Tuesday, July 10, 2012

About Paradox

Paradox is a statement that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory. It can be an opinion that conflicts with common belief. However, this seemingly contradictory statement may nonetheless be true

Examples of paradox

1. You can save money by spending it.

2. I'm nobody.


3. What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young.


4. Wise fool.


5. Bittersweet.


6. I can resist anything but temptation.


7. It's amazing how sometimes people are so eager to give you an answer to a question that you may not even have...


8. Has it occured to you that when discussing hobbies and interests, phrases such as "to kill time" and "to past time" have evaporated from our speech, leaving us with only "to find time" and "to manage time"...


9. Nobody goes to that restaurant. It's too crowded.


10. Don't go near the water until you've learned to swim.


11. The man who wrote such a stupid sentence cannot write at all.


12. If you get this message, call me; if you don't, then don't worry about it.


13. If a person says about himself that he always lies, is that the truth or a lie?


14. War is peace.


15. Freedom is slavery.


16. Ignorance is strength.


17. Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.


18. 'Take some more tea,' the March hare said to Alice, very earnestly.


19. 'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.'


20. 'You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter. 'It's very easy to take more than nothing.'"


21. (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)


22. Freedom is not doing what you want, freedom is wanting to do what you have to do...this kind of freedom is always rooted in practiced habits.


23. Knowledge is a paradox. It's both subjective and objective; subjective because it requires a subject, the knower; objective because it requires an object, the thing known. The meeting and marriage of subject and object, of a receptive mind and a strange fact is what we mean by the word knowledge.


24. The whole secret of mysticism is that a person can understand everything with the help of what he does not understand. The logician seeks to make everything clear, and only succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows a few things to remain mysterious, and everything else becomes clear.


25. Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.


26. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.


27. The sane person always cares more for truth than consistency. If he sees two truths that seem to contradict each other, he accepts both truths and the contradiction along with them. His intellectual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.


28. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is the reason.


29. Madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness.


30. The central defect of evil is not sin but the refusal to acknowledge sin.


31. Individualism is the foe of individuality. Where men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each other. They become featureless by "featuring" the same part. Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal.


32. Each new power won by man [over Nature] is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.


33. If everything is possible, then nothing is possible. Nothing is possible for the self because it is the object that is possible. Absolute power is impotence.


34. The less you have, the more free you are.


35. A story was told of a housewife who was preparing dinner when her inquisitive daughter popped her a question. "Mum, why do you always have to cut the ham in half before putting it into the oven to grill?" The housewife paused for a moment and replied, "Hmmm....well darling, I'm not sure why, but I learned to do this from your grandma since I was a little girl like you." - That very weekend, as part of her routine visit, the housewife dropped by at her mum's place and remembered to ask her daughter's question. And she was stumped as her mum as-a-matter-of-factly said, "Oh, I had to cut it into halves because I never had a plate big enough for the whole ham."



Intertextuality

Gothic Novel


Pragmatic Stylistics

Antonomasia

Transferred Epithet

Newspaper Genres


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