Quotes about Paradox

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

I'm talking about intellectually and emotionally challenging, but at the same time it's actually not that challenging. So there's this dichotomy.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.

The true emblem of causa sui is Baron Münchhausen, who, clamping his legs around his horse as it sinks in the water, pulls his pigtail up over his head and raises himself and the horse into the heights; under this emblem, put: causa sui.

If you're saying farewell to your arms, what do you use to wave goodbye?

In conclusion, rapid space travel and travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding. They would cause great logical problems, so let's hope there's a Chronology Protection Law to prevent people going back and killing their parents.

God sometimes uses ugly vessels to carry beautiful things.

Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don't want to be.

Our exceptionalness is not for us but for others. That is the paradox at the heart of who we are. So what makes us different has nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have been good. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have longed to help make others great too. That earnest humility and generosity must be attended to.

There are Chestertonian aphorisms too: "Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued".