Existential Irony Quotes

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.

Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.

Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days - whatever there may be for the dust - the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.

IT is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. "Gad, she'd better!" retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: "A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!"

It's always, you know, a pleasant exercise to imagine my own death because then I'm so happy when I can stop.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

There are more people alive today than have everdied. If that's true, and you believe in reincarnation, then thatmeans there are a lot of people walking around without souls...I've met some of them... Haven't you?

Give death announcements each time you move instead of giving announcements of the change of address. Send the same when you die.

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

Your whole life passes in front of your eyes before you die. This is called living.

Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I .

You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.

How little room Do we take up in death, that, living, know No bounds!

More than that, I believe that the grass is green because green is restful to the human eye, that the sky is blue to give us an idea of the infinite. And that blood is red so that murder will be more easily detected and criminals will be brought to justice. Yes, and I believe that I shall live forever, but I shall live without reason.

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

But it seems an irony of creation that man's mind knows how to handle things the better the farther removed they are from the center of his existence. Thus we are cleverest where knowledge matters least.

... most people are dead, and none of them seem to mind it. One hears a great many complaints about life, doesn't one? And there are people I know who would certainly grumble -- however dead they were -- if there were anything to grumble at.