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Absurdity Quotes

Browse 592 quotes about Absurdity.

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Absurdity Quotes

“If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”

LifePhilosophyDesireOpportunityWomenMoneyYouthOld AgeParentsAbsurdityWishful ThinkingConundrumsGroundhog DaySelf ContradictionTiresias
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“But that’s what they do with everything inconvenient in history— either label it as some freak event, or as irrelevant surface details. The only reason their theories even seem consistent is that they’ve presented a version of history rendered into reductive pap, with more lies of omission than facts. They simply can’t allow themselves to acknowledge that history’s basically nothing but messy absurdities, and that there is no inevitable path to it. Every shape will fit into a round hole if you carve it and hammer it enough.”

HistoryLiesManipulationCensorshipAbsurdityAbsurdities
Book:The Siege of Skyhold
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“—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant? —I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

HumorFunnyReligionFaithAtheismRespectCatholicismSecularAbsurdityProtestantismIllogical Incoherent
Book:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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“God knew man would evolve. People think some of the Old Testament laws are absurd now because we live in a very different culture, a different time period. They had their problems and we have ours. God is constant but man is not, and he foreknew the ever-changing world his people would have to deal with; therefore, and if there is indeed an omniscient God, a Christ-like figure would be our only rational, possible connection to a constant, holy God throughout the evolution of culture and social law. The only answer that makes sense when it comes to relevance regarding religions and time periods is Christ, and the chances are slim that men could have invented it.”

LoveGodLawHumanityCultureJesusChristChangeFreedomEvolutionMoralityBibleJesus ChristConstantScriptureRationalComplexityHolinessConnectionAbsurdityRulesNew TestamentOld TestamentFickleApologeticsProfundityHoliness Of GodForeknowledgeSocial Law
Book:Killosophy
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“We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?”

HumorFunnyAmericaKnowledgeFantasyJourneyBibleMythIceAustraliaSwimFloodAbsurdityAngelsAfricaAsiaSlothOld WorldArkGiraffeThe BibleFableTropicsJumpHippopotamusNoah S ArkHowlingKangarooMuskratPolar BearAntelopeArmadilloOrangutanThe FloodAnteaterAgoutiFlood MythMarmosetPrehensile Tailed MonkeyRacoonVampire Bat
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; that is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for it. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primordial lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy; when it is absent I long for it more intensely than the lover for the object of his love. But I do not believe; this courage I lack.”

LoveGodFaithCourageAbsurdity
Book:Fear and Trembling
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“Basically, control is just an illusion. Far too many factors contribute to everything that happens during a day, even during an hour, a week, a month, a year. And that's the end of the matter. You think you control something because you think you recognize a certain pattern, so you imagine that you’re always gonna achieve the same results with the same actions. Until something unexpected happens.”

Life PhilosophyLife And LivingIllusionControlAbsurdityPatternPatterns In LifeComedy And TragedyControling
Book:Another dance in the flames
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“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son. What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”

ReasonAtheismMadnessAtheistAbsurdityLeap Of FaithDon QuixoteQuixoticUnamunoMiguel De UnamunoFideismBaylePierre Bayle
Author:Martin Gardner
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“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”

TruthEmotionAtheismHonorEvidenceValueAtheistOrthodoxConformityBiasCheatAbsurdityIndoctrinationBrainwashingFalsityReligionists
Book:Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft
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“A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.' (Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.) [Diary entry, February 13 1756]”

HellMysteryArgumentInfiniteExcuseAbsurdityCoverDivinity Of Jesus
Book:Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Adams Papers)
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“The push for diversity can lead to absurd results. Bone marrow donations almost never work unless donor and recipient are the same race, so non-white patients suffer because almost all the people who register as donors are white. In 2008, the National Marrow Donor Program announced that all marrow registries would be required to meet quotas for minority donors. Officials at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise, Idaho said they would have to shut down their donor registry because the demographics of the region made it impossible to find more than a handful of non-white donors. Likewise, the largely white Amity Regional School District that serves the eastern suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut, stood to lose tens of thousands of dollars in federal money because it did not have enough non-white autistic students. The district had no control over who was diagnosed with the condition, but federal officials said a ratio of 38 whites, one black, and one Asian was “significantly disproportionate,” and threatened to withhold $67,000.”

RaceDiversityEqualityAutismAbsurdity
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“Feeling confronted with the absurdity of life may sometimes nurture a personal satisfaction for those who like to set a paramount task or to create a compassionate mission. In so doing, the seal of absurdity becomes less unbearable, while it confers them a ‘Sisyphus’ status that transmutes them into heroes of human resilience. (“Sisyphus on the hill.)”

ResilienceHeroesAbsurdityParamountTaskSisyphusPersonal SatisfactionCompassionate Action
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.”

ExistenceJesus ChristMythologyRidiculousDoctrineAbsurdityNew TestamentHoly GhostWildObsceneDebaucheryFable
Book:The age of reason
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“The only difference between life and death is that the living still have time, but the time to say that one word, to make that one gesture, is running out for them. What gesture, what word, I don't know, a man dies from not having said it, from not having made it, this is what he dies of, not from sickness, and that is why, when dead, he finds it so difficult to accept death. (Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, p 122)”

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Book:The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
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“That was when I finally got to it. This is just the way it was going to be. I could lose fifty pounds and be beautiful. I could write my Book of Books, and have it an underground success. I could even die and be reborn. But no matter what, I would always be as painfully shy and as bewildered by the social talk that brings people together, as shy and as bewildered as I had been since I was a kid. Without knowing what you say to leave without hurting, I pushed back my chair, stood up awkwardly, and silently wandered away. When I awoke I knew, for the first time again, that nothing ever really changes. The shyness is mine, like it or not. It's the best of me and the worst of me, and only the covering it up, the hiding it, and the running from it is not me. And for better or for worse, all of that that is not me is me, too.”

FreedomAnxietySelf AcceptanceCapabilityAbsurdityShyness
Book:If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
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“Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. Condemned to this freedom, it is difficult for a man to face the fact that he feels like a misfit in this life, difficult until he discovers the secret that all men, finally, are misfits.”

Self AcceptanceAbsurdity
Book:If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
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“I did say that to deny the existence of evil spirits, or to deny the existence of the devil, is to deny the truth of the New Testament; and that to deny the existence of these imps of darkness is to contradict the words of Jesus Christ. I did say that if we give up the belief in devils we must give up the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, and we must give up the divinity of Christ. Upon that declaration I stand, because if devils do not exist, then Jesus Christ was mistaken, or we have not in the New Testament a true account of what he said and of what he pretended to do. If the New Testament gives a true account of his words and pretended actions, then he did claim to cast out devils. That was his principal business. That was his certificate of divinity, casting out devils. That authenticated his mission and proved that he was superior to the hosts of darkness. Now, take the devil out of the New Testament, and you also take the veracity of Christ; with that veracity you take the divinity; with that divinity you take the atonement, and when you take the atonement, the great fabric known as Christianity becomes a shapeless ruin. The Christians now claim that Jesus was God. If he was God, of course the devil knew that fact, and yet, according to this account, the devil took the omnipotent God and placed him upon a pinnacle of the temple, and endeavored to induce him to dash himself against the earth… Think of it! The devil – the prince of sharpers – the king of cunning – the master of finesse, trying to bribe God with a grain of sand that belonged to God! Casting out devils was a certificate of divinity. Is there in all the religious literature of the world anything more grossly absurd than this? These devils, according to the Bible, were of various kinds – some could speak and hear, others were deaf and dumb. All could not be cast out in the same way. The deaf and dumb spirits were quite difficult to deal with. St. Mark tells of a gentleman who brought his son to Christ. The boy, it seems, was possessed of a dumb spirit, over which the disciples had no control. “Jesus said unto the spirit: ‘Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee come out of him, and enter no more into him.’” Whereupon, the deaf spirit (having heard what was said) cried out (being dumb) and immediately vacated the premises. The ease with which Christ controlled this deaf and dumb spirit excited the wonder of his disciples, and they asked him privately why they could not cast that spirit out. To whom he replied: “This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Is there a Christian in the whole world who would believe such a story if found in any other book? The trouble is, these pious people shut up their reason, and then open their Bible.”

ReasonCriticismCriticalHypocrisyAbsurdityScholarshipFalsehoods
Author:Robert G. Ingersoll
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“That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.”

BeliefChristianitySacrificeEducatedStoryAbsurdityIndoctrinationCredulityBrainwashingProfaneFableLove Of GodVehemenceExamineEnrapture
Book:The age of reason
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“They may take you for a fool, promise to shower you with the world, use their canny devastating tongue to manipulate and dominate your mind, but its better to put them bulshit people at arms length rather than falling into the arms of infidelity.”

RelationshipPromiseTemptationFakeSatanCheatingInfidelityAbsurdityDistrustFake PeoplePromisesStopPlayboyReality CheckTrickFalsificationConCheating On SomeoneMark My WordsFull StopPhoneyArms Length
Author:Michael Bassey Johnson
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“It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.”

ParadoxAbsurdityFear Of DeathAbsurdismReductionismIncoherenceFear Of UnknownReason For LivingCircular Reasoning
Book:Only the Deplorable
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“Did hope help us to survive, or not? Too many families clung to it all through the war, thus falling into the enemy's trap. But would they have survived without hope? Hope is sometimes unworthy of us, Tamar said, but despair is even worse if it kills the will to act, to confront events, to protest evil, to shout, No! We are not blind, we will not submit! If the absurd exists, we will respond. With reason or with more absurdity—but we'll respond.”

ReasonActionEvilHopeDespairResponseProtestAbsurdity
Book:The Forgotten
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