All Quotes By Tag: Absurdity

“Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”

“Playing a fool is the best paid role.”

“Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.”

“Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.”

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

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

“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 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 without evidential value…. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”

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

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”

“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.”

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

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

“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.”