#paradox

The words of truth are always paradoxical. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#paradoxical #truth #words

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

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#philosophy #political-science #wikileaks #change

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

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