Absurd Quotes - Page 27

• You are walking in a desert.You hear a bird singing.As absurd as it may seem for a bird to be pending in the desert,you are obligated to make it a tree.That's poem

  Kiki Dimoula

  Bird, Tree, Singing

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• Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Ignorance, Hands, Circles

  "Nausea". Book by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938.

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• It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

  Robert Silverberg

  Believe, Writing, Men

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

  Albert Camus

  Happiness, Son, Two

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.122, Vintage

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• There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Giving, Age, Goes On

  Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

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• To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

  Charles Darwin

  Distance, Believe, Eye

  "The Collapse of Evolution". Book by Scott Huse, p. 73, 1996.

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• I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

  Jon Krakauer

  College, Years, Parent

  "Into the Wild". Adventure, Biography, Drama, 2007.

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• Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

  Terry Pratchett

  Good Luck, Science, Magic

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• They call themselves Sephardic Jews, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that some come from the Muslim world and some come from the Christian world. I would call them the Muslim Jews and the Christian Jews. It sounds absurd but you know what I mean.

  Bernard Lewis

  Christian, Mean, Important

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• Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Confusion, Anxiety, Feelings

  Maxwell Maltz (2015). “Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded”, p.58, Penguin

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• It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism - as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.

  James Bovard

  Government, People, Political

  James Bovard (2015). “Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen”, p.222, Macmillan

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• To say that everything in the bible is to be believed , simply because it is found in that volume, is equally absurd and pernicious... To discard a portion of scripture is not necessarily to reject the truth, but may be the highest evidence that one can give of his love of truth.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Giving, May, His Love

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• I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.

  Reverend Malcolm Boyd

  Theatre, Example, Lines

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• Not only does the psyche exist, but it is existence itself. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical...We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.

  Carl Jung

  Psychics, Doe, Prejudice

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• And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again.

  Robert Browning

  Book, Ignorance, Soul

  'Cleon' (1855) l. 57

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• It is usually a mistake to impose an individual's taste on a room that has its own....style. Conversely, to put very fine pieces of furniture in a room that is without architectural distinction is as absurd as wearing a tiara with a bathing suit.

  Nancy Lancaster

  Mistake, Design, Style

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• Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

  William Butler Yeats

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Chaos, Planets, Centre

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mind, Chaos, Splendid

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• A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

  Clive James

  Thinking, Dallas, Classic

  Clive James (1983). “Glued to the box: television criticism from the Observer, 1979-82”, Jonathan Cape

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• Men of Oregon, I invite you to become students of your events. Running, one might say, is basically an absurd past-time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find meaning, in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd past-time: life.

  Bill Bowerman

  Running, Team, Men

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• The reason it is difficult is that we have been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories, and few people will risk public ridicule by advocating them. On the other hand, to endorse the accidental view is absurd. Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.

  G. Edward Griffin

  Views, Hands, People

  "The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve". Book by G. Edward Griffin, 1995.

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• The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they're human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.

  Jon Ronson

  People, Way, Ridiculous

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• Al Bernstein has seen cable television sports grow up. In 30 Years/30 Undeniable Truths he looks at his time in the industry through a prism that is unique to him. This book gives the reader an insight into the sometimes absurd world of television sports. There is a 31st undeniable truth: Al Bernstein is a truly funny man.

  Barry Tompkins

  Sports, Growing Up, Book

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• What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Attention, Valuable

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1853). “The Spectator”, p.243

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