Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.

Octavio Paz

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Alan Watts

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

Amin Maalouf

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Anatole Broyard

Of all the logical impasses, unknowings, paradoxes, and terrors that provoke laughter, death by its finality and unsolvable mystery is paramount.

Andrew Hudgins

People who express themselves in paradoxes are in a strong position; and the more outrageous the paradox, in general the stronger the position.

Bernard Williams

My documentary 'Split Decision' examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.

Doug Liman

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.

Edward Teller

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

Evan Parker

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Fernand Braudel

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

George Eliot

Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.

Graham Hancock

I collect axioms, paradoxes, maxims, teaching stories, proverbs, and aphorisms of all sorts, because I love to see complex ideas distilled into a few words.

Gretchen Rubin

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

Jess Row

He was self-sacrificing in many different ways, and my father was a man of paradoxes.

John Carter Cash

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

John Hurt

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Junot Diaz

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Marcel Proust

My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.

Mike Mills