The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.
As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Some may claim that is it unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as miracles. But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things subservient to the rule of law.
By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.
You are doomed to make choices. This is life's greatest paradox.
The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love.
In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul.
It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day.
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Every Christian who strives for holiness of life experiences dryness of soul. It is to most people a heart-rending experience. It is a paradox, for the soul becomes confused when it realizes the harder it strives the further away Jesus seems to be.
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.
As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.
The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall.
The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.
The paradox is, I can't miss the good things about my father while he is alive, but I will of course miss him... when he is dead.
The paradox is that I have no love for myself as a human being, but I have immense pride in the music I make, and I believe it has an important place. Others do, too, and the thousands of people with Morrissey tattoos certainly proves something.
You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.
Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.
There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
But I will say that most comedians are the saddest people I know. That is the biggest paradox to me.
I consider myself pretty lazy, but I look back and check out the stuff I've done, and I say, 'God, that's a lot of stuff for a lazy guy.' It's a paradox, I suppose, being both things.
Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.
The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.
I love paradox. I like to go where people don't expect me to go.
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.
There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.