Paradoxically, all these wonderful dimensions that we want for our being are completely missing, being a hope, a dream about the perfection of the being. Then this hope and dream of perfection is materialized in the vision we have on our soul mate. Moreover, if we are under the impression that we know what we would want as perfection, it always remains a mere false impression and nothing more, because then the event of a Great Love occurs, we realize that what we thought to be perfection is false, and the novelty of the new imagine on the perfection embodies by the lover makes us feel that intense feeling of suffocating love, precisely because we find our new standard for perfection, which becomes this way superior to the old one.
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Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
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Since the 1960s, we have seen the failure of the melting pot ideology. This ideology suggested that different historical, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds could be subordinated to a larger ideology or social amalgam which is America. This concept obviously did not work, because paradoxically America encourages a politics of contestation.
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Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.
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Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person.
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At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater and lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens -- women, workers and the members of subject races -- to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.
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Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make yourself a happier and more productive person.
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'Thirty years ago cancer in children was regarded as a medical rarity. Today more children are dying of cancer than any other disease. The increase in harmful effects on health seems paradoxically to go hand in hand with an increase in the number of scientists.'
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
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Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can do ... is to write, for in the act of writing we deny our mutedness and begin to eliminat...
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Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
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