Quotes and Sayings about Absurdity
"Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Belief, Absurdity, Opinion)
"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."
- Albert Camus
(Related: Absurdity, Feeling, Man)
"We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity."
- Clark M. Clifford
(Related: War, Dance, Absurdity, Now)
"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
(Related: Work, Fear, Absurdity, Contempt, Novelty)
"Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity."
- Julio Cortazar
(Related: Absurdity, Infinite, Living)
"If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that."
- John Cusack
(Related: Absurdity, Criticism, Satire)
"Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: Death, Absurdity)
"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Absurdity)
"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought."
- Vaclav Havel
(Related: Experience, Absence, Absurdity, Meaning, Words)
"Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity."
- Vaclav Havel
(Related: Life, Hope, Absurdity, Doubt, First, Sense)
"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
(Related: Absurdity, Man)
"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
(Related: Life, Development, Absurdity, Economy, Generations, Importance, Rules, Universe)
"Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood."
- Alexander Herzen
(Related: Absurdity, Childhood, Insanity, Italy)
"The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only."
- Thomas Hobbes
(Related: Absurdity, Living, Man, Privilege)
"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Absurdity, Imitation)
"When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith."
- Junius
(Related: Faith, Absurdity, Doctrine)
"There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen."
- Neil LaBute
(Related: Church, Absurdity, Care, Want)
"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."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Nature, Kiss, Truth, Absurdity, Day, Fish, May, Reason)
"No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing."
- Bernard Levin
(Related: Absurdity)
"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
(Related: Absurdity, Order, Right)
"The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to."
- David Lynch
(Related: Absurdity)
"Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd."
- David Lynch
(Related: Humor, Life, Absurdity, Ignorance, Man, Running)
"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
(Related: Funny, Life, Absurdity, Comedy)
"There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd."
- Frank McCourt
(Related: Absurdity, Poverty)
"The proposition that we should encourage wickedness and violence by exposing one side of the face to blows because we have been beaten on the other is too great an absurdity."
- Thomas Mellon
(Related: Absurdity, Violence, Wickedness)
"A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk."
- Oswald Mosley
(Related: Absurdity, Mind, Risk)
"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
(Related: Truth, Absurdity, Consciousness, Existence, Man, Now)
"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
(Related: Life, Art, Religion, Morality, Absurdity, Defeat, World)
"Annihilation is an absurdity in terms."
- Bernard Palissy
(Related: Absurdity)
"The system of idolatry, invented by modern christianity, far surpasses in absurdity anything that we have ever heard of."
- Orson Pratt
(Related: Christianity, Absurdity)
"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
(Related: War, Truth, Absurdity, Being, Genocide)
"People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization."
- Agnes Repplier
(Related: People, Civilization, Absurdity)
"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
(Related: Age, Absurdity, May)
"In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
(Related: Thought, Absurdity, World)
"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
(Related: Absurdity, Majority, Minority, Slavery, states)
"My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized."
- Martin Short
(Related: Mother, Absurdity, Eccentricity)
"That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another."
- Adlai E. Stevenson
(Related: Wisdom, Absurdity)
"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
(Related: Humor, Character, Absurdity)