
“What is too absurd to believe is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.”
Sebban Balwer
(15 October 1994)
Source: Lord of Chaos
Source: Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales Of People, Passion and Power
“What is too absurd to believe is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.”
Sebban Balwer
(15 October 1994)
Source: Lord of Chaos
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Preface (p. xiii; quoting Voltaire)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)
“We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”
Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)
“It is to be believed because it is absurd.”
Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. / Certum est, quia impossibile.
Variant translations
It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.
It is is entirely credible, because it is inept.
It is certain because it is impossible.
De Carne Christi 5.4
Often paraphrased or misquoted as "Credo quia absurdum."
Also paraphrased as "It is so extraordinary that it must be true."
Two lines from De Carne Christi have often become conflated into the statement: "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe it because it is impossible), which can be perceived as a distortion of the actual arguments that Tertullian was making.
Reflections on a chestnut tree root.
Nausea (1938)
Context: Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.