Absurd Quotes - Page 10

• W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.

  Vernon Reid

  America, Rocks, Hypocrisy

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• The absurd, with its rupture of rationality-of conventional ways of seeing the world-is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world.

  William Kentridge

  Understanding, World, Rupture

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• The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.

  Immanuel Kant

  Believe, Wish

  "A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources" by H. L. Mencken, (p. 955), 1946.

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• Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

  Leonard Woolf

  Self, Musical, Records

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• There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.

  Steve Ballmer

  Technology, Long, Economy

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• I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.

  James Hillman

  Character, Night, Animal

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• The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

  Julie Mehretu

  Space, Political, Understanding

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• Deep, dark unearthly black. I hadn't told anyone yet, but the color kept streaking across my mind at the oddest moments. When it did, my skin shivered pleasantly, and it was as if I could feel the color tracing a finger tenderly along my jaw, tipping my chin up to face it directly. I knew it was absurd to think a color would come to life, but once or twice, I was sure I'd caught a flash of something more substantial behind the color. A pair of eyes. The way they studied me cut to the heart.

  Becca Fitzpatrick

  Eye, Heart, Cutting

  Becca Fitzpatrick (2013). “The Complete Hush, Hush Saga: includes Hush, Hush; Crescendo; Silence and Finale”, p.578, Simon and Schuster

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• When somebody asks, 'Whats the answer to all of these questions?' that's absurd. There is no answer, there are answers, along the way.

  Jacque Fresco

  Answers, Way, Asks

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• We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our find schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Yards, Looks

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.88, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.

  Jarvis Cocker

  Self, Encounters, Levels

  "You can snort as much cocaine as you want and have as many beautiful women as you want ... but it doesn't make you happy" by Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. November 23, 2008.

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• I've always been literally a lover of the absurd. I think the absurd gives a new dimension to reality and even to common sense. And life, you know, on an everyday basis, is absurd, or may turn out to be absurd. There's no reality without absurdity.

  Tomi Ungerer

  Reality, Thinking, Common Sense

  Interview with Burgin Streetman, www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com. July 1, 2013.

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• They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd.

  Al Sharpton

  Gay, Constitution, Adultery

  "Sharpton Pledges Fight Against Homophobia Among Blacks" by Jamal Watson, New York Sun, August 3, 2005.

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• Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

  May Sarton

  Joy, Pencils

  May Sarton (2014). “Collected Poems: 1930–1993”, p.98, Open Road Media

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• Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work.

  Frederick Herzberg

  Healthy, Indifference, Response

  "Punished by Rewards: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes". Book by Alfie Kohn, p. 205, 1999.

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• To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.

  Michael Novak

  Lying, War, Fall

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• Ladies playing cricket? Absurd. Just like a man trying to knit

  Len Hutton

  Men, Trying, Cricket

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• It is absurd to believe that soldiers who cannot be made to wear the proper uniform can be induced to move forward in battle. Officers who fail to perform their duty by correcting small violations and in enforcing proper conduct are incapable of leading.

  George S. Patton

  Military, Believe, Moving

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• By one means or another, the swiftest method of rejection of the holy prophets has been to find a pretext, however false or absurd, to dismiss the man so that his message could also be dismissed.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Mean, Men, Holy Prophet

  Spencer W. Kimball (1982). “The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

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• He has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: the courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in dialog situations, absence of hypocrisy, a complete absence of grandeur in the conduct of his personal life. He has never been driven by blind self-assertion to make absurd decisions.

  Alice Miller

  Self, Hypocrisy, Giving

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• I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.

  Rachel Maddow

  People, Sound, National Security

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• As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality -- where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Struggle, Luxury, Doe

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• To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God.

  Victor Hugo

  Crush, Stars, Fall

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• The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Doe, Meals, Would Be

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)”, p.4138, e-artnow

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• I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

  Walter Lippmann

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Walter Lippmann “Force and Ideas: The Early Writings”, Transaction Publishers

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