Absurd Quotes

#1. I had the most absurd nightmare. I was poor and no one liked me.

Dan Aykroyd

#2. Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

Erica Jong

#3. A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

Clive James

#4. Just like existence itself, the dream was complicated and absurd.

Kirk Vonnegut

#5. Madonna reinforces everything absurd and offensive. Desperate womanhood. Madonna is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.

Steven Morrissey

#6. 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

#7. For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

Lysander Spooner

#8. 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

#9. It would probably strike the average politician as absurd to argue that the best way to fix the economy is to stop trying to 'fix it.'

David Harsanyi

#10. As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

Alain De Botton

#11. Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

Robert Webb

#12. These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.

Edmund White

#13. The demand that poetry be immediately understandable to everyone is truly absurd.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

#14. It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.

Leo Strauss

#15. The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#16. If it grieves you," he said, the words caressing my bones, "then I don't think it's absurd at all.

Sarah J. Maas

#17. 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

#18. Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the ocean.

Victor Hugo

#19. Forks are absurd, he scoffed. They insult your food. They make it think you're killing it twice.

Clare B. Dunkle

#20. Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#21. The disposition of the heart is man's, but the preparation of the tongue is the Lord's." [Prov. 16:1, 9, conflated.] It is an absurd folly that miserable men take it upon themselves to act without God, when they cannot even speak except as he wills!

John Calvin

#22. The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.

David Gibson

#23. I like things to be a little bit absurd. But I don't really like playing covers.

Spencer Krug

#24. When I write, I create really absurd situations which become false because I am after the joke.

Sally Phillips

#25. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

Albert Camus

#26. It is absurd to think that a man can believe in Christ, with his heart, and it not have a radical affect on the rest of his life.

Paul Washer

#27. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Roberto Bolano

#28. I realize that something that was growing inside of me for some time ... has matured: and it is the hate of civilization, the absurd image of people moving like locos to the rhythm of that tremendous noise that seems to me like the hateful antithesis of peace.

Jon Lee Anderson

#29. Where is the absolution of religion now? Morality is not negotiable, Hensley. Unleashing a war machine in order to end a war? An absurd Olympics of semantic excuses. Ludicrous.

Hazel Woods

#30. It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

Brennan Manning

#31. I couldn't possibly have any regrets, because I've been very lucky, I've been celebrated, and I've survived. I couldn't have one single regret. That would be absurd.

Don McCullin

#32. It's absurd to be upset by a lack of results when the cause is a lack of activity.

Orrin Woodward

#33. Do not boast because you have beliefs; don't forget that hundreds of absurd beliefs in the history are totally disappeared!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#34. No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of necessity, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; still it places the existence and personal attributes of the Deity on such grounds as to render doubts absurd and atheism ridiculous.

John Herschel

#35. Most things are both true and absurd.

Derek B. Miller

#36. Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It's like counting leaves in a garden,
along with the song-notes of partridges,
and crows.
Sometimes organization
and computation become absurd.

Rumi

#37. Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.

Gore Vidal

#38. What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.

Thomas Mann

#39. The idea of a vegetarian butcher is absurd; but there is something more absurd than this: The idea of an honest politician!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#40. Zachary maneuvered the vehicle down the rutted lane, scanning the corners for signs of danger. Two minutes and they'd be safe. Free. Absurd, giddy joy lit Zachary up. He smiled at Brian. "Jesus, you're a pain in the ass."
Brian grinned. "But I give great head, Sir.

Kari Gregg

#41. Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Virginia Woolf

#42. I always feel kind of absurd and presumptuous presenting a speech.

Moby

#43. And if that's what the American people want, then that's what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd.

Michael Scheuer

#44. There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

George Orwell

#45. As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Noam Chomsky

#46. It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.

Richard Dawkins

#47. Cement in bold relief, - far underground. I lean my elbows on the table, and the lamp lights brightly the newspapers I am fool enough to re-read, and the absurd books.

Arthur Rimbaud

#48. In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Stefan Zweig

#49. The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.

Albert Camus

#50. When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

Craig Venter

#51. So James refusing to sit down was a big deal. Unheard of. Like a black child suddenly saying in an English accent to its mama, "No, madam, I will not retrieve a switch so that you may beat me with it. I believe your request to be not only abusive, but also absurd.

Ernessa T. Carter

#52. Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

Alice Foote MacDougall

#53. There's something I find highly embarrassing about it. As soon as I think I've written something smart, the next day I've got nausea, thinking, "Don't even try to be smart, it's absurd."

Lou Doillon

#54. Most Americans would agree that Plowshares is a Theatre of the Absurd.

Daniel Berrigan

#55. Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

Brian Froud

#56. Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

Seymour Papert

#57. Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible." -Albert Einstein

Diana Mauer

#58. 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

#59. After a lifetime in academia, I have discovered that there is only one requirement for someone to actually believe any of the one hundred most absurd ideas possible for a human mind to conceive: you must be an intellectual. Some ideas are so ridiculous that only a Ph.D. could believe them.

Peter Kreeft

#60. scientifically speaking - you cannot. Accept it. You simply cannot make any nation completely corruption-free. It is only an absurd fairytale. It feels good to talk about it, but it cannot be made a reality.

Abhijit Naskar

#61. That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.

Emil Cioran

#62. The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd.

George H. Smith

#63. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.

Adolf Hitler

#64. Once an absurdity is accepted as truth, it will seem truer the more absurd it is shown to be.

Robert Breault

#65. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe. Embedded in the dream is a hunger for its own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and that grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamoring for payment.

Bruno Schulz

#66. We're forced into absurd lives, against which the only sane response is to wage a guerrilla operation of humour and lust and madness.

Charles Bukowski

#67. It felt possible--though I know this is absurd--that the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed.

Catherine Lacey

#68. Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.

Paul Johnson

#69. The business of courtship is like a tango: absurd and pure embellishment.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#70. In order to act freely, we must act by chance, which is absurd, and what no man will dare to avow.

Jonathan Edwards

#71. For an idea which, at first, does not seem absurd, there is no hope.

Albert Einstein

#72. When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Wayne Thiebaud

#73. The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.

Erwin Schrodinger

#74. A vigilante masquarading as Robin Hood? Or jus a talented thief with a taste fot the absurd?

Tiffany Snow

#75. Attempting to succeed without embracing the tools immediately available for your success is no less absurd than trying to row a boat by drawing only your hands through the water or trying to unscrew a screw using nothing more than your fingernail.

Richie Norton

#76. Shortly after we were in bed I began my story, but made it so absurd, so long, and so tiresome, that, as my intention was, I sent her to sleep, and should have gone to sleep myself - but dark plots are ever wakeful. ("The Story of Prince Barkiarokh")

William Beckford

#77. It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

Rebecca West

#78. Yeah I live of my music. Why does everyone ask me that? Is my music that absurd that nobody could possibly be buying it?

Venetian Snares

#79. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

Christopher Hitchens

#80. With an endless assortment of children and animals living under one roof, there was always some absurd crisis that gave comic relief to my problems.

Sally Jessy Raphael

#81. Celaena put a hand against her chest. How absurd - how utterly absurd and useless - that her heart still beat and Nehemia's didn't

Sarah J. Maas

#82. It was moving, but so absurd that I nearly laughed out loud. I imagined a new line of Hallmark cards: Thank you for not killing my boyfriend, even if it risks killing you.

Hilary Duff

#83. I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

Robertson Davies

#84. The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.

Mason Cooley

#85. There's this absurd situation on a movie set where your trailer's here and the set is here and the lunch tent is here, and you're not allowed to get yourself from these three places.

Olivia Williams

#86. I was once part of a Christmas cabaret. I sang 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.' I tap-danced. I had a ten-gallon hat. It was quite absurd.

Peter Dinklage

#87. Freedom is a difficult burden to bear in an absurd world.

Eugene Webb

#88. 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

#89. Stop saying that! You sound absurd, and I don't even think you mean it. Besides, I'd never marry you," I told him. "I'm sixteen, and you're a slut, and you can't stop saying preposterous things!"
"True," he admitted. He kissed me on the lips and then I closed the door.

Gabrielle Zevin

#90. I was thinking of the word Surrealistic ... I don't think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.

Eva Fuka

#91. It's not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it's all an enemy plot, at least there's someone calling the shots.

James S.A. Corey

#92. But the internet, with its army of anonymous hatemongers, still tried to keep the absurd story alive.

Barkha Dutt

#93. Without sounding negative, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of stand-up. I'm more interested in an absurd kind of theater.

Harland Williams

#94. Punch me." "Don't be absurd." "Come on, punch me, Barrons." "I'm not punching you." "I said, punch
OW!" He decked me.

Karen Marie Moning

#95. ... any hypothesis, however absurd, may be useful in science, if it enables a discoverer to conceive things in a new way; but when it has served this purpose by luck, it is likely to become an obstacle to further advance.

Bertrand Russell

#96. There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

Oliver Goldsmith

#97. 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

#98. She wasn't a victim of fate, she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia - however absurd that might seem.

Paulo Coelho

#99. Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.

Fritjof Capra

#100. I remember when the idea of living to be 40 seemed absurd.

Bruce Cockburn