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 ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation...

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 suicide.

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 really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we’re bored, we don’t know how to look around ourselves,...

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, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to...

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 exactly,” Mom said. “God doesn’t mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It’s sort of...

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 not think. There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever happened. What did he do?...

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 absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors…

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 words, it’s much more exalted.

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 people shut up their reason, and then open their Bible.

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 that it’s no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a...

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. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the ‘tragic sense of life’, from this despair, faith comes to the rescue,...

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

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...

Life is sweet absurdity, Sir Wizard. Laugh your way through it.

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, . . . I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the ‘Good Book’ was ended.

That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also...

HAMM:Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!CLOV (violently):That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.(Pause.)

Christianity would be helpless without the idea of free will and the idea offree will would be helpless without incongruity.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

I can cross the boundless ocean just to save you, I cannot eat or sleep without you, I can take you on a journey to heaven and show you to the angels. All these are fake and absurd promises; Be sincere, walk up to your lover and say, honestly, darling, i can only do the...

As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.[Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777]

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives...

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back...

I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it’s, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In...