On Paradoxes (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty." (Ralph W Emerson, "The Dial, XII", 1841)

"He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox."  (Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1890) 

"The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them." (Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1890)

"Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life." (Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying", 1891)

"Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all." (Thomas Mann,"The Magic Mountain", 1924)

"There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "The Father Brown omnibus", 1951)

"Irony is a form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time." (K W Friedrich Schlegel, "Aphorism 48", "Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms", 1968)

"With sufficient knowledge, any possible so-called paradox can be resolved." (Edward E Smith, "Masters of the Vortex", 1968) 

"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself." (Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance", 1977)

"Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face." (Frank Herbert, ["Conversations in Port Townsend," interview with Tim O'Reilly] 1983) 

"It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more." (David Brin, "Brightness Reef", 1995)

"The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense." (Ursula K Le Guin," "A Man of the People", 1995)