Cosmic Irony Quotes

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what - apart from the eternal innocence of animals - offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. ~ Henry Mulisch

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. ~ Barry Lopez

One year, I'd completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: "Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child." ... I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old. ~ Mary Blakely

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony. ~ George Saintsbury

At what point did I stop being a planet in orbit, held in place by familiar forces of gravity? And after the cosmic collision that followed, after I cut myself loose, cast myself off, made myself alone, will I ever return to my old orbit? Can I? Do I want to? ~ Shana Youngdahl

Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding. ~ Kate Grenville

But as the sun slipped even further, his eyes weren't drawn to the horizon. He watched Lily as she stood on the dock, glorying in the golden ritual, her russet hair slipping free from its ponytail to frame her face with messy abandon.
This is the view I need to be happy, she'd said.
The irony was exquisite. Because that was what he whispered to himself every time he saw her too.
And there wasn't a damn thing he could ever do about it. ~ Elyse Mady

It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife - that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, 'You're going to get tired of hearing from me. I'll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you'll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.' And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, 'Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She's in heaven, after all.'
It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception...There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life - hadn't that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph? ~ Alice McDermott

You're dancing on me
said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see.
So fucking what? she said. ~ Alice Notley

Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it. ~ Steven Soderbergh

I find it really fascinating that while in an attempt to look beautiful we tend to go for what's easily acceptable.
But when it comes to portraits, it is only our facial flaws that make that picture worth its while, setting it apart.
Isn't it amazing to find that beauty is something that makes us alike? While our flaws are the real contributors to our uniqueness. ~ Mansi Laus Deo

A $20 haircut hardly ever lasts longer than a $5 haircut. ~ Wes Smith

The great irony is that women are accused of making romantic comedies, as if it's a bad thing, but [(500) Days of Summer] Marc Webb makes a romantic comedy and he gets Spider-Man [as his next project]. Are you kidding me? You cannot win. ~ Manohla Dargis

These were the moments I wished I were dead, when I was too weak to do anything about it. It was nature's cruel irony, stringing me along. ~ Pepper Winters

I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins, ~ Antony Flew

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity. ~ Pascal Mercier

as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all. ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

Those who seek to suppress voting today are either ignorant of the history or are, as I suspect is more often the case, malevolently choosing to ignore it...

To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can't convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters. This reveals a certain irony: Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to the currency of ideas. ~ Dan Rather

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't. ~ Cindy Sherman

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history. ~ John D. Barrow

When you have the power to love, that strength, that courage is infinite; that love is infinite. There is nothing finite about it's presence, for love. never. dies. ~ Solange Nicole

And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality. ~ Pierce Brown

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,
The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;
Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,
And Poets once had promis'd they should last. ~ Alexander Pope

Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Mother Earth Speaks:
You live in my womb,
learn from my seasons
and grow old in my arms

Listen to my heart
I give you garments
woven in gold

I bless your arrival
then let you fly free
knowing forever we are one
you and I ~ Ramon Ravenswood

All the Cosmic Drama, as it is written in the four Gospels, should be lived inside ourselves, here and now. The isn't something merely historic, it's something to live, here and now! ~ Samael Aun Weor

They had supported him ... for freedom's sake, they would have said; meaning as do all men who mouth that catchword, freedom for themselves and their own class. ~ Margaret Butler

My films often have a very strong strain of irony, or even sarcasm, which is definitely related to homosexual camp. But it is by no means straightforward: quite often I am sincere when I appear to be sarcastic, and I am sarcastic when I appear to be sincere. I also try to contradict myself at least once a day, which is a camp must. ~ Bruce LaBruce

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend - about what, I don't recall - and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes. ~ Sam Harris

Your weaknesses may not seem overwhelming, but they will create the biggest problems you face. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

If "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted," then there is no purpose or grand cosmic scheme to life beyond what we choose to impose or believe. To some this is cynicism. For the Chaos Magician, it is a breath of dizzying freedom. ~ Phil Hine

It is a truth widely recognized that tyranny stems from the consent of the governed as much as democracy does. ~ Eric Robert Morse

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size.
Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase.
Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water. ~ Clive Cussler

We can imagine how to create and be creative on a beach in a cosmic sky. No grain of sand is merely just sandy; with imagination at hand the sand can become whatever you fancy. ~ Jennifer Sodini

It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing. ~ Matt Haig

The greatest irony in the world is that you are so blessed and don't know it. ~ Esther Hicks

Irony has always seemed the best approach to life, the best way to keep it at arm's length. ~ Lawrence Thornton

In the grounds of the château was a church
said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old
churches. ~ Ken Follett

Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow. Plant misery seeds and that us what you reap. ~ Stephen Richards

The irony is that it was tougher to rent a car from Cerberus when it owned Alamo than to buy a semi-automatic. To rent a car, one had to provide ID, a drivers' license, and get insurance coverage. To buy a gun? Cash and carry, from the back of a station wagon at a gun show. No concerns about downstream liability or risk. ~ Eliot Spitzer

I was a goner for this girl. Was gone when I started lusting over her ankles but this was some higher-level cosmic soul mate shit. ~ Kate Canterbary

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? ~ Brian Doyle

Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror. ~ William Edward Buckley

I saw an injured black cat. God knows, who has crossed her path. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

The word ecology, coined by the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (initially as oecology) in 1866. derives from the Greek oikos, "referring originally to the family household and its daily operations and maintenance." The term ecology is therefore intended to refer to the study of the conditions of existence that pertain to, and the interactions between, all the entities that make up our larger, cosmic household here upon earth. ~ Warwick Fox

In the future, will our technologies help stabilise or planet and population, leading to a very long lifetime for us? Or will we destroy our world and its inhabitants, after only a brief appearance on the cosmic stage? ~ Jill Tarter

The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn't afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He'd taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping - complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean. ~ Diana Rowland

It's okay is a cosmic truth ... It's okay. If there were nothing here for us to learn, we wouldn't bother to pay the fare. ~ Richard Bach