Best 841 quotes in «irony quotes» category

Sacred cows make great hamburgers.

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

Skype is a wonderful thing. The irony is that you never Skype when you're in the same country as someone.

That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.

Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.

Some people tell me that they like what I do, which is great, of course. The perfect irony and truth is that I need them much more than they need me.

That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

The great irony to Dirk [Gently] is that he sees connections in everything, but the one thing he fails and struggles with most is connecting with other people.

The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

The irony of good customer service is that over time it will bring in more new customers than promotions and price slashing ever did!

The irony of the matter is that the future generations do not have a vote. In effect, we hold their proxy.

The irony of loneliness is that everybody shares it from time to time.

The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.

The irony of prison is that it takes years and years and years to plan an elaborate escape, but all you have is years and years and years.

The irony is that science has served only to show how small human knowledge is.

... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

The process of creativity, absorbing aspects of life and channeling it into something shared or tangible - that's my ideal brain food. The irony to this is that the more creative I have became, the less I listen to of other peoples music.

There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

There is no paradox. There is only irony.

The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!

We didn't understand irony yet in the '80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Truth offends everyone outside its definitions. But the irony of truth is that the greater its potential for offense, the greater its potential for giving hope.

Waiting is a huge part of being a refugee. You're waiting at borders to get across. You're waiting for transportation. The waiting that people do in Turkey to get aboard one of these boats is incredible. And then when they finally do get aboard, it's the last place they want to be. It's harrowing. That is the horrible irony of a refugee's life. You wait and wait for the next step, and when you get to the next step, it's awful. You don't want to be doing it. But you have to. You have to keep moving forward.

Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.

Van Gogh was so under appreciated in his time, he sold only one of his 900 paintings while alive. Posthumously, he became one of the most famous artists of all time and his work is now considered priceless. Oh the irony.

What would we do without irony? Check out your own daily reliance on it, the foul-weather friend who's there for you when nothing else is.

Well, it'd certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony.

With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.

When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.

When it's hardest to pray are usually the times I need to pray the hardest. Not sure if that's irony or common sense.

When or if we "quote, unquote" do not like our work, it is probably because we do not feel safe where we go to work. So when you say, what can we do?, the irony is that the best thing we can do is, well one option, is to quit.

When you know that everything happens for the best, then everything that happens is okay with you. The irony of this is that when everything that happens is okay with you, you set up an energy field of such equanimity and harmony with the universe that the universal law of attraction draws more equanimity and harmony into your life.

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

About two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible "answers all or most of the basic questions of life"—and 28 percent of them admit that they rarely or never read it!

You know the great irony is that people think you have to have money to enjoy fine food, which is a shame.

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.

You should never try irony or self-effacing humour.

Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that ‘that was impossible, because he was dead.’ An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call form a young woman who inquired as to how she might obtain a copy of In Memory Yet Green (the first volume of my autobiography)... There seemed no point in suggesting that she haunt the second bookstores because no one but an idiot ever abandons one of my books after it has come in his possession, and there are few idiots who know enough to buy one of my books in the first place.

A DEAD STATESMAN I could not dig: I dared not rob: Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue And I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? from EPITAPHS OF THE WAR 1914-18

A constant factor in human history is the need to protect oneself. Another factor is the urge to attack someone else.