I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and...

Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.

HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn’t know.HAMM:What? What didn’t you know?NAGG:That it’d be you.(Pause.)

But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why…” she hesitated.”Why one makes such a fuss about things,” Anthony suggested. “All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self...

Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.

His urbane brain cut the most magnificent capers, as, chloroformed by fatigue, it directed its incoming perceptions along the most absurd paths and enjoyed the utter senselessness of its associations.

Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. “I fry mine in butter!” indeed.

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

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

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own...

It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this...

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely...

This is a silly place. Half the world has no clean water. The other half has so much that they pooh in it.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above...

In Britain, a cup of tea is the answer to every problem.Fallen off your bicycle? Nice cup of tea.Your house has been destroyed by a meteorite? Nice cup of tea and a biscuit.Your entire family...

…it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of...

People have some really crazy ideas about love, friends and relationships. They have the absurd belief that their friends, children, family, lovers and companions can make them happy.

It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility “faith”!(Institutio III.2.3)

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag’d to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their...

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse...

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we...

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo,...

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

[Mom] said she didn’t want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. “Isn’t that a sin?” I asked Mom. “Not...

I enjoy poetry where I can talk as bizarre as I please, but theology or philosophy, I always respect the truth by taking it a step further.

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity

Le suicide est une solution à l’absurde.

Both precious and absurd, this tightrope of existence we walk in both directions; strung only on a rhythm of heartbeats across a void

If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did...

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises in individual, when displayed ego and self portrayed images are not recognised by anyone.

To believe the ridiculous requires the strictest logic.

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it’s probably because your heart is talking.

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an...

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without...

This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Is there a Christian in the whole world who would believe such a story if found in any other book?The trouble is, these pious...

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

If I didn’t laugh, absurdity would get the best of me.

Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and...

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.

The concept of absurdity is something I’m attracted to.

What lies between where you are and where you want to be sometimes requires traveling through the Twilight Zone.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits…

At my last birthday party I had fun and really let myself go. Literally. I opened the cages where I keep my clones and I let myself go, all 333 versions of myself.

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all....