Best 153 quotes in «absurdity quotes» category

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

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.

He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.

Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

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.

Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.

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.

If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten.

I feel completely at home in the absurdities of India.

I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning.

Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.

The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.

Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.

The absurd is sin without God.

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

The greater absurdities are, the more strongly they evince the falsity of that supposition from whence they flow.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

...the most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

The reductio ad absurdum is God's favorite argument.

There are those who will find [Albert Camus] notions about absurdity appealing, and others who will be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria, the heat and so on.

There are two things I like stiff and one of them's jelly.

Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

The system of idolatry, invented by modern christianity, far surpasses in absurdity anything that we have ever heard of

To all the rest of his Absurdities, (for vice is always unreasonable,) he adds one more, who expects that Vertue from another which he won't practise himself.

Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment.

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

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.

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others is neither better nor worse than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so.

What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.

We've become to living with absurdity, and that to make people to see how much so, I had to ratchet up the insanity.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.

Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises in individual, when displayed ego and self portrayed images are not recognised by anyone.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

Although he was a young and virile man at 37, he was not inexhaustible. In addition to food and drink, he had better lay in a couple thousand tablets of viagra. The drug would probably remain potent if he vacuum packed the pills in groups of 10 and kept them in a freezer. That would work unless civilization completely collapsed and power companies were unable to function. Fortunately, Jim had a propane-powered backup generator with half a dozen tanks of fuel already on hand. If Henry added to the propane supply, and he used the generator only for essential maintenance like keeping the viagra freezer operating in warm weather, he would be happy here on the farm for a looong, looong time. Unless, even now, dead Jim was out there in the generator shed sabotaging the machinery.

And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?

A partir du moment où elle est reconnue, l'absurdité est une passion, la plus déchirante de toutes.

Din clipa în care a fost cunosută,absurditatea devine o pasiune,cea mai sfîșietoare din toate.

Epicuro,” Spain interrupted with a firmness that made us all turn, “you don’t want humanity to fail your Great Test because the lot of us, who should be out there shepherding, were stuck here, riveted, listening to you arguing theodicy with Voltaire.

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.' (Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.) [Diary entry, February 13 1756]

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.

As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing. [Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777]