Best 153 quotes in «absurdity quotes» category

The executioner's argument was that you couldn't cut of something's head unless there was a trunk to sever it from. He'd never done anything like that in his time of life, and wasn't going to start now. The King's argument was that anything that had a head, could be beheaded, and you weren't to talk nonsense. The Queen's argument was that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time, she'd have everyone beheaded all round. It was this last argument that had everyone looking so nervous and uncomfortable.

Suddenly he stopped as if rooted outside the doors of one house; before his eyes an inexplicable phenomenon occurred: a carriage stopped at the entrance; the door opened; a gentleman in a uniform jumped out, hunching over, and ran up the stairs. What was Kovalev's horror as well as amazement when he recognized him as his own nose!

Terror washed through him, and then was replaced by a sense of cosmic absurdity.

That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.

The feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

The jury returned with a verdict of "Don't ask me, I wasn't there," and was excused.

The jusitce is blind. Turn the surveillance cameras off!

The Law of Chaos: Any activity or event that seems to lie beyond the boundaries of possibility will usually be the first thing to occur.

The Law of Logical Insanity: Anything that can easily be explained using common sense and rational thought is probably too simplistic and therefore false and untrue.

The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.

Then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said: "You're shaking.

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant? —I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

The push for diversity can lead to absurd results. Bone marrow donations almost never work unless donor and recipient are the same race, so non-white patients suffer because almost all the people who register as donors are white. In 2008, the National Marrow Donor Program announced that all marrow registries would be required to meet quotas for minority donors. Officials at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise, Idaho said they would have to shut down their donor registry because the demographics of the region made it impossible to find more than a handful of non-white donors. Likewise, the largely white Amity Regional School District that serves the eastern suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut, stood to lose tens of thousands of dollars in federal money because it did not have enough non-white autistic students. The district had no control over who was diagnosed with the condition, but federal officials said a ratio of 38 whites, one black, and one Asian was “significantly disproportionate,” and threatened to withhold $67,000.

That is to say, believing that God writes books is bad enough, but because the cosmos is a perverse cornucopia, spouting endless tragedies and absurdities, the theist must go one step beyond even that foolish affirmation; she must cast aside all pretense of being a dignified, sentient rebel against the cosmic horrors, and perpetrate a bonus bit of nonsense: she must pretend to care about her manifestly fictional deity while actively ignoring most of what this deity is supposed to have miraculously penetrated the present world to tell her. Having resigned herself to the undead god’s tyranny, with no thought of resistance, the theist utterly abandons herself to the sway of mindless forces, heaping one absurdity upon another until the local process of complexification is complete: natural forces, including the biases and fallacies to which we’re prone,produce a fantasy world in the theist’s mind, a mental map that bears as little relation to natural reality as one cosmos would bear to another in the multiverse. The theist’s worldview, complete with anthropomorphisms, delusions, fallacies, and so forth, stands as an emergent level of reality, like scum floating to the surface which nevertheless boasts patterns of putrefaction that can be divined by an intrepid anthropologist.

The way earlier societies seem obviously absurd and cruel gives a kind of horror at the forces that must be at work in our own, but suggests that any society must have dramatically satisfying and dangerous conventions; and people can put up with almost any political conditions, either because they are lazy or because they are ambitious.

The Law of Moronic Ubiquity: Anything in the universe that is generally considered to be idiot-proof will eventually be ruined by an idiot.

The worm was yet to come - to say nothing of the thirty thousand bicycles.

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

They may take you for a fool, promise to shower you with the world, use their canny devastating tongue to manipulate and dominate your mind, but its better to put them bulshit people at arms length rather than falling into the arms of infidelity.

Viver, naturalmente, nunca é fácil. Continuamos fazendo os gestos que a existência impõe por muitos motivos, o primeiro dos quais é o costume. Morrer por vontade própria supõe que se reconheceu, mesmo instintivamente, o caráter ridículo desse costume, a ausência de qualquer motivo profundo para viver, o caráter insensato da agitação cotidiana e a inutilidade do sofrimento. Qual é então o sentimento incalculável que priva o espírito do sono necessário para a vida? Um mundo que se pode explicar, mesmo com raciocínios errôneos, é um mundo familiar. Mas num universo repentinamente privado de ilusões e de luzes, pelo contrário, o homem se sente um estrangeiro. É um exílio sem solução, porque está privado das lembranças de uma pátria perdida ou da esperança de uma terra prometida. Esse divórcio entre o homem e sua vida, o ator e seu cenário é propriamente o sentimento do absurdo. E como todos os homens sadios já pensaram no seu próprio suicídio, pode-se reconhecer, sem maiores explicações, que há um laço direto entre tal sentimento e a aspiração ao nada.

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.

This is a silly place. Half the world has no clean water. The other half has so much that they pooh in it.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such.

To-do list : to-do list!

We humans are like squirrels who spend all summer gathering and hoarding nuts and when winter comes can't remember where they are.

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, . . . I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended.

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.

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?

Women there is no perfect man! Don't waste your money on make-up!

You better put an S on your forehead, cause your name must be stupid.

You may not be interested in absurdity," she said firmly, "but absurdity is interested in you.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

Your only chance of survival, if you are severely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! Love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that's what men, normally, call love.

Absurdity is the one thing love can't stand; it can overlook anything else, -- coldness, or weakness, or viciousness, -- but just be ridiculous and that's the end of it!

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

A sense of absurdity interferes with my efforts to appear venerable.

A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hardhearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian.

Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity.

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.

For any truth, if “overdone” (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its actual applicability, can be reduced to an absurdity, and is even bound to become an absurdity under these conditions.

Do not sanction an absurdity.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

False reasoners are often best confuted by giving them the full swing of their own absurdities.

Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.

Any manwhose love of horses isstronger thanhis fear of being an absurdity is all right with me.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.