#paradoxes

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#american literature #back #forever #leave #literature

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

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days. ↗

— Howard Thurman

#paradoxes #age

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#prejudice #education

When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored. ↗

— Wendell Willkie

#become #clear #freedom #ignored #longer

There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world. ↗

— Paul Dirac

#behavior #between #confronting #economic #great

Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either--he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days--since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other--with, of course, a day off each year for sheer solipsist debauchery. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#hypotheses #indecision #paradoxes #solipsism #the-universe

Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such endless variety of forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct. ↗

— Henry Theophilus Finck

#forms #love #paradoxes #shades #love

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. ↗

— Václav Havel

#life #paradoxes #humor

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