Absurd Quotes - Page 34

• The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: "anima"-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Men, Empathy, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

  Oscar Wilde

  Mother, America, Insulting

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “Epigrams and Aphorisms”, p.55, BoD – Books on Demand

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid

  Giuseppe Verdi

  Art, Stupid, Taken

  30 Copy quote

• If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like
  prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There
  is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of
  this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we
  have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

  William Lane Craig

  Atheist, Mean, Men

  "Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics". Book by William Lane Craig, 1994.

  78 Copy quote

  Show source

• If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Independent, Dying

  4 Copy quote

• Madonna reinforces everything absurd and offensive. Desperate womanhood. Madonna is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.

  Steven Morrissey

  Offensive, Desperate, Prostitution

  4 Copy quote

• Three cheers for the war. Three cheers for Italy's war and three cheers for war in general. Peace is hence absurd or rather a pause in war.

  Benito Mussolini

  Cheer, War, Three

  "The Menace of Fascism" by John Strachey, (p. 65), 1933.

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• America has no north, no south, no east, no west. The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north and a south. We are one and undivided.

  Sam Watkins

  War, America, History

  46 Copy quote

• Nothing can be believed unless it is first understood; and that for any one to preach to others that which either he has not understood nor they have understood is absurd.

  Peter Abelard

  Science, Firsts, Belief

  46 Copy quote

• No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate [burn] their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.

  Henry George

  Faith, Mother, Children

  9 Copy quote

• Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.

  Peter Pronovost

  Data, Missing, Quality

  7 Copy quote

• Having members of the Bush administration actually sit down and discuss counter terrorism with the very countries that support terrorists is absurd.

  Frank Lautenberg

  Country, Support, Down And

  4 Copy quote

• But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

  Helen Garner

  Men, Insulting, Violence

  5 Copy quote

• The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

  W. G. Sebald

  Past, Way, Normal

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “Vertigo”, p.106, New Directions Publishing

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Love Is, Insane

  6 Copy quote

• Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Country, Thinking, People

  Thomas Bernhard (2010). “The Loser: A Novel”, p.28, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

  Thomas Nagel

  Inspirational, Life, Believe

  "Mortal questions". Book by Thomas Nagel, 1979.

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

  Paul Davies

  Order, Law, People

  33 Copy quote

• It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

  Beryl Markham

  Animal, Men, Elephants

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is going to sound completely absurd, but I do sometimes feel like the enjoyment of an awards ceremony or the pride in the finished article hasn't ever surpassed the joy of doing the work, of making it. The doing it is really the bit I'm there for.

  Chiwetel Ejiofor

  Pride, Awards, Joy

  61 Copy quote

• To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow.

  Metrodorus of Chios

  Space, World, Earth

  52 Copy quote

• There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour ... What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.

  Hendrik Verwoerd

  Children, Teaching, Opportunity

  324 Copy quote

• I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Law, Letters, Obsolete

  5 Copy quote

• The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent...The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

  Philip Gourevitch

  Political, Insane, Information

  9 Copy quote

• Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.

  Murray Rothbard

  Hierarchy, Ruthless, Behinds

  Murray Rothbard (2009). “Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 8”, Ludwig von Mises Institute

  26 Copy quote

  Show source