#paradox

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding. ↗

— Harold Evans

#always #complex #more #nuanced #paradox

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like "Yeah, but, you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else." and "Who cares?" and "It's all bullshit anyway. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#apathy #boredom #bullshit #europeans #goodness

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away. ↗

— Ralph Fiennes

#away #bit #decided #looked #paradoxical

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. ↗

— Bob Hamilton

#paradox #science #experience

Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries. ↗

— Mark E. Hyman

#behind #both #centuries #children #deficient

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

#capturing #different #exchanges #fusion #hardness

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other. ↗

— Lawrence Kasdan

#book #chill #comfort #each #every

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#else #embryo #exposed #grandiose #great

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#husband #j-g-ballard #james-graham-ballard #jg-ballard #marriage

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#ambitious #beyond #goal #important #itself