#paradoxes

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

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. (Žižek, S. "Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks." London Review of Books 33.2 (2011): 9-10. ) ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#philosophy #political-science #public #wikileaks #age

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

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 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