#absurdity

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #absurdity




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


Carl Sagan


#humor #reason #sagan #war #humor

I can't go on, I'll go on.


Samuel Beckett


#drama #existentialism #fiction #humor #nihilism

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.


F. Scott Fitzgerald


#life #business

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...


Joseph Conrad


#imagination #literary-theories #imagination

All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.


John Podhoretz


#campaigns #change #earth #him #hope

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.


Christopher Hitchens


#courage #empathy #men #sensitivity #women

I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.


Jason Bateman


#audience #because #comedy #enjoy #everyman

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.


Vaclav Havel


#absurdity #deeper #experience #in other words #meaning

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 me 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


#conundrums #desire #groundhog-day #life #money

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.


Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


#belief #life #life