When two seemingly conflicting thoughts have made it to proverb or aphorism status, usually, in the ambivalence of life, both are true. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations

Mr. [Thomas] Gray the poet has often observed to me that if a man were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself it must in whatever hands prove a most useful and entertaining one. – Horace Walpole, quoted in Walpoliana, 1800

The truest sayings are paradoxical. – Laozi, as quoted in The Wisdom of the East: The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ, transla

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember. – John Mason Brown