Absurd

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. ~Wisława Szymborska

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"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one."  ~Voltaire

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Like most children he prefers sameness, routine, consistency. This, too, I understand. Repetition is the essence of meaning. Without it we are lost. But taken to its extreme, a love of system becomes absurd.  

 ~Siri Hustvedt, from "Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia," an essay in A Plea for Eros

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Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us. 

~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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53
They have a proverb: Absurdity
is marvelous, but you get hungry an hour later.

I reply But that is what it is for.

~from James Richardson's The Encyclopedia of the Stones: a Pastoral      

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Certainty is Overrated

In the end it all comes down to this you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.  ~David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

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Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. . . .All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. ~H. L. Mencken

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Despair is a kind of of certainty that the future will be like the present.  ~Rebecca Solnit

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Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one. ~Voltaire

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Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” has comic potential, besides being the best formulation of the comic spirit.  ~Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

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Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities — for success, for happiness, for really living — are waiting.  Martha Nussbaum