Top 100 Absurd Life Quotes
#1. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people's words! - it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. Everybody's wondering, how can I arrange the daisies and dandelions of my life into a better bouquet? The answer is, you can't. Life is random. Life is absurd. Life is deadly. The bouquet arranges itself. And it doesn't always bloom or smell good.
Conrad Wesselhoeft
#4. Nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time
Albert Camus
#5. What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus
#6. I wish every day of my life could be this absurd.
Julie Murphy
#7. I am amazed about how everyone wants to know about my love life. They whisper to me, 'Tell me the truth? Is it true?' Who cares? Because we have this job, we are to say to everybody what we do, or with whom we sleep? It's a bit absurd, but that's why everybody lies so much.
Penelope Cruz
#8. I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.
Albert Camus
#9. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.
Angela Carter
#10. You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.
Woody Allen
#11. I think we get stuck in routines so easily that when an absurd moment in life seems to be there for no reason, it wakes you up out of your everyday pattern. You pull back and look at life a little bit wider because of that one weird thing you weren't expecting.
Kurt Braunohler
#12. My inner voice told me at that point,
"you shouldn't be caring about her, just move on! You have to improve your life and live apart from her"
But my absurd heart was pleading,
"you love her, you idiot. She is your life sphere, one more try at least for the sake of kindness.
Qalandar Nawaz
#13. My love is pizza shaped. Won't you have a slice? It's circular, so there's enough to go around.
Dora J. Arod
#14. She would not risk to grow so fond of her home that it was a pain to leave it; she preferred to remain a wayfarer, sauntering through life with a heart keen to detect beauty, and a mind, open and unbiased, ready to laugh at the absurd.
W. Somerset Maugham
#15. If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.
Robert Towne
#16. Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?
Albert Claude
#18. Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing's more absurd.
Peter Mullan
#19. I know how absurd things can get. I've had years where I've had questionable things going on in my life.
Geoff Rickly
#20. We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
Angela Carter
#21. But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
Albert Camus
#22. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Kurt Vonnegut
#23. The advanced organizations of Thinking must teach with their example by cooperating. Every human organization can cooperate in one or another way for the common good. We are a family and we should not miserably torment each other's life because that's absurd.
Samael Aun Weor
#24. I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
Norman Mailer
#25. All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
Adam Gopnik
#26. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on "sinful, absurd, insane war." He saw himself as a victim.
Laura Hillenbrand
#27. We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.
Fernando Pessoa
#28. Once your faith persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares absurd, beware, lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life.
Voltaire
#29. People think they can tame the earth. How absurd! The vanity of human wishes is endless. It is more fun to dance with life.
Frederick Lenz
#30. In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life
Paul Auster
#31. It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
Archibald MacLeish
#32. Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#33. Grief will go
it always does
but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.
Andrew Sean Greer
#34. The law is that you
must live
in the house you have built.
The law is absurd: it is
written down nowhere.
You are uncertain what crime
is, though each life writhing to
elude what it has made
feels like punishment.
Frank Bidart
#35. Life is so absurd now that it is almost impossible to be a satirist in this era.
Fran Lebowitz
#36. I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.
Harvey Fierstein
#37. What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content - all the great things in life are done by discontented people.
Christopher Morley
#38. They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?
even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.
Graham Greene
#39. Life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.
Albert Camus
#40. When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd.
Stephen R. Covey
#41. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
Albert Camus
#43. Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
Salman Rushdie
#45. One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.
Michael Shannon
#46. Death is life's way of telling you, you've been recalled
Josh Stern
#47. I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same.
Tom Rachman
#48. Children and dogs are the messengers of God some of us do not deserve them
Ginnetta Correli
#49. It seem absurd to me that they don't know, haven't felt any change or tremor, even as my life has been completely turned upside down.
Lauren Oliver
#50. Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my
revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of
consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death - and I refuse suicide.
Albert Camus
#51. I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.
Daniil Kharms
#52. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.
Muriel Barbery
#53. When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don't mean - well, maybe I do - laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.
Paul Merton
#54. We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40)
Sheldon B. Kopp
#55. The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#56. No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
Muriel Barbery
#57. To live the practical aspect of life as part of our schooling is formidable, but to adopt living it as our ultimate goal is absurd.
Samael Aun Weor
#58. ... You saved me from a life filled with absurd prejudice and morality and allowed me to grow...
Julie Maroh
#59. The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
Marya Hornbacher
#60. Like space, the soul is not an expression of eternal constancy but of constant change, and this motion has but one purpose: to continue forward, on the narrow ledge, in the absurd hope that you can escape the Darkness.
Erik Valeur
#61. What an absurd amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to find out how things 'really are', when all the time they weren't.
Hugh Prather
#62. I have to live my life. I have a family and I just think it's absurd to let other people influence the way you live.
Britney Spears
#63. The universe had no choice but to create intelligent life so that there would be someone else that could simply laugh at how unbelievably, ridiculously and senselessly huge the universe is and how utterly insignificant the rest of us are.
Ian Strang
#64. I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.
Jeff Tweedy
#65. Maybe everyone is crazy up in these mountains. Maybe the air up here makes you absurd, the scent of flowers and rock and snow. And I've never spoken like that to anyone in my life before. You're my only friend here, you know that? And you're fifty years away.
Jackie French
#67. Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation ... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
Leonard Woolf
#68. For crying out loud, absurd things can happen, none of us is spared." He reached out and gave her a soft pat on the back. "So screw it, lovey. Enjoy every second you've got and stop moping around." - Intomesee
Maha Erwin
#70. Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
Thomas Nagel
#71. I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.
Ang Lee
#72. You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.
Oscar Wilde
#73. If you find life absurd, shouldn't you find death precisely meaningful?
Harry Mulisch
#74. It's okay to be absurd, ridiculous, and downright irrational at times; silliness is sweet syrup that helps us swallow the bitter pills of life.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#75. Helena Bonham Carter and Jeff Bridges waved at me. And, of course, it would be absurd if they were waving at me, so I just stared at them. I stared at both of them. And they were like, 'Alright, fine.'
Jennifer Lawrence
#76. Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end.
Alice Hegan Rice
#77. I love full on, like 65 mph in a handicapped parking spot.
Dark Jar Tin Zoo
#78. He had too much to think about. In the course of his long, useless marches he had sunk deeper and deeper into the tangle of his botched life as into a clump of brambles, and still he had found no meaning or consolation.
Hermann Hesse
#79. There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.
William Wharton
#80. Our thoughts, feelings, desires and actions are being robotized; 'life' is coming to mean feeding apparatuses and being fed by them. In short: Everything is becoming absurd. So where is there room for human freedom?
Vilem Flusser
#81. I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
W. H. Auden
#82. The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
Albert Camus
#83. In the ordinary affairs of life we do not require nor expect demonstrative evidence, because it is inconsistent with the nature of matters of fact, and to insist on its production would be unreasonable and absurd.
Simon Greenleaf
#84. The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.
Anthony Powell
#85. The idea that reason and rationality is somehow separate from and antithetical to ones ' heart' is one of the most absurd theologies I have ever in my life heard."
~R. Alan Woods ("Just Keeping It Real", Copyright 2012)
R. Alan Woods
#86. I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.
Oscar Wilde
#87. No, maybe it wasn't as dramatic as the term circumstances made it sound. Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.
Haruki Murakami
#88. Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
L.P. Hartley
#89. 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.
Tomi Ungerer
#90. The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
Albert Camus
#91. Life was absurd, she thought, bouncing her up and down as if she were a rubber ball. She longed to lose height and roll away into a corner and be forgotten.
Beryl Bainbridge
#92. Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations ... absurdity is the key word ...
Eva Hesse
#93. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?
Voltaire
#94. Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.
Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
Oscar Wilde
#95. I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle ...
Questlove
#96. Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of a long series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second
Joseph Heller
#97. This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
Joyce Carol Oates
#98. What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.
Hermann Hesse
#99. I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
Salman Rushdie
#100. If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
Albert Camus
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