Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It might sound a paradoxical thing to say--for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental tim...e--but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a... paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The female part of the Cry (who had many of them often experienced a joyful self- approbation on being told by their admirers that... all their perfection lay in folly and that to prove their wisdom they must shun, as poison, every offered instruction for fear of becoming disagreeable to their lovers) now felt rolling in their bosoms the highest anger and disdain. Not against their adorers for so preposterous a method of flattery, much less against themselves for receiving and being pleased with such absurd adulation: but all their indignation was pointed against Portia for daring to bring into open light the true meaning of such paradoxical stuff.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are ...likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is ...what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One c...an act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it--even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one's self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it may be, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation can conquer fear. But this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible. He who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »