
“The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today.”
1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)
Part II, p. 133
Watt (1943)
“The struggle against the religious absurdity is more than ever a necessity today.”
1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)
1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
from his responding at the 1951 MoMA symposium, in which several artists were asked to respond to the prompt 'What Abstract Art Means to Me'
1950s
“No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd,”
Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 217-18; : Partly cited in: John Barton, " Pragmatism, systems thinking and system dynamics http://courses.daiict.ac.in/pluginfile.php/19296/mod_resource/content/1/Pragmatism%20and%20systems%20Thinking.pdf." 19th International System Dynamics Conference, Wellington, New Zealand. AusAID, 1999.
Context: Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James's prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James s now famous little essay on " The Will to Believe " the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.
Winter, 1931-1932 The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934 <!-- p. 11 -->
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.
“It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.”
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus
Context: One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! — by such narrow ways —?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.
“It was absurd and frustrating, to feel so much and know so little.”
Part Seven “The Demagogue”, Chapter vi “Hello, Stranger”, Section 2 (p. 306)
(1987), BOOK TWO: THE FUGUE
“Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.”
“The Prophet … feels it as a moral necessity to set Righteousness on the throne.”
Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Priest and Prophet" (1893), p. 133