72 Paradoxical Quotes

In a world filled with straightforward statements and clear-cut ideas, paradoxical quotes offer a delightful twist. These thought-provoking aphorisms often appear contradictory at first glance but reveal deeper truths upon reflection. They challenge our conventional thinking, inviting us to explore the complexities and nuances of life. Whether you’re seeking a fresh perspective or simply enjoy the mental gymnastics of unraveling these puzzling remarks, our curated collection of the top 72 paradoxical quotes promises to both entertain and enlighten. Dive in and let these paradoxes inspire you to see the world in a whole new light.

1. “Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “I never said most of the things I said.” - Yogi Berra

3. “Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)” - Blaise Pascal

4. “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.” - Vince Lombardi

5. “Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” - Oscar Wilde

6. “And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.” - Erica Jong

7. “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.” - Robert Benchley

8. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” - Mahatma Gandhi

9. “Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.” - Jon Stewart

10. “He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.” - Douglas Adams

11. “Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.” - Isaiah Berlin

12. “That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” - Garrison Keillor

13. “Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.” - Yogi Berra

14. “A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.” - Banksy

15. “Give me an honest con man any day.” - J.D. Salinger

16. “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?” - George Carlin

17. “Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.” - Albert Einstein

18. “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” - Tennessee Williams

19. “All generalizations are false, including this one.” - Unknown - attributed to Mark Twain by Normand Baillargeon

20. “His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.” - Robert A. Heinlein

21. “The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” - Douglas Adams

22. “Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” - Frank Herbert

23. “Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't three lefts make a right? Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't two negatives make a positive?” - Andrew Clements

24. “Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity” - Stephen King

25. “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.” - Aristotle

26. “Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.” - Matthew Fox

27. “The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.” - David F. Ford

28. “They have gone. And the tunnel is about to close. So, boys, I am looking for someone to blame.” - Eoin Colfer

29. “The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox.” - Kedar Joshi

30. “Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.” - Mark Twain

31. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.” - George Orwell

32. “The Universe is very, very big.It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies. Rule number two: Everything lasts forever.” - Craig Ferguson

33. “Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.” - C.S. Lewis

34. “And he who wields white, wild magic gold is a paradoxFor he is everything and nothingHero and foolPotent, helplessAnd with one word of truth or treacheryHe will save or damn the earthBecause he is mad and saneCold and passionateLost and found” - Stephen R. Donaldson

35. “In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical.” - Bob Hamilton

36. “The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.” - Hal Herzog

37. “The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.” - Erica Jong

38. “I’d say that most of these [poems in Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP] are just straightforward enough, but not entirely explainable or attributable to a single cause/effect, which makes them the kind of poems I want to read many times… “Salty as a lip” is my favorite. It’s so alive: strange and human / earthy and raw. Mysterious but grounded. Mashak has manifested paradox, it seems. Bravo!” - Sage Cohen

39. “It's weird not to be weird.” - John Lennon

40. “Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.” - Mark Helprin

41. “First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.” - J.G. Ballard

42. “Pops added,"you know, they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve.""And if you do, you never get the results you expected," (Katherine) replied.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

43. “Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.” - R. D. Laing

44. “A fear of weakness only strengthens weakness.” - Criss Jami

45. “Men have two greatest fears: the first fear is the fear of being needed, and the second fear is the fear of not being needed.” - C. JoyBell C.

46. “Я хочу дожить свое бессмертие спокойно.” - Александр Житинский

47. “There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology—the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology—which takes us somewhere we wouldn’t be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love.” - Nanette Sawyer

48. “Every moment is the paradox of now or never.” - Simon Van Booy

49. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” - Plato

50. “The incompetent always present thmeselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and teh feeble-minded as intellectual.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

51. “Joshua to Angela: "Please, Angela, do it for me… and you never know you just might have fun." She looked at him warily. "I find that highly doubtful, Josh.""Well how will you know unless you actually try it?""I just know. Do you have to drink a hot fish milkshake to know you aren’t going to like it?" She asked.” - Patti Roberts

52. “This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His nature; it is not too difficult for us to also overthrow our evil will." Hymns of the Nativity, Hymn 1:97, pg. 74 in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989).” - St. Ephrem the Syrian

53. “Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.” - Steven James

54. “I have no privacy. But I feel so alone.” - Susan Beth Pfeffer

55. “If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” - Sam Harris

56. “There is a curious paradox that no one can explain. Who understands the secret of the reaping of the grain? Who understands why Spring is born out of Winter’s laboring pain, or why we must all die a bit before we grow again? I do not know the answer; I merely know it’s true. I hurt them for that reason, and myself a little bit too.” - Tom Jones

57. “That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” - Ted Hughes

58. “The only way to be completely self-consistent is to be constantly uttering paradoxes.” - Bauvard

59. “Q: The Continuum didn't think you had it in you, Jean-Luc. But I knew you did...We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.Picard: When I realized the paradox.Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.” - Brannon Braga

60. “The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t.” - David Foster Wallace

61. “A circle has no end.” - Isaac Asimov

62. “Where glowing embers through the roomTeach light to counterfeit a gloom...” - John Milton

63. “Λόγια που είναι πολύ σωστά φαίνονται σαν παράδοξα.” - Λάο-Τσε

64. “To make a statement that one knows is false is more honest than to make a statement that one knows is true.” - Lionel Suggs

65. “Just because a prediction is true, doesn't mean that it is not false.” - Lionel Suggs

66. “Just because a path never existed, doesn't mean that it isn't there...” - Lionel Suggs

67. “Can omniscient God, whoKnows the future, findThe Omnipotence toChange His future mind?” - Karen Owens

68. “He came face-to-face with the rude paradox fame had dealt him: The secret of his extraordinary art had been his ability to observe human interaction anonymously, thereby gaining insight into the emotions on display in ordinary life--it was his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall that made him famous, and fame had destroyed his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall.” - C R Strahan

69. “In this temporal existence, perfection is an illusion, regardless of those who believe in its concept. Perfection is devoid of any value. Perfection, after all, implies you've reached the zenith. There is no possibility or potentiality. There is no room for imagination. There is no ability to visualize a concept. Perfection is limited by its own nature, which in short, is zero.” - Lionel Suggs

70. “My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.” - Brandon Sanderson

71. “I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'.” - G.K. Chesterton

72. “The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite.” - Fulton J. Sheen