Top 100 The Absurdity Quotes
#1. Speaking it aloud would reveal the absurdity of it, and he preferred the dream.
Anthony Ryan
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Logic and reasoning, which might show the absurdity of such dreams of bliss and revenge, are to be thrust aside.
Ludwig Von Mises
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Desire is the absurdity that holds open the infinity of possibility.
Wendy Farley
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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.
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper.
Hugh Howey
#31. What before seemed a ... frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all.
Bill Hicks
#32. God, listen to the absurdity within us and raise us from the illusion!
Sorin Cerin
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.
Thomas Hobbes
#36. They prised open the door in the morning. The beatific expression on his face was exactly what one would find in a temple deity or the just dead - an unsmiling smile. The absurdity and humour was there if one could just see it, the question and answer staring one in the face
Srividya Srinivasan
#37. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don't like can be overwhelming.
Allie Brosh
#38. It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.
Christoph Waltz
#39. Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
Annie Dillard
#40. 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
#41. Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt.
Phil Ochs
#42. Instead of talking about cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we must end the absurdity of corporations not paying a nickel in federal income taxes.
Bernie Sanders
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Give me a defiant poseur over a trendsetter any day. The poseur understands the absurdity of trends
Dean Cavanagh
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality.
Leila Sales
#56. Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.
Tanya Huff
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.
Thomas Hobbes
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Marriage needed the absurdity of values.
Manu Joseph
#65. Another name? Oh, certainly. And when the Faceless Men come to kill me, I'll say, 'No, you have the wrong man, I'm a different dwarf with a hideous facial scar.' Both Lannisters laughed at the absurdity of it all. (Tyrion Lannister)
George R R Martin
#66. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
David C. Coates
#67. I always see the absurdity in most situations. It's my experience of how life works.
Natasha Lyonne
#68. Paul grasped humor only imperfectly, but supposed he could see the absurdity of it from a human perspective. "Yes, and you are a very charming bipedal bladder of fluid," he said. "Nicest thing anyone's said to me all day!
Jim Cleaveland
#70. There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
W. Somerset Maugham
#71. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful
Albert Camus
#72. When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.
Louis Sullivan
#73. Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
Brent Weeks
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
#77. Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
#78. In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
Winston Churchill
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I can't afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.
Joseph Conrad
#84. What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.
Joseph Roth
#85. 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
#86. She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.
Natalie Standiford
#87. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.
Charles Simic
#88. He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed
a kind of amiable absurdity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
#95. When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.
Junius
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.
Frederick Lenz
#100. 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
