Absurd Quotes - Page 16

• Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.

  Mel Brooks

  Writing, Trying, Actors

  "Mel Brooks Is Always Funny and Often Wise in This 1975 Playboy Interview". Interview with Alex Belth, www.thedailybeast.com. February 16, 2014.

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• One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.

  Michael Shannon

  Drama, Fans, Comedy

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Taste, Inspired, Poet

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (1993). “We: New Edition”, p.24, Penguin

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• If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Use, Recipes, Today

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2865, Delphi Classics

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• I don't personally follow trends; I don't even like the idea of trends. I think it's kind of absurd that you have to change every six months, so I always try and buy things that hopefully I'll like forever, and resonate with me.

  Lily Cole

  Thinking, Ideas, Forever

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• cultivate in young minds an equal love of the good, the beautiful and the absurd; most people's lives are too lead-colored to lose the smallest twinkle of light from a flash of nonsense.

  Fanny Kemble

  Beautiful, Education, Light

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• Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

  Marquis de Sade

  Men, Thinking, Animal

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• No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Song, Kings, Hatred

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.4

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• true emancipation ... will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

  Emma Goldman

  Sex, Men, Two

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.126, 谷月社

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• The Christian religion is derogatory to the Creator in all its articles. It puts the Creator in an inferior point of view, and places the Christian devil above him. It is he, according to the absurd story in Genesis, that outwits the Creator in the Garden Eden, and steals from Him His favorite creature, man, and at last obliges Him to beget a son, and put that son to death, to get man back again; and this the priests of the Christian religion call redemption.

  Thomas Paine

  Christian, Son, Men

  Thomas Paine (2016). “COMMON SENSE (Political Classics Series): Advocating Independence to People in the Thirteen Colonies - Addressed to the Inhabitants of America”, p.598, e-artnow

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• War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.

  Germaine Greer

  War, Winning, Men

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

  Erica Jong

  Sex, Transcendence

  Erica Jong (2007). “Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life”, p.76, Penguin

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• Without discipline and detachment, an actor is an emotional slob, spilling his insides out. This abandonment is having an unfortunate vogue. It is tasteless, formless, absurd. Without containment there is no art. All this vomiting and wheezing and bursting at the seams is no more great acting than the convulsions of raving maniacs.

  Bette Davis

  Art, Emotional, Discipline

  Bette Davis (1962). “The lonely life: an autobiography”, Putnam's

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• I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Thinking, Magic

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• Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it's no longer baseball.

  Barbara Holland

  Sports, Baseball, Games

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• The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Parent, Mind, Reason

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2015). “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, p.190, Booklassic

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• I am hoping for better times. That's how you know us hapless gardeners - by our dirty fingernails and our absurd, unquenchable optimism about next year.

  Mary McGrory

  Dirty, Years, Optimism

  Mary McGrory, Phil Gailey (2006). “The Best of Mary McGrory: A Half-Century of Washington Commentary”, p.161, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Block, Lying, Average

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• The idea that the Lord our God is not a personage of tabernacle is entirely a mistaken notion. He was once a man. Brother Kimball quoted a saying of Joseph the Prophet, that he would not worship a God who had not a Father; and I do not know that he would if be had not a mother; the one would be as absurd as the other. If he had a Father, he was made in his likeness. And if he is our Father we are made after his image and likeness.

  Brigham Young

  Mother, Brother, Father

  Brigham Young (1992). “The Essential Brigham Young”

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• The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.

  Galileo Galilei

  Moving, Errors, Religion

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• If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.

  Willem de Kooning

  Thinking, Noses, Today

  Barbara Hess, Willem De Kooning (2004). “Willem de Kooning, 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse”, p.33, Taschen

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• No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of necessity, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; still it places the existence and personal attributes of the Deity on such grounds as to render doubts absurd and atheism ridiculous.

  John Herschel

  Doubt, Atheism, Deities

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• my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.

  Isabel Allende

  Truth, Husband, Thinking

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• I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Gasoline, Seems, Ifs

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (2014). “Tish: The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• it is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him.

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Imbibing, Prejudice, Educated

  Anna Letitia Barbauld (2001). “Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.337, Broadview Press

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