Top 100 The Absurdity Quotes
#1. You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.
Frederick The Great
#2. Speaking it aloud would reveal the absurdity of it, and he preferred the dream.
Anthony Ryan
#3. When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world
Dean Koontz
#4. 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
#5. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.
Joseph Conrad
#6. 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
#7. The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
Umberto Eco
#8. I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.
Joseph Conrad
#9. 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
#10. What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.
Joseph Roth
#11. Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.
Michel Houellebecq
#12. She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.
Natalie Standiford
#13. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.
Charles Simic
#14. Logic and reasoning, which might show the absurdity of such dreams of bliss and revenge, are to be thrust aside.
Ludwig Von Mises
#15. He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed
a kind of amiable absurdity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#16. Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#17. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#18. I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.
Jason Bateman
#19. 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
#20. But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.
Samuel Johnson
#21. 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
#22. A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.
Hermann Hesse
#23. Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#24. We look at, the absurdity of the system provides us the most material. And that is best served by sort of the theater of it all, you know, which, by the way, thank you both, because it's been helpful.
Jon Stewart
#25. Desire is the absurdity that holds open the infinity of possibility.
Wendy Farley
#26. When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.
Junius
#27. We pedaled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presence, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.
Georges Bataille
#28. It is often idle to attempt to oppose ignorance and absurdity by such feeble instruments as truth and reason, and the wisest managers of mankind have generally been most successful when their plan has been to counteract one folly by means of the influence of another.
Jacob Abbot
#29. I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?
Virginia Woolf
#30. Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.
Frederick Lenz
#31. 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
#32. Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
Vaclav Havel
#33. I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.
James Joyce
#34. I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.
Dave Eggers
#36. To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.
Martin Cruz Smith
#37. There is a gentle absurdity about Washington, D.C., and it is easy to develop affection for the place, if you can forget that the consequences of what goes on there are real, whereas what goes on there may not be.
Linda Ellerbee
#39. sometimes find it difficult to control my indignation in the presence of absurdity." She
Colleen Hoover
#40. The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
Vaclav Havel
#41. Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ...
Joseph Conrad
#42. Truth lies in a small compass! The Aristotelians say, all truth is contained in Aristotle, in one place or another. Galileo makes Simplicius say so, but shows the absurdity of that speech by answering all truth is contained in a lesser compass, namely, in the alphabet.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#43. The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.
Voltaire
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Had this author [Sir W Drummond Academical Questions, chap. iii.], instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have, been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#47. A sphere is made up of not one, but an infinite number of circles; women have diverse gifts, and to say that women's sphere is the family circle is a mathematical absurdity.
Maria Mitchell
#48. There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#49. I am a pillar. I know. I am this broken pillar of this basement.
Amaan Ahmad
#50. We're also irreverent, we have an irreverent attitude towards puppets, as well. So a lot of what we do is we're kind of making fun of the puppets for being puppets, even while we're doing it. And again, that all feeds into the absurdity of this show.
Brian Henson
#51. It is a logical absurdity to equate democracy with freedom in the way that mainstream political philosophers and commentators typically do. A system where individuals and minorities are at the mercy of unconstrained majorities hardly constitutes freedom in any meaningful sense.
Keith Preston
#53. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
Yukio Mishima
#54. And bloody hell. This journeyed far beyond "like," rocketed straight past "fondness," and pushed all the way to the brink of absurdity.
Tessa Dare
#55. When you get down to it, at it's root, Comedy is truth, absurdity, and pain. One of my little mottos is: 'Do you remember the Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown kicked the football and kissed the Little Red Haired Girl? Neither do I.'
Lev Yilmaz
#56. One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#57. I am a hair-lock; I am floating in the gutters to meet the rubber-band.
Amaan Ahmad
#58. That one body should act upon another through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else is so great an absurdity that no man suited to do science ... can ever fall into it, ... Gravity must be caused by an agent ... but whether that agent be material or immaterial I leave to my readers.
Isaac Newton
#59. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
Anonymous
#60. Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.
George MacDonald
#61. Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war.
Jonathan Evison
#62. There was a time, before I wound up here, when I would have thought all this was funny. When I was a member of the world, and not a member of "the club." The world just loves to laugh at the absurdity of insanity. I
Neal Shusterman
#63. As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity-meanwhile we did not think it safe to alter it under the pressure of your hostility.
Thucydides
#64. People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
#65. 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
#66. I agree completely with Secretary Colin Powell, who said today this is an absurdity. And so I think the American people will know it's an absurdity. I have absolutely no concerns about it whatsoever.
Hillary Clinton
#67. To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.
Zig Ziglar
#68. Once again the absurdity of my inner thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous.
Isaac Marion
#69. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
Will Durant
#70. it sometimes happened that you would, in the middle of your exertions, be discouraged by the absurdity of what you were in the process of doing: athletic exertion was vanity. You engaged in it less for the joy of the act than in order to exhaust yourself.
Edouard Leve
#71. For, ultimately, isn't all laughter only the echo of an original revolt against the almighty: a never-ending scream against the absurdity of our exile from him?
D.P. Watt
#72. It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws." In
James S.A. Corey
#73. 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
#74. Yes, I am calling for an intellectual revolution that sweeps away the corruption, absurdity and error, which prevail in morals, customs, traditions, and doctrines.
Ameen Rihani
#75. 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
#76. Now I know exactly what Ben meant when he said he finds it difficult to control his indignation in the presence of absurdity. He thinks my insecurities are absurd, and he took it upon himself to prove that to me.
Colleen Hoover
#77. Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
Samuel Johnson
#78. I didn't think you needed rescuing. I just sometimes find it difficult to control my indignation in the presence of absurdity.
Colleen Hoover
#79. To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.
Iain Sinclair
#80. It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.
John Adams
#81. For any truth, if overdone ... if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.
Vladimir Lenin
#82. 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
#83. All I try to do is as earnestly and as acutely as I can, conceive a character and try to portray this character just honestly. If the humor is within the absurdity and the awfulness of situations, then let it be seen that way.
Patrick Warburton
#84. Yes, when you see for the first time, a great laughter arises in you - the laughter about the whole ridiculousness of your misery, the laughter about the whole foolishness of your problems, the laughter about the whole absurdity of your suffering.
Rajneesh
#85. Imagine learning all the great wisdom of the world just so that you can get a job. What an absurdity. We should be learning all the great wisdom of the world in order to become wise.
Eddie Campbell
#86. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.
Douglas Adams
#87. I love the free entertainment that patients provide. People say and do the most ridiculous things, and I've got a front row seat to the absurdity." - A Colorado travel nurse
Alexandra Robbins
#88. My first visit to West Berlin was in February 1983. The drive through East Berlin, the fact that West Berlin was surrounded by a wall that was more than 100 miles long - the absurdity and intensity of it really knocked me out.
Henry Rollins
#89. the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper.
Hugh Howey
#91. 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
#92. To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority.
William H. Seward
#93. What before seemed a ... frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all.
Bill Hicks
#94. Theology is Anthropology ... [T]he distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#95. His urbane brain cut the most magnificent capers, as, chloroformed by fatigue, it directed its incoming perceptions along the most absurd paths and enjoyed the utter senselessness of its associations.
Gerhard Roth
#96. Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
Voltaire
#97. God, listen to the absurdity within us and raise us from the illusion!
Sorin Cerin
#98. I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.
Aspen Matis
#99. Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.
Timothy Radcliffe
#100. Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
Errol Morris
