Oxymorons from Everyday Life. Whether you know it or not, you have probably used some, or at least heard, some oxymorons in your every day life.

• Great Depression

• Pain for pleasure

• Clearly confused

• Act naturally

• Beautifully painful

• Painfully beautiful

• Pretty ugly

• Pretty cruel

• Definitely maybe

• Living dead

• Only choice

• Amazingly awful

• Virtual reality

• Random order

• Original copy

• Happy sad

• Run slowly

• Awfully delicious

• Small crowd

• Light darkness

• Dark snow

• Open secret

• Passive aggressive

• Appear invisible

• Awfully lucky

• Big baby

• Tiny elephant

• Wake up dead

• Growing smaller

• True myth

• Typically odd

• Naturally strange

• Unpopular celebrity

• Sad joy

• Heavy diet

• Noticeable absence

• Quiet presence

• Short wait

• Sweet agony

Sentence Examples with Oxymorons. There are some well-known sentences and quotations that make use of oxymorons. Seeing oxymorons used in context often helps to provide a better idea of how and why they are used.

• ""I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief." - Charles Lamb

• "And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." - Alfred Tennyson

• "Modern dancing is so old fashioned." - Samuel Goldwyn

• "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business." - Henry Ford

• "I am busy doing nothing."

• "A little pain never hurt anyone."

• "I am a deeply superficial person." - Andy Warhol

• "No one goes to that restaurant anymore - It's always too crowded." - Yogi Berra

• "A joke is actually an extremely really serious issue." - Winston Churchill

Oxymoron rarely becomes trite. Their components repulse each other and oppose repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymorons. They show a high degree of the speaker’s emotional involvement in the situation: “awfully pretty”.