Top 100 The Absurd Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Most Americans would agree that Plowshares is a Theatre of the Absurd.
Daniel Berrigan
#8. Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible." -Albert Einstein
Diana Mauer
#9. 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
#11. Sometimes the cultures phobia of religion borders on the absurd.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#12. The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.
Clarence Darrow
#13. Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.
Laurie Foos
#14. 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
#15. But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#17. People have some really crazy ideas about love, friends and relationships. They have the absurd belief that their friends, children, family, lovers and companions can make them happy.
Bryant McGill
#18. The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare
Martin Esslin
#19. Faith prefers the absurd to the plausible.
Mason Cooley
#20. Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#21. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
#22. When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.
Stanley Crouch
#23. A political race today, even a primary, is $150 million. The whole political system has become obscene in terms of the absurd amount of money that is required to compete. Just put it on ESPN and call it a sporting event.
Mike Huckabee
#24. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. - ALBERT CAMUS
Anonymous
#25. The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
Albert Camus
#26. 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
#27. Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'
Lauren Willig
#28. There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.
Albert Camus
#29. Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#31. Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine. His head trails a wake through the galaxy of the absurd.
Rene Char
#32. So the merman cannot belong to Agnes unless, after having made the infinite movement, the movement of repentance, he makes still one more movement by virtue of the absurd.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. I just don't know when we all decided that if it doesn't fit in a Happy Meal box, it's not for kids. I remember flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, and I grew up watching Monty Python. I think that kids can handle a lot more than we give them credit for, especially when it comes to the absurd.
Gore Verbinski
#34. The absurd is a shadow cast over everything we do and even if we try to live life as if it has meaning as if there are reasons for doing things the absurd will linger in the back of our minds as a nagging doubt that perhaps there is no point.
Albert Camus
#35. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime ... it is itself an absurd phenomenon.
Albert Camus
#36. There's no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.
William Wharton
#37. The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.
Edward Abbey
#38. What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?
Frida Kahlo
#39. I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.
Jonathan Shapiro
#40. I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.
Thomas Szasz
#41. Yes, I am here. And you are lucky to be here too after all the absurd things you've done since you left home.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#42. The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.
Alva Myrdal
#43. For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Albert Camus
#44. I love the absurd - kind of absurdist comedy, absurd things in life.
Rose McGowan
#45. I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me.
John Barton
#46. The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.
Jesse Ball
#47. The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
Rudolf Arnheim
#48. When he heard about the bench, his heart began to beat horribly. A moment later he pulled himself together and, with shame, drove away the absurd thought.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#49. I've heard too many times where people say that I'm this ultra-serious guy. In truth, I've got an extremely absurd sense of humor. I thrive on the absurd - I love it.
Phil Anselmo
#50. The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#51. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Albert Camus
#52. I am not haunted by memories of Vietnam. But I must admit I never thought we would again witness in my lifetime the specter of politicians picking targets and ruling out offensive measures in the absurd hope that the enemy would respond to our restraint by yielding to our demands.
John McCain
#53. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#54. Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#55. The absurd and legendary devil is the enigma of the Church.
L. Frank Baum
#56. But the internet, with its army of anonymous hatemongers, still tried to keep the absurd story alive.
Barkha Dutt
#57. The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.
Mason Cooley
#58. A vigilante masquarading as Robin Hood? Or jus a talented thief with a taste fot the absurd?
Tiffany Snow
#59. America has no north, no south, no east, no west. The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north and a south. We are one and undivided.
Sam Watkins
#60. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann
#61. Slowly I became possessed by the absurd conviction that everything was possible, and it seemed to me that even those deserted streets and that hostile wind smelled of hope.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#62. We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Lawrence Durrell
#63. It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'
Albert Camus
#64. Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
Pope John Paul II
#65. I think good comedy is a commitment to the absurd in that the situation for the actors should be virtually played like a drama.
Peter Billingsley
#66. Like space, the soul is not an expression of eternal constancy but of constant change, and this motion has but one purpose: to continue forward, on the narrow ledge, in the absurd hope that you can escape the Darkness.
Erik Valeur
#68. All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
Albert Camus
#69. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
Albert Camus
#70. The other thing I like, in fact, several months ago I introduced a bill to end the absurd catch and release policy where our government has been giving tickets, essentially, to people who enter illegally and then letting them go and show up of their own volition.
John Doolittle
#71. Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.
Leo Tolstoy
#72. Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.
Maxwell Maltz
#73. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system.
Blaise Cendrars
#74. 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
#75. I like the absurd and the surreal: the Coen brothers, Bunuel, Kubrick.
Kevin McCloud
#76. My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.
Lord Byron
#77. Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge.
Henry Miller
#78. Only those who attempt the absurd ... will achieve the impossible. I think ... I think it's in my basement ... Let me go upstairs and check.
M.C. Escher
#79. I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.
Malcolm Boyd
#80. All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Iris Murdoch
#81. If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#82. A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.
Asger Jorn
#83. But he is now so accustomed to seeing that vertical strip of light when he opens his eyes in the morning that he has reached the absurd conclusion that without it he would be trapped forever in the shadows of sleep, in the darkness of his own body and the darkness of the world.
Jose Saramago
#84. On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can't be more like it is one of the reasons it's admirable.
Carter Burwell
#85. Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational
Margaret Maclure
#86. Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.
Vartan Gregorian
#88. I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.
David
#89. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
#90. Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. 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
#92. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
Albert Camus
#93. Faith is continually discarding the absurd, even in the face of the unknown.
Anonymous
#94. I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Albert Camus
#95. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Albert Camus
#96. 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
#97. The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
Albert Camus
#98. 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
#99. The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#100. When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic
Ashlee Vance
