Top 32 Quotes About The Absurdity Of Life
#1. Even as I think them, the words lose their context, dissolve into grains of absurdity in the vast ocean of day-to-day hunger.
Isaac Marion
#2. I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments- it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it- when one meets death face to face. The Royal Way (1935)
Andre Malraux
#3. We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.
Philip K. Dick
#4. Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it!
Wynton Marsalis
#5. While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers.
Matilda Joslyn Gage
#6. The combination of landing the biggest interview of my career and having a drill in my back reminds me that God only gives us what we can handle and that it helps to have a good sense of humor when we run smack into the absurdity of life.
Robin Roberts
#7. Humor helps us get through life with a modicum of grace. It offers one of the few benign ways of coping with the absurdity of it all.
Diane Keaton
#8. He had the neurotic's partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#9. I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
#10. School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.
Jules Henry
#11. It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.
Phil Ochs
#12. The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
Martin Gardner
#13. Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.
Fernando Pessoa
#14. It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.
Jane Hirshfield
#15. 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
#16. We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#17. 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
#18. Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside.
"I fry mine in butter!" indeed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.
Catherynne M Valente
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works.
Natasha Lyonne
#27. Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing - rather than running from - the utter absurdity of life.
Jenny Lawson
#29. 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
#30. I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#31. 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.
Christopher Hitchens
#32. Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
Albert Camus