Absurd Quotes - Page 17

• All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.

  Janet Malcolm

  Ashes, Analysis, Mouths

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• Of all the systems - if indeed a bundle of contradictions and absurdities may be called a system - which human nature in its moments of intoxication has produced, that which men have contrived with a view to forming the minds and regulating the conduct of women, is perhaps the most completely absurd.

  Mary Hays

  Men, Views, Mind

  Mary Hays (1974). “Appeal to the men of Great Britain in behalf of women”, Dissertations-G

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• prayer must be, in its own nature, absurd and impertinent.

  Mary Collyer

  Prayer

  Mary Collyer (1749). “Felicia To Charlotte: Being Letters From A Young Lady in the Country, To Her Friend in Town : Containing A Series of the Most Interesting Events, Interspersed with Moral Reflections ...”, p.59

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• Good food is a celebration of life, and it seems absurd to me that in celebrating life we should take life. That is why I don't eat flesh. I see no need for killing.

  Anna Thomas

  Food, Animal, Needs

  Anna Thomas (1972). “The Vegetarian Epicure”, Vintage

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• A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

  Kathryn Schulz

  Religious, Memories, Thinking

  "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error". Book by Kathryn Schultz, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

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• The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

  Zoltan Istvan

  Dream, Comfort, Spirit

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• I have to live my life. I have a family and I just think it's absurd to let other people influence the way you live.

  Britney Spears

  Thinking, People, Way

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• Life is so absurd now that it is almost impossible to be a satirist in this era.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Eras, Impossible, Life Is

  Source: mrbellersneighborhood.com

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• Killing for ideas is the most dangerous form of killing at all. Being willing to die for your ideas rather than your country is another concept, but dying for an idea, like in religion, is absurd.

  Mick Jagger

  Country, Ideas, Dying

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• The mountains are in labour, the birth will be an absurd little mouse.

  Horace

  Mountain, Littles, Birth

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• It's absurd to warme one in his armour.

  George Herbert

  Armour

  George Herbert (1874). “The Complete Works of George Herbert: Prose”, p.353

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• God knows the times I have found myself in absurd situations.

  Brandon Lee

  Found, Situation, God Knows

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• It's become uncool to play other people's songs, and that's absurd. It has got to change. It's the reason why everything's so mediocre.

  Steven Van Zandt

  Song, Play, People

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• To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. ... In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant.

  Heinrich Rohrer

  Ideas, Competition, Progress

  "Science - A Part of Our Future". Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Vol. 19, 193, 1994.

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• I have often come across convinced adepts of Greek mythology who mock our faith under the pretext that we do not say anything else to those whom we instruct in divine things, but merely command them to believe.
  They accuse the apostles of ignorance, labelling them barbarians, because they do not have the subtlety of eloquence; and they say that the cult of martyrs is ridiculous, considering it completely absurd for the living to seek assistance from the dead.

  Theodoret

  Believe, Ignorance, Greek

  "Theodoret of Cyrus" (The Early Church Fathers) by Istvan Pasztori Kupan, Routledge, (p. 86), 2006.

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• The demand that poetry be immediately understandable to everyone is truly absurd.

  Mieczyslaw Jastrun

  Demand, Poetry Is

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• It is clearly absurd that it should be possible for a woman to qualify as a saint with direct access to the Almighty, while she may not qualify as a curate.

  Mary Stocks, Baroness Stocks

  Religion, Saint, May

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• But this inestimable privilege was soon violated: with the knowledge of truth the emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity. Constantine easily believed that the heretics, who presumed to dispute his opinions or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation.

  Edward Gibbon

  Men, History, Catholic

  Edward Gibbon (1837). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.292

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• People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Hate, Loss, Ideas

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• This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Might, Lost, Trash

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• I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

  Robertson Davies

  Book, Simple, Fiction

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• The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and to be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

  Emma Goldman

  Mother, Sex, Men

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.126, 谷月社

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• Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Illustration, Order

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.68, Vintage

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• The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.

  Thomas Woods

  Self, Doe, Rendering

  Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Kevin R. C. Gutzman (2008). “Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush”, p.92, Crown Forum

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• How absurd that our students tuck their cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPods into their backpacks when they enter a classroom and pull out a tattered textbook.

  Eli Broad

  Phones, Cells, Ipads

  Eli Broad (2012). “The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking”, p.141, John Wiley & Sons

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