Top 100 The Absurd Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.
Michael Leunig
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Faith is continually discarding the absurd, even in the face of the unknown.
Anonymous
#29. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
#30. Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel.
Terence Winter
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
Albert Camus
#34. 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
#35. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
#36. I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Albert Camus
#37. My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.
Ori Gersht
#38. 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
#39. How absurd it would be if the further development of the menagerie itself would be held back by self-inflicted wounds!
Anonymous
#40. When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic
Ashlee Vance
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.
Voltaire
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it's the logic of love.
Mother Teresa
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The film business is absurd. Stars don't last very long. It's much more interesting to be a proper actor.
Tom Courtenay
#57. 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
#58. There's always someone we'd love to kill, the trick is to make it not look like an accident
Josh Stern
#59. The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#66. The existential hero strives for authenticity even when it is costly, lives meaningfully in the midst of a banal, absurd world, and confronts rather than rejecting reality regardless of the personal cost.
Jason Dias
#67. You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ.
Woody Allen
#68. Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#69. The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.
Albert Camus
#70. So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd
Dan Simmons
#71. 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
#72. Unextinguished laughter shakes the skies.
Homer
#73. I scraped my heel against this black claw: I wanted to peel off some of the bark. For no reason at all, out of defiance, to make the bare pink appear absurd on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world. But, when I drew my heel back, I saw that the bark was still black.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#74. How absurd it was that in all seven kingdoms, the weakest and most vulnerable of people - girls, women - went unarmed and were taught nothing of fighting, while the strong were trained to the highest reaches of their skill.
Kristin Cashore
#75. God could not have chosen anyone less qualified, or more of a sinner, than myself. And so, for this wonderful work He intends to perform through us, He selected me- for God always chooses the weak and the absurd, and those who count for nothing.
Francis Of Assisi
#76. I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
Georges Duhamel
#77. 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
#78. The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.
Vilfredo Pareto
#79. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
Arthur Miller
#80. Honey, you're the one who stopped sleeping with me, OK?
It'll be a year come April 20th.
I remember the date exactly, because it was Hitler's birthday
Woody Allen
#81. By one means or another, the swiftest method of rejection of the holy prophets has been to find a pretext, however false or absurd, to dismiss the man so that his message could also be dismissed.
Spencer W. Kimball
#82. I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know ... I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.
Woody Allen
#83. I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.
P.G. Wodehouse
#84. Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#85. 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
#86. Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
#87. Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: 'No'. And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realised that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission".
Albert Camus
#88. Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck
Julie Orringer
#89. Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#90. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable
Albert Camus
#91. I came home one night, some month ago, and I went to the closet in my bedroom ... and a moth ate my sports jacket.
He was laying on the floor, nauseous, y'know.
Woody Allen
#92. 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
#93. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
Albert Camus
#94. The humans are dead (I'm glad they are dead)
The humans are dead (I noticed, they're dead)
We used poisonous gases (With traces of lead)
And we poisoned their asses (Actually, their lungs)
Binary solo!
0000001, 00000011
000000111, 00001111!
Flight Of The Conchords
#95. Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.
J.B. Priestley
#96. The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.
Denis Diderot
#97. We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.
George Saunders
#98. You see, I've heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived.
Albert Camus
#99. The idea that somehow or other you can deal with all the problems in the world by banning a particular religious group from entering the U.S.A. is offensive and absurd.
Jeremy Corbyn
#100. Pedantry, in the common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books and a total ignorance of men.
Henry MacKenzie
