Absurdity Quotes - Page 17

• All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Bible, Prayer, Sublime

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 419), 1895.

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• Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Beautiful, Simple, Reality

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• The vested interests-if we explain the situation by their influence-can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing either upon the public's indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public the danger of its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to danger where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent.

  Norman Angell

  Real, Hate, Home

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• What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

  Agnes Repplier

  Laughter, Dust, Laughing

  Agnes Repplier (1891). “Points of View”, Boston Houghton, Mifflin 1893.

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• Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain.

  Svetlana Alliluyeva

  Beautiful, Meaningful, Nature

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• There is a gentle absurdity about Washington, D.C., and it is easy to develop affection for the place, if you can forget that the consequences of what goes on there are real, whereas what goes on there may not be.

  Linda Ellerbee

  Real, Goes On, May

  Linda Ellerbee (1987). “"And so it goes": adventures in television”, Berkley Pub Group

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• It is like most other ancient books - a mingling of falsehood and truth, of philosophy and folly - all written by men, and most of the men only partially civilized. Some of its laws are good - some infinitely barbarous. None of the miracles related were performed. . . . Take out the absurdities, the miracles, all that pertains to the supernatural - all the cruel and barbaric laws - and to the remainder I have no objection. Neither would I have for it any great admiration.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Philosophy, Book, Men

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1952). “Life and Letters”

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• The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—

  Kim Stanley

  Ideas, Corporations, Citizens

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• The Christian life is a thank-you from beginning to end as we ponder what God has done. What an absurdity to think that we could ever bargain with God, as if there were anything we could put on the table. Nothing we can do would ever earn his favor. Yet all is ours for free. And the cross reveals his willingness to forgive not just once, but over and over and over again. How can we repay such extravagant, generous love? We cannot and need not, and the heart's only answer is gratitude.

  Rebecca Pippert

  Christian, Gratitude, Heart

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• there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

  Charles Bukowski

  Army, Average, Hatred

  Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.148, Canongate Books

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• Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that 'liberals' will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly.

  Unknown

  Taken, Global Warming, Communism

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• I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

  David Lynch

  Doors, Confusion, Darkness

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• Once again the absurdity of my inner thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous.

  Isaac Marion

  Skeletons, Awkward, Skins

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• Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.

  Agnes Repplier

  Giving, Foundation, Elude

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• Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.

  Felix Guattari

  Fashion, Growth, World

  Félix Guattari (1995). “Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm”, p.21, Indiana University Press

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• It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. 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

  Wisdom, Art, Struggle

  "Complete Phil Ochs: Chords of Fame". Book edited by Tom Nolan and Mark Eliot, 1978.

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• It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.

  John Stuart Mill

  Ideas, Effort, Age

  "Collected Works: Principles of political economy".

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• I think that his [Kurt Vonnegut's] appeal, though, will always be chiefly to adolescents. His sense of the world matches that of young people, who feel deeply life's absurdity.

  Michael Dirda

  Thinking, People, World

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.

  David Lynch

  Real, Interesting, Comedy

  "The Surreal Careers of David Lynch". Interview with Meredith Danluck, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 20, 2012.

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• The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication, in the hierarchy of our needs. Humour has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.

  Sara Davidson

  Laughter, Pain, Distance

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• To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

  Denis Diderot

  Miracle, Prove, Contrary

  "The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations". Book by Norbert Gutermam, 1963.

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• To brand man with infamy, and let him free, is an absurdity that peoples our forests with assassins.

  John Philpot Curran

  Men, Liberty, Assassins

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• Well, I knew instantly when I met my wife what a good relationship it was, compared with what I had been doing for the previous 20-odd years. She is my buddy, my partner, my friend. And part of being a comedian is that it's your job to look at life and regurgitate it in a funny way, to point out its absurdities.

  Greg Behrendt

  Jobs, Years, Good Relationship

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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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• When any opinion leads us into absurdities, 'tis certainly false; but 'tis not certain an opinion is false, because 'tis of dangerous consequence.

  David Hume

  Philosophical, Opinion, Certain

  David Hume, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord “Moral Philosophy”, Hackett Publishing

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