Absurdity Quotes - Page 6

• Forget being the best of anything. That's the fruit of the action, and you do the work -they say- for the doing, not the fruit. You can never really know how it's gonna turn out in the world but you know if you enjoy doing it. And ideas start flowing and you start getting, you know, excited about stuff. Then you're having a great time in the doing and that's what it's all about. If you don't enjoy the doing, then do something else.

  David Lynch

  Creativity, Ideas, World

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• The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology.

  Ayn Rand

  Country, One Day, Degrees

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.8, Penguin

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• The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Writing

  Sherwood Anderson (1969). “Sherwood Anderson's memoirs: a critical edition”

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• Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

  Barack Obama

  Religious, Kings, Men

  "Leith Anderson, Russell Moore, Other Faith Leaders Ask Obama to Reject Gov't Report Saying Religious Freedom Is Code for Discrimination" by Anugrah Kumar, www.christianpost.com. October 12, 2016.

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• School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

  Jules Henry

  Education, School, Envy

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• Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it.

  Frederick The Great

  Europe, Imagination, Fiction

  Attributed to Frederick II of Prussia in "Civilization: The West and the Rest", Book by Niall Ferguson, 2011.

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• Nima Shirazi is a rare voice of rational analysis and political insight that provides an eloquent counter to the pervasive absurdities that make up popular political discourse.

  Susan Abulhawa

  Voice, Political, Analysis

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• While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Mother, Men, Strange

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• I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow - you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

  David Lynch

  Children, Distance, Creativity

  Interview with Kristine McKenna, www.thecityofabsurdity.com. March 08, 1992.

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• That morning each of us found a breaking point. Not only a physical barrier, but a point where determination, stamina and duty clashed and were overcome not so much by pain but by absurdity.

  Stefan Kieszling

  Morning, Determination, Pain

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• I have noticed that whenever a person gives up his belief in the Word of God because it requires that he should believe a good deal, his unbelief requires him to believe a great deal more. If there be any difficulties in the faith of Christ, they are not one-tenth as great as the absurdities in any system of unbelief which seeks to take its place.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Giving Up, Believe, Belief

  "The Complete Works of C. H. Spurgeon, Volume 39: Sermons 2289-2341".

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• But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness.

  David Lynch

  Book, Creativity, Understanding

  David Lynch (2007). “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity: 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.28, Penguin

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• The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Truth, Knowledge, Math

  Thomas Hobbes (2016). “The Essential Leviathan: A Modernized Edition”, p.20, Hackett Publishing

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• I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

  David Lynch

  Art, Creativity, People

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• One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe.

  Thomas Paine

  Believe, Thinking, Scripture

  Thomas Paine (1861). “The Age of Reason, etc”, p.91

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• I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.

  Edmund Burke

  Victory, Wish, Noble

  Mary Leadbeater, Edmund Burke, Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench, George Crabbe (1862). “The Leadbeater Papers: Unpublished letters of Edmund Burke, and the correspondence of Mrs. Richard Trench and Rev. George Crabbe”, p.126

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• Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." "Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

  Voltaire

  Christian, Believe, Men

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• What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Feelings, Sense Of Humor, Ability

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• The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  World, Earth, Absurd

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2011). “The Brothers Karamazov (卡拉馬助夫兄弟們)”, p.730, Hyweb Technology Co. Ltd.

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• One of my central approaches to writing speculative fiction is to take an absurd situation, which we presently feel is normal, and then push it to an even further absurdity. It's only in this light that we can see the reflection of the disturbing state of our present-day affairs.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Writing, Reflection, Light

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

  Daniel Dennett

  School, Ideas, Disrespect

  "Liberals and the New McCarthyism" by Derrick Jensen, www.counterpunch.org. August 10, 2015.

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• The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.

  John Constable

  Fashion, Art, May

  John Constable (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of John Constable (Illustrated)”, p.590, Delphi Classics

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• If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods--and that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?

  Jonathan Hull

  Powerful, Love Is, Magic

  Jonathan Hull (2001). “Losing Julia”, Island Books

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• One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.

  Thomas Sowell

  Lying, Skills, Political

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• I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce - my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions - the absurdity of the thing.

  Billy Connolly

  Body, Crosses, Malfunction

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