Absurd Quotes - Page 36

• To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.

  Will Tuttle

  Prayer, Failure, Hypocrite

  Will Tuttle (2007). “The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony”, p.197, Lantern Books

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• It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.

  Seth Grahame-Smith

  Believe, Book, Reading

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• A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

  Randall Jarrell

  Writing, Successful, People

  "Mid-Century American Poets". Book by John Ciardi, "Answers to Questions" (p. 171), 1950.

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• The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.

  Otto Weininger

  Men, Giving, Insanity

  "Sex and Character" by Otto Weininger, (pp. 122-123), 1906.

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• Inquire, investigate, doubt yourself and others. To find truth, you must not cling to your convictions; if you are sure of the immediate, you will never reach the ultimate. Your idea that you were born and that you will die is absurd – both logic and experience contradict it.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Ideas, Doubt, Logic

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• It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

  Rebecca West

  Errors, Literature, Monkeys

  "Rebecca West, The Art of Fiction No. 65". Interview with Marina Warner, The Paris Review, No. 79, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1981.

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• The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being - that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart - the difference between theory and experience.

  Martin Esslin

  Ideas, Differences, Intuition

  Martin Esslin (2009). “The Theatre of the Absurd”, p.25, Vintage

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• There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Stranger, Reason, Should

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• The fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers. The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

  Nick Hanauer

  Law, Ideas, Fundamentals

  Source: gawker.com

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• It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

  Helena Norberg-Hodge

  Believe, Culture, Earth

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• Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those things.

  David Bowick

  Hate, Mad, Facts

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• The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Believe, Fall, Mean

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• One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.

  Walter Lippmann

  Dream, Illumination, Might

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Enemy, Desire, Demand

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo”, p.45, Vintage

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• Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Mean, Passion, Heart

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2009). “Emile: Or, On Education”, p.384, The Floating Press

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• Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Vanity, Goal

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Impossible Things, Mystic, Isolated

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.271, 1982.

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• Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Noble, Killing

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p. 289, 1982.

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• Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Writing, Two

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

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• It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist. ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

  Charles Darwin

  Atheist, Men, Doubt

  "Darwin's complex loss of faith" by Nick Spencer, www.theguardian.com. September 17, 2009.

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• For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth.

  Lysander Spooner

  Truth, Government, Vices

  Lysander Spooner (2006). “Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty”, p.2, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• It is absurd to suppose, if this is God's world, that men must always be selfish barbarians.

  Charles Fletcher Dole

  Selfish, Men, World

  Charles Fletcher Dole (1897). “The Coming People”

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• The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite .

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  War, Men, Tasks

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997). “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays”, p.11, Macmillan

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• All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there's a word that drives me mad it's "energy" used in a nonsensical way-don't get me started!

  Stephen Fry

  Reading, People, Mad

  "Stephen Fry — Last Chance to Think". Interview with Kylie Sturgess, www.csicop.org. 2010.

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• The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Men, Doe, Merit

  Vilfredo Pareto (1971). “Manual of political economy”, Augustus m Kelley Pubs

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