“The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."”

Source: Notes On A Scandal

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 324

《乌克兰宪政危机与政治决断》 ["Ukraine's constitutional crisis and political decisions"] (2004), translated by David Ownby in Rethinking China's Rise, p. 27

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Sentimental Education (1869)
Context: Don't talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean — reality? Some see things black, others blue — the multitude sees them brute-fashion. There is nothing less natural than Michael Angelo; there is nothing more powerful! The anxiety about eternal truth is a mark of contemporary baseness; and art will become, if things go on in that way, a sort of poor joke as much below religion as it is below poetry, and as much below politics as it is below business. You will never reach its end — yes, its end! — which is to cause within us an impersonal exaltation, with petty works, in spite of all your finished execution.

Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages (1904) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/inge/light.toc.html, p. xxx - PDF and epub at Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=Wt4PAAAAYAAJ
Context: True contemplation considers Reality (or Being) in its manifestations as well as in its origin. If this is remembered, there need be no conflict between social morality and the inner life. Eckhart recognises that it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than selfimposed mortifications. "We need not destroy any little good in ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts another." "Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him."
There is much more of the same kind in Eckhart's sermons — as good and sensible doctrine as one could find anywhere.

"¿No es lo mismo que suceda lo que deseamos, que desear lo que suceda? Lo que importa es que nuestra voluntad y los sucesos estén de acuerdo."
La otra aventura, 1968.

As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)
Context: In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.