So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best exa...
Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at...
The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas al...
You talk more when you're nervous," he said, still standing close to her. "No i don't. That's absurd. I'm just trying to explain to you-" "Do i make you nervous?" "No. I'm not nervous." "You're trembling." "I'm cold. I'm wearing practically zero clot...
And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as i...
There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell you a truth you can only see from the unders...
The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He do...
Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, a...
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the wor...
Peter Llewelyn Davies: This is absurd. It's just a dog. J.M. Barrie: Just a dog? *Just*? [to Porthos] J.M. Barrie: Porthos, don't listen! [to Peter] J.M. Barrie: Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he's *jus...
Valentine: You know what this is like? It's like those old movies we both love. Now I'm going to tell you my whole plan, and then I'm going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you, and you'll find an equally convoluted way to escap...
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. ...
It was strange to see the keenness with which men had tried to order, constrain, and systematize human passions, jealousy, rage, violent death, accusations. That was the justice system (...): the absurd pretension that human nature could be dominated...
Note: When reading dry political theory, such as the texts you will find on the following pages, it may be useful to apply the Exclamation Point Test from time to time, to determine if the material you are reading is actually relevant to your life. T...
[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 ...
Thor again tutored me in the seventh grade, when I was learning Algebra. Algebra was quite an experience for me. Thor spent countless hours with me, because it was very hard for me to grasp how to pull out a number from a letter. I thought it was an ...
It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being cap...
My second thoughts condemn And wonder how I dare To look you in the eye. What right have I to swear Even at one a.m. To love you till I die? Earth meets too many crimes For fibs to interest her; If I can give my word, Forgiveness can recur Any number...
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too i...
The Oracle pursued a logical course of confuting theism, and leaving 'a-theism' the negative result. It did not, in the absurd terms of common religious propaganda, 'deny the existence of God.' It affirmed that God was a term for an existence imagine...
If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your symp...
