Absurdity Quotes

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  • All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

    H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.89, Vintage
  • I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly.

    Real   Thinking   Play  
    Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. November 11, 2010.
  • Do not believe in an absurdity no matter who says it.

    Believe   Matter   Belief  
    "The Essential Rumi". Book translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson. Chapter 18: "The Three Fish", p. 196, 1995.
  • My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity-the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter.

  • What a weak, credulous, incredulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me ... I should prefer the obedience, affections and instinct of a dog before it.

    Dog   Men   Average  
    Michael Faraday, F. James (1999). “The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, Volume 4: 1849-1855”, p.542, IET
  • I've always been literally a lover of the absurd. I think the absurd gives a new dimension to reality and even to common sense. And life, you know, on an everyday basis, is absurd, or may turn out to be absurd. There's no reality without absurdity.

    Interview with Burgin Streetman, www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com. July 1, 2013.
  • Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

  • No men deserve the title of infidels so little as those to whom it has been usually applied; let any of those who renounce Christianity, write fairly down in a book all the absurdities that they believe instead of it, and they will find that it requires more faith to reject Christianity than to embrace it.

    Believe   Book   Writing  
    Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”
  • That's part of the comedy, too, is we do have jokes throughout of hanging a lantern on the absurdity of the world. Like, when BoJack's flying over the neighborhood, you see some houses have swimming pools in the backyard, and what does that mean? Why would there be a swimming pool underwater? But we thought it was funny.

    Mean   Swimming   House  
    Source: www.hitfix.com
  • A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.

    Girl   Silly   Sleep  
    Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.101, Macmillan
  • I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.

  • Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

    H. P. Lovecraft (2010). “Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.139, Lulu.com
  • History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

    Henry Steele Commager, Raymond Henry Muessig (1980). “The study and teaching of history”, Merrill Publishing Company
  • Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

  • Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.

  • Young man, nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.

    Baby   Men   Intelligent  
    Gao Xingjian (2000). “Soul Mountain”
  • I think the fault is more with historicists who have stubbornly failed to develop a good theory of historicity. By simply resting on the feeble laurels of prima facie plausibility ('Jesus existed because everyone said so') and subjective notions of absurdity ('I can't believe Jesus didn't exist!'), the existence of Jesus has largely been taken for granted, even by competent historians who explicitly try to argue for it.

    Jesus   Believe   Taken  
  • As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to to maintain the existence of Nothing.

    Movement   Body   Void  
    Letter 221 to Voltaire on November 25, 1777. "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great", translated by Richard Aldington, 1927.
  • I have noticed that whenever a person gives up his belief in the Word of God because it requires that he should believe a good deal, his unbelief requires him to believe a great deal more. If there be any difficulties in the faith of Christ, they are not one-tenth as great as the absurdities in any system of unbelief which seeks to take its place.

    "The Complete Works of C. H. Spurgeon, Volume 39: Sermons 2289-2341".
  • Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

    Hope   Hero   Giving  
    "Vaclav Havel Dead: The Quotes Of The Man Who 'Lived In Truth'" by Paul Vale, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk. December 18, 2011.
  • Aristotle, in spite of his reputation, is full of absurdities. He says that children should be conceived in the Winter, when the wind is in the North, and that if people marry too young the children will be female. He tells us that the blood of females is blacker than that of males; that the pig is the only animal liable to measles; that an elephant suffering from insomnia should have its shoulders rubbed with salt, olive-oil, and warm water; that women have fewer teeth than men, and so on. Nevertheless, he is considered by the great majority of philosophers a paragon of wisdom.

    Bertrand Russell (1943). “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity”
  • Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

    "Liberals and the New McCarthyism" by Derrick Jensen, www.counterpunch.org. August 10, 2015.
  • It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.

    Bertrand Russell (2016). “Why I Am Not a Christian”, p.60, Lulu Press, Inc
  • I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

    Art   Creativity   People  
  • Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

    Julio Cortazar (2016). “Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much”, p.14, Everyman's Library
  • Mark my words: If Shaun Rogers is healthy, he'll be the NFL defensive player of the year.

    Player   Years   Nfl  
  • I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

    Real   Book   Character  
    Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.47, Profile Books
  • Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.

    James Anthony Froude (2004). “Short Studies on Great Subjects”, p.461, The Minerva Group, Inc.
  • In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical - in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it.

    Art   Taken   Usual  
    "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 28), 2004.
  • No one knows loneliness like an atheist. When an average person feels isolated, he can call through the depths of his soul to One who knows him and sense an answer. An atheist cannot allow himself that luxury, for he has to crush the urge and remind himself of its absurdity.

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