Top 100 Quotes About Absurdity
#1. Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.
John Locke
#2. What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.
Agatha Christie
#3. It is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles.
Thomas Hobbes
#4. I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.
Edmund Burke
#5. In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.
Anthony Marra
#6. [ ... ] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity
Carl Von Clausewitz
#7. The pristine virtue is nothing but absolute absurdity, utter obscurity and sheer imbecility.
Chandrashekar
#8. The only absurdity in which I find equally immense compassion and morality is Christianity - though the compassion is outlandish and the morality is blemished.
Kedar Joshi
#9. Would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#10. There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#12. The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Marcel Proust
#13. The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
Jane Hirshfield
#14. Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.
N. T. Wright
#15. 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 maintain the existence of Nothing.
[Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777]
Frederick The Great
#16. I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders. Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.
Davey Havok
#17. In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of this world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#18. Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.
Frances Wright
#19. An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.
Joseph Addison
#20. How many hours can one person spend locked in a bathroom, looking at skin, hair, eyes. Feeling fingers, toes. And the absurdity of a belly button?
Mary E. Pearson
#22. He was ashamed of baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#23. There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
Roland Barthes
#25. There is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
Charles Bukowski
#26. Art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. A sense of absurdity interferes with my efforts to appear venerable.
Mason Cooley
#29. If we are looking to employ logic to infer a deity, we fall into absurdity.
Andrew Furst
#30. Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.
Elbert Hubbard
#31. I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#32. Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
Odysseus Elytis
#33. That morning each of us found a breaking point. Not only a physical barrier, but a point where determination, stamina and duty clashed and were overcome not so much by pain but by absurdity.
Stefan Kieszling
#34. I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life's essential absurdity.
Stephen King
#35. I manage a toast to the Christmas tree
and one to the sweet absurdity
in the miracle of the verb to be.
Lucky you, lucky me.
Miller Williams
#36. The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.
George Sand
#37. He expressed unconditional agreement with the uselessness and absurdity of the word 'fatherland'; he agreed with the idea that religion was harmful;33 but he loudly and firmly asserted that boots were inferior to Pushkin,34
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#38. To measure prices by a currency that is called by the same names as gold, but that is really inferior in value to gold, and then - because those prices are nominally higher than gold prices - to say that they are inflated, relatively to gold, is a perfect absurdity.
Lysander Spooner
#39. Desire is this absurdity that holds open the infinity of possibility. Ever optimistic, ever resourceful, desire tells us what it sees as it speeds ahead on its divine wings. What we cannot see, desire describes, and then it goads us to travel on until we have given birth to Joy.
Wendy Farley
#40. 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.
Thomas Huxley
#41. I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.
Israel Horovitz
#43. The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
Mary McCarthy
#44. He tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity.
Christopher Moore
#45. Absurdity is the one thing love can't stand; it can overlook anything else,
coldness, or weakness, or viciousness,
but just be ridiculous and that's the end of it!
Margaret Deland
#47. My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.
Martin Short
#48. Give me a defiant poseur over a trendsetter any day. The poseur understands the absurdity of trends
Dean Cavanagh
#49. In love, everything is true, everything is false; it is the one subject on which one cannot express an absurdity.
Nicolas Chamfort
#50. The real absurdity is that to love is to suffer, but the reverse isn't always true ...
John Geddes
#51. Dignity, virtue, affability, and bearing," Mrs. Lytton recited over and over, turning it into a nursery rhyme.
Georgiana would glance at the glass, checking her dignified bearing and affable expression.
Olivia would sing back to her mother: "Debility, vanity, absurdity, and ... brainlessness!
Eloisa James
#53. 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 absurdity.
Vaclav Havel
#54. We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity.
Clark M. Clifford
#55. Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.
Thomas Nagel
#56. There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.
Neil LaBute
#57. Despite the absurdity and the silliness and the triviality of the entire campaign experience, there is also something, as non-cynical as this sounds, kind of uplifting and strange about watching democracy unfold.
Michael Hastings
#58. Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.
Alexander Herzen
#59. I'm sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men [sic] who made war as you study an absurdity. They'll be shocked, just as today we're shocked with cannibalism.
Golda Meir
#60. They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#61. Once an absurdity is accepted as truth, it will seem truer the more absurd it is shown to be.
Robert Breault
#62. To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
Denis Diderot
#63. Why, without a sense of humour, you are blind to so much in the world. To human nature. To the absurdity of so much that we say and do.
Steven Erikson
#64. The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#65. One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
#66. But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality.
Leila Sales
#67. From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.
Albert Camus
#68. I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.
David Lynch
#69. Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.
Tanya Huff
#70. I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.
Michael Dirda
#71. I can never be an atheist, because God is our celestial hope for our existential worries, our cosmic chance against absurdity! MMI
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#72. Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
Agnes Repplier
#73. The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
George Orwell
#74. I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce - my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions - the absurdity of the thing.
Billy Connolly
#75. I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all.
David Cronenberg
#76. As you know it is a comedy so everything is a little bit pushed. That's what's funny about this kind of movie is you can laugh about the absurdity, and the bad side of life.
Sophie Marceau
#77. She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.
Kamel Daoud
#78. 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.
Jeffrey Lang
#79. I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.
Thomas Hobbes
#80. It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one's own absurdity. LXXX
W. Somerset Maugham
#81. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Everything in the Universe denies 'nothing'. To suggest an ending is the one absurdity -The Man in Black from Stephen King's The Gunslinger
Stephen King
#82. The fairy tale belongs to the poor ... I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.
Erik Christian Haugaard
#83. I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same - except I now recognized my invisibility. So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd
Ralph Ellison
#84. Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying - and you have to keep trying - eventually you will come across the next item on your list.
Jonathan Nolan
#85. If I didn't laugh, absurdity would get the best of me.
Marty Rubin
#86. What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
#87. Art can't decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it's a tragic, bloody farce.
Don Winslow
#88. Leaps of innovation require a bravery that borders on absurdity.
Astro Teller
#89. Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that's how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience.
Dave Abrams
#90. The laughter that happens when people are truth-telling and showing up and being real - I call that "knowing laughter." That's what happens between people when we recognize the absurdity of the belief that we're alone in anything.
Brene Brown
#91. Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
D.H. Lawrence
#92. What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?
Vaclav Havel
#93. Against a broken heart, even absurdity falters.
Because words fall away.
A dialogue of silence.
That deafens.
Steven Erikson
#94. It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a few men and saying to them, "Make laws regulating all our spheres of activity, although not one of you knows anything about them!
Pyotr Kropotkin
#95. We put authors on such a pedestal, and it's a moment that humanizes the whole thing, and lends an absurdity to what otherwise is a "please sit with your hands on your lap" kind of event.
Mac Barnett
#96. All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.
John Podhoretz
#98. 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
#99. Had anyone suggested at the time that it would not be the Egypt of the pharaohs that would survive and change the moral landscape of the world, but instead a group of Hebrew slaves, it would have seemed the ultimate absurdity.
Sheila Heti
#100. The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.
Thomas Hobbes
