Utterly 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

Life is always new, mind is always old. Life is never old, mind is never new. Hence they never meet, they can't meet. Mind moves backward, life moves forward. So those who try to live life through the mind are simply doing something so utterly stupid that the day they recognize what they have been doing to themselves, they will not be able to believe that they could have been so stupid, so ridiculous, so absurd. — Osho

Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part. — John Malkovich

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd. — Christopher Hitchens

If religion is the answer, the question must be utterly absurd. — Nyan Prater

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me. — Anais Nin

Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. — Marcel Proust

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

The admirers and followers of the Al Koran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed throughout that wild and absurd performance ... Would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morality, let us attend to his narration, and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise upon such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilised society. No steady rule of right conduct seems there to be attended to: and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or harmful to the true believers. — David Hume

I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that. — Jeffrey Eugenides

According to the International Institute for Environment and Development, the annual amount spent globally on advertising aimed at increasing consumption topped $430 billion in 1998.Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net effect is the massive production of absurd, empty and useless items which are nevertheless utterly serious since we earn our living from them, and dedicate our leisure time to them. — Jacques Ellul

As an artist, I think you always have to take care of yourself as a person probably even more than the average person because your body is so important to your art. — Josh Young

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. — Emma Goldman

How impossible, how utterly absurd it would be for the disciples
these disciples, such men as these!
to try and become the light of the world! No, they are already the light, and the call has made them so. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible. — Bertrand Russell

And as they drifter up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.
Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cards going along the Euston Road and out over towards the Westway flyover, on keeping the street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat on the ground. — Douglas Adams

The most precious things I have in my life were not bought, they were earned. — David Alejandro Fearnhead

The key to a better life: Complain less, appreciate more. Whine less, laugh more. Talk less, listen more. Want less, give more. Hate less, love more. Scold less, praise more. Fear less, hope more. — Michael Josephson

Celaena put a hand against her chest. How absurd - how utterly absurd and useless - that her heart still beat and Nehemia's didn't — Sarah J. Maas

If a wizard should take up residence in your garden and requests food, you are obliged to feed him. — Mark Jackman

I want to give a beautiful speech at the end of the world - a rousing and inspiring collection of thoughts expressed eloquently through a dying language that is ultimately too little too late; absurd and utterly meaningless - almost insulting as life burns away. — Jonathan Douglas Duran

29Jesus went on from there and walked beside the Sea of Galilee. And he went up on the mountain and sat down there. 30And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at his feet, and he healed them, 31so that the crowd wondered, when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel. Jesus Feeds the — Anonymous

They don't have a case," Bob said. "I don't even know how they got an indictment." "We know," Kamau and i said. "Their case is utterly absurd," Evelyn said. "We know," Kamau and i droned again. "Their witnesses are as phony as three-dollar bills," Evelyn said. "We know." "They don't have one piece of physical evidence," Evelyn ranted. "No photographs, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no nothing." "We know," Kamau and i chanted in unison. — Assata Shakur

Okay." I bounced down the stairs. "I'm decent."
He was waiting at the foot of the stairs, closer than I'd thought, and I bounded right into him. He steadied me, holding me a careful distance away for a few seconds before suddenly pulling me closer.
"Wrong again," he murmured in my ear. "You are utterly indecent - no one should look so tempting, it's not fair."
"Tempting how?" I asked. "I can change ... "
He sighed, shaking his head. "You are so absurd." He pressed his cool lips delicately to my forehead, and the room spun. The smell of his breath made it impossible to think.
"Shall I explain how you are tempting me?" he said. It was clearly a rhetorical question. His fingers traced slowly down my spine, his breath coming more quickly against my skin. My hands were limp on his chest, and I felt ligtheaded again. He tilted his head slowly and touched his cool lips to mine for the second time, very carefully, parting them slightly.
And then I collapsed. — Stephenie Meyer

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses. — Stanley Tucci

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate ... It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ... higher intelligences ... even to the limit of God ... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific. — Fred Hoyle

The universe had no choice but to create intelligent life so that there would be someone else that could simply laugh at how unbelievably, ridiculously and senselessly huge the universe is and how utterly insignificant the rest of us are. — Ian Strang

What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? — Virginia Woolf

I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd. — Cate Blanchett

I'm watching a lot of the football. — Serena Williams

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. — Kate Atkinson

By the time I got home at night, my eyes were so chlorinated I saw rings around every light. — Esther Williams

The more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If Atheism writes upon the blackboard of the Universe a question mark, it writes it for the purpose of stating that there is a question yet to be answered. Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd? — Joseph Lewis

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are. — John Eliot

There are meaningful deaths. And there are absurd and utterly meaningless deaths. Unfortunately, you don't get to choose which one you get. — Teresa Medeiros

You don't have the potential to create, you are always creating. — Jack Canfield

The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void. — Terence McKenna

Your vanity is ridiculous, your conduct an outrage, and your presence in my garden utterly absurd — Oscar Wilde