever have before.

24. My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

25. Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

26. The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

27. The glory and the nothing of a name.

28. I was once walking through the forest alone. A tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it.

29. My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

30. The following is an attempt to systematize alike the data of mysticism and the results of comparative religion. The skeptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true. Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.

31. Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

32. What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.

33. In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was. That meant I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich. So what the hell - if that's a paradox, then I'm a socialist. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about money. That's why I lost it, either by giving it away or by allowing myself to be screwed by so-called managers.

34. So weak thou art, that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.

35. Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

36. Money can't buy poverty. [3]

37. In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest... Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love, for love is most free and at the same time most bound.

38. Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves? (Mork & Mindy)

39. Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble: and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

40. An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

41. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.

42. Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.