Quotes about Paradox

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable.

Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

St. Augustine says, "If God is, why is there evil? But if God is not, why is there good?

Socrates says we must be either fools because we think we are wise, or wise because we know we are fools. Christ says we must be either sinners who think we are saints, or saints who know we are sinners. Even

Chesterton said once that there is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians. And

We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us.

Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor's prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet—Babette's feast—spread for me.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created .