Top 100 Absurd Quotes
#1. I've turned arrogance into an artform, where it's so absurd that it becomes comedy. But I've never done anything to hurt anybody or steal from anyone.
John Lydon
#2. He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#3. I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Jon Krakauer
#4. When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
David Byrne
#5. He left the room, unable to watch her standing there, naked with her underwear on her head, laughing at her own absurd madness.
Lisa Genova
#7. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#8. A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married state.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#9. People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
Daniel Kahneman
#10. This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.
Bertrand Russell
#11. I have no clue what a 'hottie' is. To think of myself in those terms is absurd.
Drew Fuller
#12. My last girlfriend was a Showgirl - But we eventually broke up because she wouldn't Tell me anything. Now I'm dating a girl who looks exactly like my grandma, only my girl older.
-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz
James Lee Schmidt
#13. Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.
Dale Carnegie
#14. t is absurd, impolitic, and inhuman to burn a city you mean to occupy
Henry Clinton
#15. Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.
Sasa Stanisic
#16. Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.
Charles De Secondat
#17. What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
Albert Camus
#18. I wish every day of my life could be this absurd.
Julie Murphy
#19. Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
W. Somerset Maugham
#21. The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.
Voltaire
#22. With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.
Richard Courant
#23. I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.
Rene Descartes
#24. The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.
Todd Gitlin
#25. It is absurd if something that is fundamental for humanity and for its survival should in itself be defined as submission. That would mean that society can't carry on without the submission of women.
Kristina Schroder
#26. Revenge is a dish best served in something microwaveable
Josh Stern
#27. Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.
Michael Leunig
#28. We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years-contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence-Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.
Tony Blair
#29. The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.
Nick Clegg
#30. I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.
Thom Mayne
#31. Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.
David Cobley
#32. Stand at the base and look up at 3,000 feet of blankness. It just looks like there's no way you can climb it. That's what you seek as a climber. You want to find something that looks absurd and figure out how to do it.
Tommy Caldwell
#33. If perfection is absurd, why is tragedy common?
John Most
#34. 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
#35. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
Julian Fellowes
#36. Psychoanalysis and dianetics are, on the face of it, both absurd. People are what they are because of causes that go infinitely farther back than infancy of the mother's womb
Clark Ashton Smith
#37. Give a man time enough and he generally finds something absurd to say - at least, that's my experience.
Sydney Horler
#39. There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.
Steve Ballmer
#40. It's us against them, three against countless thousands. But for some reason, and even though it's absurd, at that moment I feel pretty damn good about our odds.
Lauren Oliver
#41. All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.
Janet Malcolm
#42. Faith is continually discarding the absurd, even in the face of the unknown.
Anonymous
#43. In comedy, something may be more absurd, but you have to believe just as much as you do when you're doing drama.
Jenna Elfman
#44. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
#45. It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
Anatole France
#46. Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.
Terence Winter
#47. Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.
Alvin Toffler
#48. Remember the Hottentots?" asked James. "They've become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means, as you know, one who attacks the aunt of a Hottentot potentate.
Alexander McCall Smith
#49. The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
Albert Camus
#50. Blood is thicker than water, and so is diarrhea
Josh Stern
#51. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'
Mark Bradford
#52. All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
Eugene Ionesco
#53. I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.
Albert Camus
#54. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
#55. I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Albert Camus
#56. My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.
Ori Gersht
#57. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#58. How absurd it would be if the further development of the menagerie itself would be held back by self-inflicted wounds!
Anonymous
#59. When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic
Ashlee Vance
#60. I don't believe any person looking for work is fearful of political judgment. Government is a large institution, and if they believe that people are going to get rid of good employees for political reasons, that's absurd.
Jan Brewer
#61. Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows ...
But ... nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#62. I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.
Rachel Maddow
#63. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#64. The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.
Voltaire
#65. 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
#66. Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
Fernando Pessoa
#67. The problem with modernism is that we actually believe, naively and arrogantly, that we can in some way hold any concept and grasp it - and if we cannot, they it is absurd and impossible and therefore nonexistent.
Tobin Wilson
#68. The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it's the logic of love.
Mother Teresa
#69. If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it's just going to be that much funnier. And there's no better example of that than 'Monty Python.'
Seth MacFarlane
#70. The Law of Moronic Ubiquity: Anything in the universe that is generally considered to be idiot-proof will eventually be ruined by an idiot.
Ian Strang
#71. There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.
Charlotte Bronte
#72. I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.
William H Gass
#73. For an absurd moment, I wondered if Ammit devoured the hearts of wicked cows, and if he liked the beefy taste.
- Carter Kane
Rick Riordan
#74. It's really absurd to make ... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it ... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
Willem De Kooning
#75. I have never, not once, gone on television and not received some email or tweet or comment about my hair. Without fail. Isn't that absurd? All it does is make me want to shape my bangs into a sort of middle finger-like sculpture.
Sally Kohn
#76. what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren't they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He'll be in good hands.
Matthew Thomas
#77. If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.
Peter Watts
#78. I walk through the seasons and always the birds
are singing and screaming and keening for love
When you're with me it seems so absurd
that I should be jealous of the jay and the dove.
Maggie Stiefvater
#80. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to keep a secret among three men - particularly if they are married - knows how absurd is the idea of a worldwide secret conspiracy consciously controlling all mankind by its financial power; in real, clear analysis.
Oswald Mosley
#82. All is well, everything is permitted, and nothing is hateful - these are absurd judgments
Albert Camus
#83. I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I'm a strange a looking creature.
Patricia Piccinini
#84. Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
Norton Juster
#85. I think it's absurd to talk about - one time you were outside the system, now you are in the system - no, we fight, the cause of the fight is because the system is bad that we can't get out of it.
Huey Newton
#86. The film business is absurd. Stars don't last very long. It's much more interesting to be a proper actor.
Tom Courtenay
#87. It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.
Charles Darwin
#88. There's always someone we'd love to kill, the trick is to make it not look like an accident
Josh Stern
#89. The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#90. Of course, politicians always say they're just describing their opponents' positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.
James Surowiecki
#91. Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity - old money - was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.
Alexander McCall Smith
#92. I'm gonna go put my earplugs in and practice piano for hours until my fingers bleed. I practice the piano with the focus of Helen Keller - and nothing can distract me from the scent of the music.
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz
Karen Quan
#93. The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.
Harold Prince
#94. A real liberated teacher never asks for a commitment from a student. That's absurd, a person wants to be there and they want to learn everything they can.
Frederick Lenz
#96. So, in conclusion, that is the moral of Heidi. 'Always push invalid chairs off the top of mountains when you get the opportunity.' The end. Excellent advice.
Louise Rennison
#97. Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.
Peter Pronovost
#100. How impossible, how utterly absurd it would be for the disciples
these disciples, such men as these!
to try and become the light of the world! No, they are already the light, and the call has made them so.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
