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...

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

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

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

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...

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,...

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, ....

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.

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

—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...

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...

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...

They may take you for a fool, promise to shower you with the world, use their canny devastating tongue to manipulate and dominate your mind, but its better to put them bulshit people at arms...

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...

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.(“Introduction”)

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: ‘If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are...

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If...

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...

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.

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.)

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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...

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

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...

…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...

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

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.

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...

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

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,...

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...

[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...

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