Paradox Quotes

That's the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have great joy as well. If we didn't have those things we'd just be numb.
Kathy Mattea

Great, Pain, Joy

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

Life, Happiness, Self

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
Jane Smiley

Death, Famous, Before

After an eternity of seeking the sudden threshold of seeing and finding leaves one filled with a strange paradox of ecstasy and grief. I was born to see.
Joy Page

After, Strange, Born

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

Peace, War, Danger

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
Paul Samuelson

Greed, Decade, Intriguing

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
Lev Grossman

Country, Fact, State

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

Place, Reach, Prime

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.
John Grierson

Truth, Heart, Lie

The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
Frank Miller

Time, Women, Democracy

The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.
Nigel Kneale

Fun, Together, Different

OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family's based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand '55.
Mike Mills

Life, Family, Time

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

Simple, Book, Through

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.
Ellen Page

Good, Enjoy, Comedy

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
Thomas Wolfe

America, Strange, Here

This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education.
Bill Owens

Education, College, Nation

But I will say that most comedians are the saddest people I know. That is the biggest paradox to me.
Jean Reno

Saddest, Biggest, Comedians

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

Money, Science, Famous

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.
Jeremy Northam

Truth, Heart, Job

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
John Fowles

End, Passion, Wanting

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
Amy Waldman

Great, Character, True

All this talk about writing is a little bit moot, because it is almost an unthinking process. It is actually a paradox because you are constantly making choices.
Julia Leigh

Writing, Talk, Making

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.
Shana Alexander

Mind, Reality, Eye

That's a curious paradox that I don't think a lot of people out there know; that you get really scared before you go on. You come out in a nervous rash, and it's not like you actually love getting up there and showing off.
Jacqueline McKenzie

Love, Before, Off

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.
Adrienne Clarkson

Mean, Genius, Complex

The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul.
Ralph Peters

Age, Great, Technology

It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters.
Bryce Dallas Howard

Writing, While, Act

The Clinton paradox: How could a president so intelligent, so compassionate, so public-spirited and so conscious of his place in history act in such a stupid, selfish and self-destructive manner?
George Stephanopoulos

History, Stupid, Selfish

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
Pico Iyer

Best, Revolution, Made

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.
William Manchester

Great, Thundering

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