The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.