absurd quotes

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

- Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
  TheYellow Book, vol.4

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie'  re ve  rite  . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

- Albert Camus
  Le Mythe de Sisyphe ( The Myth of Sisyphus,1955).

L'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel. Il sent en lui son de s ir de bonheur et de raison. L'absurde na|"t de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence de  raisonnable du monde. Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

- Albert Camus
  Le Mythe de Sisyphe ( The Myth of Sisyphus,1955),'The Absurd Walls'.

Nihil tam absurde dici potest quo non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.

-Cicero full name MarcusTullius Cicero
c.44   BC  De Divinatione, bk.2, section 58.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects† It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real womenand absurd.

-John Robert Fowles
  The Magus, ch.52.

English plays, Atrocious in content, Absurd in form, Objectionable in action, Execrable EnglishTheatre!

-JohannWolfgang von Goethe
   Attributed.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

-William James
  Pragmatism, lecture 6.

Ist es an und fu«  r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu«  r einUbel zu « halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.

- Arthur Schopenhauer
  DieWelt alsWille undVorstellung (TheWorld asWill and Representation), vol.2, ch.41 (translated by E F J Payne).