Quotes Tagged "absurdity"

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

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.

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.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

Epicuro,” Spain interrupted with a firmness that made us all turn, “you don’t want humanity to fail your Great Test because the lot of us, who should be out there shepherding, were stuck here, riveted, listening to you arguing theodicy with Voltaire.

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.