#paradox

We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. ↗

— Walter Anderson

#find #joy #love #neither #never

It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. ↗

— Clive Barker

#believe #desire #dreams #goddesses #gods

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. ↗

— George Eliot

#even #experience #human #human experience #incongruous

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. ↗

— George Eliot

#dead #fingers #handle #happen #make

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. ↗

— Niels Bohr

#how #making #met #now #paradox

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning. ↗

— David F. Ford

#freedom #modernity #paradox #education

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

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox. ↗

— Galileo Galilei

#denying #maintain #may #paradox #principles