Aphorisms Quote by Idries Shah

“There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved…

— Will Durant

“How absurd life becomes with someone else: everything is interpreted; even the most trivial thing is imbued with symbolic value.”

— Jorge Volpi

“we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.”

— Patricia Crone

“Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

“There is something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.”

— A.E. Samaan

“Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“But isn’t absurdity part of being human? We aren’t ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar. Our worlds are small, our lives are…

— Margaret Rogerson

“If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“takes us the farther distance from the Old World to something new and revolutionary in human thought. That moral center, however, is hard to…

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“What used to be moral is aesthetic for us. What was social is now individual.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of…

— Louis Menand

“How much better things would be if we all tried to mold and shape our own thoughts and actions rather than those of others.”

— John G. Miller