Philosophy Of The Absurd Quotes & Sayings

Now observe; if the artist does not understand the sacredness of the truth of Impression, and supposes that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy compose something prettier than he saw and mightier than he felt, it is all over with him. Every such attempt at composition will be utterly abortive, and end in something that is neither true nor fanciful; something geographically useless, and intellectually absurd. — John Ruskin

Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the heart of existentialist philosophy is the premise that all existence is absurd. Life has no meaning and death is the ultimate absurdity, But in the course of this absurd existence, man is forced to make choices, even if those choices may be about absurd issues. But man abhors this freedom of choice, a condition called 'existential angst'. Until we reach a time when most of our life lies behind us, we second guess ourselves interminably. 'What if I had done done this?' 'What if I had done that?' 'Could I have learnt from what others before me have done?' But that is a futile endeavor. It is just not possible to pass on the burden of decision-making to someone else, nor is it possible to learn from other's experiences. Every man has to make choices by falling back on his own experience. In short, man is condemned to be free. — Duvvuri Subbarao

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.
— Thomas Nagel

The concept of a Miracle, that is, an event that takes place somehow beyond the scope of functional Reality, is absurd. . . There cannot be a true miracle. There can only be events that appear miraculous when you don't really understand How Life Works. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side. — Oliver Goldsmith

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

[Men] prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth [to the enlightenment of their souls]. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth."
"No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it."
"And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?"
Here she laughs. "You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing. — Iain Pears

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. — Kurt Vonnegut

Every one knows how absurd it would be to infer from what a man is or does when in a private station, that he will be and do exactly the like when a despot on a throne; where the bad parts of his human nature, instead of being restrained and kept in subordination by every circumstance of his life and by every person surrounding him, are courted by all persons, and ministered to by all circumstances. — John Stuart Mill

The most dangerous aspect of religion is its tendency to glorify the absurd and justify the abhorrent. — Stifyn Emrys

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If any religion allows you to torture animals or sacrifice an animal for the sake of procuring god's favor, then that is not a religion. It is an absurd practice of inhumanity. — Debasish Mridha

It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our
revolutions, the supreme good does not, in reality, coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest
of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist. We are far from the gentle
savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract. In the sound and fury of the passing
centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of
others. Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being
destroyed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the
eyes of something that no longer exists. In fact, it is here the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits. — Albert Camus

But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General — G.K. Chesterton

There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century. — G.K. Chesterton

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano. — Randall Jarrell

The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

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. — Elmina Drake Slenker

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

Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule - of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,
negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my
light. — Albert Camus

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.
I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt. — Arthur Schopenhauer

At one point, I began to think that I had a divine doorman. Lenny was the most unlikely incarnation of God I could imagine, and yet, I kept drifting irresistibly towards this absurd conclusion. Despite my staunchly atheistic inclinations, I couldn't explain Lenny any other way. But eventually I came to my senses and realized that he was just one of those game show freaks with an encyclopedic memory. That didn't make him God, did it? Would God proclaim so regularly how much he likes Patsy's Pizza? — Zack Love

Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. — Bertrand Russell

In the years since The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich has sharpened his satire, and Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips
but not on every page. He expands his narrative to accommodate shrewd philosophy and inventive portraiture, a very amusing disquisition on Soviet latrines and a number of outlandish plot developments. In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurd. — Ken Kalfus

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. — Albert Camus

There is nothing inherently evil in the process of making money,
and the notion is illogical, but that is one of the underlying tenets
in our present education system. We are taught from an early age
that making money is hard and that those who make lots of money
are morally suspect. American culture studies programs at some of
the nation's leading universities have even gone so far as to teach the
absurd and illogical notion that the rich became rich because they
enjoy privilege earned on the backs of African slaves. Minority
millionaires like entrepreneur Herman Cain, Earl Graves, Sr., and
Reginald F. Lewis prove the utter nonsense of this notion, yet this
is the illogical Progressive philosophy that has permeated our education
system. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. — G.K. Chesterton

Religion of the masses is absurd. But so is their science! — Raheel Farooq

And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion. — Brian Henson

To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils. — Adam Smith

Religious warriors are not an anomaly. It is a mistake to classify believers of particular religious and dogmatic religionlike ideologies into two groups, moderate versus extremist. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism. Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things. Nowhere do people tolerate attacks on their person, their family, their country - or their creation myth. In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality - including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth - the faith - of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else's sacred creation myth is "religious bigotry." It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat. — Edward O. Wilson

Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism. — Jacques Barzun

Albert Camus introduced his philosophy of the absurd, in which man searches for meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world. In this context, Camus proposed that the only real question in philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide. (He concluded that one should not commit suicide; instead, one should live to revolt against the absurd life, even though it will always be without hope. — David Eagleman