Absurd Quotes - Page 8

• 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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• 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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• We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

  Jack Gilbert

  Heart, Brain, Habitat

  Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.293, Knopf

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• The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Understanding, Facts, Unexpected

  Fear and Trembling "Problemata: Preliminary Expectoration" (1843)

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• For an idea which, at first, does not seem absurd, there is no hope.

  Albert Einstein

  Ideas, Doe, Firsts

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• 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.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Confused, Real, Men

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.120, Open Road Media

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• It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  War, Civilization, Citizens

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• But what difference does it make? ... When you're mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.

  James McBride

  Race, Differences, Doe

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• Being Christian without the Church doesn't make sense. That's why the great Paul VI, said that the most absurd dichotomy is loving Christ without the Church. To listen to Christ, but not the Church. To be with Christ, but stay at the margins of the Church. It's not possible. It's an absurd dichotomy.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Church, Said

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• The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.

  N. T. Wright

  Jesus, Generosity, Kingdoms

  N. T. Wright (2004). “Luke for Everyone”, p.80, Westminster John Knox Press

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• To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

  Eugene Ionesco

  World, Ridiculous, Painful

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• Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.

  Félix J. Palma

  Cousin, Attitude, Literary Genre

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• Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Atheist, Law, Atheism

  Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (2015). “The Spirit of Laws”, p.15, Library of Alexandria

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• To talk of comparing the Bible with other "sacred books" so called, such as the Koran...or the book of Mormon, is positively absurd. You might as well compare the sun with a rushlight, or Skiddaw with a molehill, or St. Paul's with an Irish hovel, or the Portland vase with a garden pot, or the Kohinoor diamond with a bit of glass. God seems to have allowed the existence of these pretended revelations, in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of His own Word.

  J. C. Ryle

  Bible, Book, Garden

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• I never asserted such an absurd thing as that things arise without a cause.

  David Hume

  God, Causes, Arise

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• 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.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Disappointment, Revenge, Growth

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• 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.

  Brian Froud

  Wise, Reality, Connections

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• I find the world more absurd now than I did when I was a kid.

  Peter Mullan

  Kids, World

  "Peter Mullan: the swot who lost the plot". Interview with Cath Clarke, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2011.

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• There is nothing so absurd as knowledge spun too fine.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Knowledge, Fine, Spun

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• Every professional golfer has a seperate coach for his drives, for approaches, for putting. In football we have one coach for 15 players. This is absurd.

  Johan Cruijff

  Change, Football, Player

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• The gospel of a God found in broken flesh, humility, and measureless charity has defeated all the old lies, rendered the ancient order visibly insufficient and even slightly absurd, and instilled in us a longing for transcendent love so deep that-if once yielded to-it will never grant us rest anywhere but in Christ.

  David Bentley Hart

  Lying, Humility, Order

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• We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years-contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence-Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.

  Tony Blair

  Years, Iraq, Weapons

  "Tony Blair's Iraq War speech in full: How Labour's leader convinced MPs to vote for era-defining conflict". Article by Dan Bloom, www.mirror.co.uk. July 5, 2016.

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• It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.

  Richard Dawkins

  Law, People, Giving

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