Life's Paradox Quotes

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.

If you enjoy the fragrance of a rose, you must accept the thorns which it bears.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

As I grow to understand life less and less I grow to love it more and more.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

Perhaps the early grave Which men weep over may be meant to save.

Life is a maze of doors and they all open from the side you're on. Just keep on pushing hard boy, try as you may, you're going to wind up where you started from.

It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other.

We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life - and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life's ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all.

It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.