Logical Paradox Quotes

The mind demands rules; the facts demand exceptions.

The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called 'deep truths', are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

I don't know of any wrong road to Dictionopolis, so if this road goes to Dictionopolis at all it must be the right road, and if it doesn't it must be the right road to somewhere else, because there are no wrong roads to anywhere. Do you think it will rain?

Everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary.I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, or for one not to take place--though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place.

Intelligence is not to be confused with intelligence.

If God is all powerful, can He make a stone so big that He Himself can't lift it?

Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

Wizard's Ninth Rule A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

"Did God have a mother?" Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

One must always do what one really cannot.

Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

The logical quandaries thrown up by well-meaning systems are clearly something that I find darkly amusing.

Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.

Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn't really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn't interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It's surreal, it's absurd, it's wordplay, it's satirical, it's analyzing itself, it's funny, it's an enormous challenge.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

It made perfect sense, and at the same time nothing seemed to.

Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.