“Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.”
All Sex, All the Time.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
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Theodore Dalrymple 96
English doctor and writer 1949Related quotes
Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Context: The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man
Context: All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.
The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)
Spark (2014)
Context: True ideology has vanished, replaced by fear and fantasy. The right wing wants corporate control and a return to a past that never existed. The left wing wants government control and a future that will never exist. Both groups lose sight of the essential questions: how can the individual speak and think and create freely? New ideas are the only evolutionary force that will save us from destruction.
"Consistency" (5 December 1887). This quote is engraved on Twain's bust in the National Hall of Fame
Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 40; As cited in: Kevin Hindle, Kim Klyver (2011), Handbook of Research on New Venture Creation, p. 74-75
Context: Circumstances have been such, that I have lived almost entirely secluded for some time. Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.... You will wonder at having heard nothing from me; but you have experience and candour enough to perceive and know that God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings... I shall be very desirous of again seeing you. You know what that means from me, and that it is no form, but the simple expression and result of the respect and attraction I feel for a mind that ventures to read direct in God's own book, and not merely thro' man's translation of that same vast and mighty work.
In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 https://archive.org/stream/englischestudien19leipuoft#page/157/mode/1up (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 157.
“Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.”
La philosophie triomphe aisément des maux passés et des maux à venir. Mais les maux présents triomphent d'elle.
Maxim 22. Compare: "This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey", Oliver Goldsmith, The Good-Natured Man, Act i.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
