Quotes about Paradox

Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.

But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.

Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the Triune God.

This is good, and all good things cast shadows.

I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.

The true emblem of causa sui is Baron Münchhausen, who, clamping his legs around his horse as it sinks in the water, pulls his pigtail up over his head and raises himself and the horse into the heights; under this emblem, put: causa sui.

If you're saying farewell to your arms, what do you use to wave goodbye?