Absurdity Quotes

The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.

Benjamin Franklin

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

Thomas Hobbes

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

Le suicide est une solution ? l'absurde.

Albert Camus

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

Albert Camus

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

George Orwell

l'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel. Il sent en lui son désir de bonheur et de raison. L'absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.

Albert Camus

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Archibald MacLeish

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

G. K. Chesterton

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean even if it did build muscle whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

Christopher Hitchens

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Arthur Schopenhauer

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Albert Camus

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

Vaclav Havel