Quotes about Paradox

The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold—and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?

A skeptic once said to me, 'I don't believe the Bible because it has miracles.' I said, 'Name one.' He said, 'Turning water into wine. Do you believe that?' I said, 'Yeah, it happens all the time.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Well, rain goes through the grapevine up into the grape, and the grape turns into wine. All Jesus did was speed it up a little bit.

Or to a different law that hasn't been demonstrated and that we haven't even thought of yet that says that you can doubly not exist in the same place?

What a mystery, what an absurdity if not true, and if true what a wonder!

The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.

Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.