Novalis Quotes

If you examine any aspect of the human condition long enough, you really do have to start laughing at it. Because the business of being human is kind of ridiculous.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

Life is such a tragicomedy.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

That's just how I see things. I think things that are the most dramatic or tragic can also look the most ridiculous and funny. That's part of being human.

The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.

Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

Mankind is a science that defies definitions.

in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

You are human and mortal; we are the sum of our weak moments and our strong.

O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound.