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 seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin

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

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.
Barbara Januszkiewicz

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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

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

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.
George Will

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

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

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Soren Kierkegaard

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

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

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

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl Rogers

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery

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

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.
Earl Warren

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