#paradoxes

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

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life. ↗

— Fernand Braudel

#contradictions #despite #difficulties #everything #framework

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

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

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. ↗

— Alan Watts

#appear #find #paradoxes #particularly #study

No, I'm serious," Frankie insisted, fed up with being silenced. "Why didn't you just make me a normie?" Viktor sighed. "Because that's not who we are. We're special. And I'm very proud that. You should be, too." "Proud?" Frankie spat out the word as if it had been soaked in nail polish remover. "How can I be proud when everyone is telling me to hide?" "I'm telling you to hide so you'll be safe. But you can still feel proud of who you are," he explained, like it really was that simple. "Pride has to come from within you and stay with you, no matter what people say." Huh? Frankie crossed her arms and looked away. ↗

— Lisi Harrison

#danger #family-fights #hidden #mixed-messages #paradoxes

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#time-travel #uncertainty

...they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve, and if you do, you never get the results you expected. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#democracy-voting #election #elections #false-promises #government

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore. ↗

— Evan Parker

#apparent #concern #contradictions #many #me