A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.
-from the Amazon review of this book, which has been ordered
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
-Carl Rogers, as quoted here
Perhaps the greatest paradox in the story of spirituality is the mystical insight that we are able to experience release only if we ourselves let go. This is the paradox of surrender. Surrender begins with the acceptance that we are not in control of the matter at hand—in fact, we are not in absolute control of anything.
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating "life" which is at once loveable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life or our own bodies.
-Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Fast is efficient; but sometimes slow is effective…
What is productivity for you anyway…
-Nicholas Bate, who always asks good questions
In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
-Adam Gopnik, from this review
You will complete your mission in life when you figure out what your mission in life is. Your purpose is to discover your purpose. This in not a paradox. This is the way.
The popular adage "use it or lose it" doesn't go far enough. If you don't use it, you might never gain it in the first place.
. . . a light bulb went off for me. Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can't become truly comfortable with a skill until you've practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerated learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a paradox to experience. You can believe one thing and also believe its opposite.
-Derek Sivers, as culled from here
Spinoza, according to all the seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God, he was indisputably a heretic. Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice. then, as now, the philosopher seemed like a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint. How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?
Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
You can and should be interested in everything, the Stoics taught, because you can and should learn wisdom from everything. The more you experience, the more you learn, and, paradoxically, the more humbled you are by the endless amounts of knowledge that remain in front of you.
-Ryan Holiday, Lives Of The Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
-attributed to Ayn Rand.
If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration. Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. . . . In this, artists have much to teach us about how we ourselves could address the future with imagination and independence. In addition to thinking about what to do, the artist's method suggest that we should think about how to be.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
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