Top 35 Paradoxical Quotes

Power is paradoxical.

Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you’re setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.

The new era of bottom-up politics has had politically paradoxical consequences in China. While it has made the system of governance more participatory, it has made the central government less authoritarian and, therefore, more bureaucratic and cautious.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that’s not the conventional definition of hiding.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

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.

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently ‘fuzzy’ – the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that’s how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

I have serious concerns about the potential risks of taking lots of fish oil capsules. So much fish oil can have paradoxical effects, reducing immune function in later life.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It’s a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.

The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it’s going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It’s like a drug.

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.

Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude – all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.

One thing that everybody told me about directing was, ‘Never compromise’. And the whole job is a compromise. So it’s very paradoxical. How do you not compromise when the whole thing is about compromise?

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

As paradoxical as life would have it, some of these same persons who were beaten are terrorized by the Nazis are assisting the die-hards of the Citizens’ Councils in bringing about economic pressure on Negroes who pay their poll taxes and register in Humphry County.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

It’s a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.

God is a freaking character, with enough foibles, tantrums, and paradoxical behaviors to supply a thousand screenplays. But who do you cast?

It might seem paradoxical given my profession, but I’m not someone who likes to be in the limelight.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It’s fun, and it’s fun because it’s hard.

I was graduated in 1940 with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Social Science but a major in Mathematics, a paradoxical combination that was prognostic of my future interests.

It’s paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.