Quotes About Absurd

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

God has told us Latter-day Saints that we shall be condemned if we do not enter into that principle of polygamy; and yet I have heard now and then (I am very glad to say that only a low such instances have come under my notice) a brother or a sister say, 'I am a Latter-day Saint, but I do not believe in polygamy.' Oh, what an absurd expression! What an absurd idea! A person might as well say, 'I am a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, but I do not believe in him.'

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.

I pitched Jay Hunt the opening scene (prime minister, middle of the night, he's woken up...). She paused, and then she laughed. She was very intrigued and all that, and then she said, "Does it have to be a pig?" So we went through various options: Could it be a supermarket frozen chicken? A giant wheel of cheese? A pig seemed just the right level of absurd, but then when he walks in and there's actually a pig there, it's awful.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

Can the difficulty of an exam be measured by how many bits of information a student would need to pass it? This may not be so absurd in the encyclopedic subjects but in mathematics it doesn't make any sense since things follow from each other and, in principle, whoever knows the bases knows everything. All of the results of a mathematical theorem are in the axioms of mathematics in embryonic form, aren't they?

I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?

You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, talk about how the U.S. became a national security state after World War II. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. To me it was the most depressing thing, these full-scale military interventions firsthand for a number of years, seeing how quickly we can get involved in another war with very little debate.

...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.

The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. ... I hadn't been to the mosque in like 10 years.

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

The Supreme Court gives corporations the same rights as a human being. It's absurd. You can't do that.

There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.

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.

I have this dream where Little Chino keeps showing up at my door. I would have to kill him even though I was at home trying to have a nice meal with my family. Every time he (Chino) would come to the door, I'm like, 'you again!' But I was myself (not Dexter) in the dream. I'm rolling my eyes in the dream because it is so absurd. It was like, this is ridiculous because you (Chino) are not even real!

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

Every man knows about a particular body part that often seems to have a mind of its own. And every woman knows how absurd men become when that is the body part they allow to influence their choices and decisions.

Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

If you lust after someone and have an absurd and overwhelming need to protect them, then the best way to deal with the situation is to marry the person.

I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I'm a strange a looking creature.

It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.

The self identity of Man is transcultural, and thus cannot have any single point of reference. Pluralism is not synonymous with tolerance of a variety of opinions. Pluralism amounts to the recognition of the unthinkable, the absurd, and up to a limit, intolerable. Reality in itself does not need to be transparent intelligible.

Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.

All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd. Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

In Russia no one is surprised when an official accepts a bribe while at the same time portraying the state as some sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay homage. This all sounds absurd. But for Russians it is completely normal.

Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

There’s no need to glamorize one body type and slam another. We need to stop this absurd hatred towards bodies for being different sizes. It doesn’t help anyone and it’s getting old.

If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.

I was thinking of the word Surrealistic . . . I don't think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” ... It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

It's absurd that we're so quick to criticize Muslims for being fundamentalist when Christians can be just as extreme and fanatical and frightening.

The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth - that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans - is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots - the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.