#paradox

Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. "I need you to be --" I said, and then I started to cry. "Be what?" she said, opening her arms. "Not sad," I said. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#love

Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence. ↗

— Mark Helprin

#love

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#paradox

The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ↗

— James Baldwin

#begins #being #conscious #educated #education

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#begins #being #conscious #educated #education

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

#condition #first #full #happiness #lasting

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