Paradox Quotes

The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.

James Clavell

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical for the paradox is the source of the thinkers passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Sren Kierkegaard

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

Niels Henrik David Bohr

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

I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?

Henri Barbusse

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Jack London

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Emil Cioran

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

Some may claim that is it unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as miracles. But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things subservient to the rule of law.

Elisha Gray

Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.

Thomas Mann

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

Hugo Black

It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.

Gail Sheehy

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

Erich Fromm

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

Norman O. Brown

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

Arthur Henderson