Ignorance

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.
-  William Channing

Paradox

"One of the great paradoxes of being is that each of us is born complete and yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. This, then, is the purpose of the stranger: to enliven what is dormant within us."  Mark Nepo

Irony

"The worst offenders of the virtue of irony, this talent for multiple emotional and intellectual points of view are moralists.  They think they know what is right and wrong, tell others how to live, and see themselves as models of virtuous living.  Next in line are literalists, who anxiously take their every thought or belief as pure fact.   They are incapable of appreciating the paradoxes in belief and need to feel that they possess truth.. "  Thomas Moore

Negative Capability

John Keats introduced the concept in 1871, describing it as "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason." He believed that "great people have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved" and that "the truths found in imagination access holy authority". He believed that authority could not otherwise be understood and writes, "This place of uncertainty is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. It is a state of intentional openmindedness".

Belief

"When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception."

"When your thinking is locked in false certainty or negativity it puts so many interesting and vital areas of life out of your reach. You live impoverished in the midst of your own abundance."

"Belief should liberate your life. The reduction of the wild eternity of your life into a harsh divine project is a blasphemy against the call of your soul."

"Expectation is resentment waiting to happen."

"When you look at the different conflicts in your life, you will find that they are placed where the contradictions cross each other, the nail where two intimate, but conflicting realities criss-cross."

Meaning

"The ability to seek and find meaning in life is based more than anything on the capacity to hold paradox and maintain unblushing cognitive dissonance.   The objective world and the subjective world lie one atop the other.   So truth may be lass a matter of either/or than both/and."  Rachel Naomi Remen