quotes about Ironic
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Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
-- Albert Camus -
It was ironic how love could awaken them to the wonders of the universe, while at the same time confine their attention to one another.
-- Alexandra Adornetto -
I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
-- Alice Munro -
Some of us will probably become famous. It will be an ironic fame fashioned largely by those who have never seen our work.
-- Allan KaprowSource : Allan Kaprow, Jeff Kelley (2003). “Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life”, p.25, Univ of California Press
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It is ironic that many Filipinos learn to love the Philippines while abroad, not at home.
-- Ambeth R. Ocampo -
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.
-- Bob Barr -
You who are on the inside, don't condemn my lack of faith too quickly; you who are on the outside, don't be too quick to mock my overcredulity; you who are indifferent, don't be too quick to wax ironic about my perpetual hesitations.
-- Bruno Latour -
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The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.
-- Carl L. BeckerSource : Progress and Power Lecture 3 (1935)
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(Farm workers) are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves.
-- Cesar Chavez -
The Golden Compass' became a bad experience because the studio didn't have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it's one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.
-- Chris Weitz -
Certainly, anyone whom I've witnessed, who has gone through something horrible and life-changing, has a sense of ironic humor, or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.
-- Christopher HeyerdahlSource : "Christopher Heyerdahl Talks HELL ON WHEELS and THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN – PART 1". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. November 28, 2011.
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The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
-- Christopher Hitchens -
It's ironic, isn't it? Our goal was great. Our path was dark.
-- Christopher Pike -
We live in an ironic society where even play is turned into work. But the highest existence is not work; the highest level of existence is play.
-- Conrad Hyers -
There are people, particularly in the United States with which I am most familiar, who would say how ironic that Tehran would be the sponsor of an anti-terrorism conference, because there are people who say that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism.
-- Cynthia McKinney -
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When I was a boy, unconsciously, spontaneously I learned the art of telling ironic stories.
-- Dario FoSource : "Fo delights his audience with boyhood tales" by Kirsty Scott, www.theguardian.com. August 16, 2005.
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I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.
-- David -
I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving.
-- Deb Caletti -
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.
-- Diane ArbusSource : "Glenn Close and Rose Byrne's Fashion Face-Off" by Laura Morgan, www.harpersbazaar.com. September 16, 2009.
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Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Don Marquis -
What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
-- Donald E. Williams, Jr. -
It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
-- Earl Warren -
It's ironic that Olympic spectators will never have seen Yiannis Kouros, the greatest Greek athlete since Pheidippides
-- Ed Ayres -
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How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.
-- Elizabeth Lesser -
But I have told the truth. Isn't that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.
-- Elizabeth WeinSource : Elizabeth Wein (2012). “Code Name Verity”, p.180, Egmont UK
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What we have learned to look for in a situation determines mostly what we see.
-- Ellen LangerSource : Ellen J. Langer (2009). “Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility”, p.33, Ballantine Books
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Knowing what is and knowing what can be are not the same thing.
-- Ellen LangerSource : Ellen Langer (2010). “Counterclockwise: A Proven Way to Think Yourself Younger and Healthier”, p.13, Hachette UK
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Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.
-- Eric Idle -
Would you buy a book proudly stating on the cover that its reader is a dummy? Or would you think "of course it's ironic"?
-- Erik NaggumSource : Read the fine manual, please (Usenet article), groups.google.com. November 14, 1997.
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From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something - from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).
-- Erik Naggum -
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It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
-- Ernest BeckerSource : Ernest Becker (2007). “The Denial of Death”, p.56, Simon and Schuster
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
-- Errol Morris -
If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.
-- Esther M. FriesnerSource : P. N. Elrod, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Charlaine Harris, L. A. Banks, Jim Butcher (2010). “My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding”, p.141, Macmillan
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Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world.
-- Frans de Waal -
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It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.
-- Fred Hoyle -
With every mistake, we must surely be learning.
-- George HarrisonSource : Song: While My Guitar Gently Weeps Acoustic Version
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It was growing late, and though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one was still obliged to dress for dinner.
-- Georgette Heyer -
Lyrically I'm very ironic and silly, but I hope I'll touch your heart
-- Geri Halliwell -
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Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite
-- Gillian FlynnSource : Gillian Flynn (2014). “The Complete Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl, Dark Places, Sharp Objects”, p.281, Broadway Books
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I find it ironic that fear is eliminating the possibility to tell stories that depict our ability to overcome fear
-- Gore VerbinskiSource : "Gore Verbinski On Cancellation Of North Korea-Based Steve Carell Film" by Mike Fleming Jr., deadline.com. December 17, 2014.
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It's such an honour being banned in Italy, the mother of sensuality. It's like being asked to straighten your tie in a bordello... It's ironic that the pictures were removed on the complaint of a cardinal. I regard censorship as a cardinal sin.
-- Harold Town -
Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.
-- Henry James -
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The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
-- Henry Louis Gates -
It’s ironic that as scientists that don’t believe in god, were the ones that are closest to god.
-- Hiromu Arakawa -
I found it to be kind of ironic, because I’m white, therefore I’m appropriating culture, but then Eminem won it - who’s white and won it many times - and they didn’t seem to say anything about that. I suspect it was just because they dislike me.
-- Iggy Azalea -
It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse....
-- Irving KristolSource : Irving Kristol (1995). “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea”, p.440, Simon and Schuster
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A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
-- J. D. McClatchySource : J. D. McClatchy (2013). “Twenty Questions”, p.30, Columbia University Press
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What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
-- Jacques Derrida -
In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.
-- James C. Collins -
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
-- Jane Austen -
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It was ironic; he held her captive, yet she’d captivated him.
-- Jeaniene Frost -
John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.
-- Jerry Saltz -
John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.
-- Jerry Saltz -
I'm comfortable looking sexy. I don't push it with poses, although I like the ironic part of it. That's what makes it fun.
-- Jessica Alba -
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Painting can also be too earnest at times and that's a drag. You don't want to go in that direction either. It should be holistic. It should represent the whole of your personality, I guess, so if somebody is a sincere painter or an ironic painter, then they're just bullshitting the audience and presenting only an idealized version of themselves.
-- Joe Bradley -
I find it ironic that happy endings now are called fairytale endings because there's nothing happy about most fairytale endings.
-- Joe Wright -
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
-- John Fowles -
There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.
-- John Green -
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Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.
-- John Gunther -
You don't have to be interesting. You have to be interested.
-- John M. Gottman -
It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.
-- Jonah Lehrer -
The barometer that shows "variable" is an ironic indictment of God.
-- Jose Bergamin -
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It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
-- Joseph Conrad -
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.
-- Joss Whedon -
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
-- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel -
I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.
-- Kenneth Koch -
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The humor is the sort born of ironic necessity; they use it to salve the wounds in insensitity.
-- Leah Hager Cohen -
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
-- Lewis Mumford -
Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and fancy women.
-- Lord Kelvin -
The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.
-- Louis C. K. -
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I just love the idea of witches, in general. The whole concept of witches was to keep down the feminine rise in power that was happening, at the time. They created this concept of witches, so that they could burn women at the stake and keep them in their place, and now we've turned it around to empower women. That's very ironic. If they only knew that they created a weapon for us to use against them.
-- Madchen AmickSource : Source: collider.com
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It's so ironic. When you finally achieve recognition, you hide behind dark glasses.
-- Madhuri Dixit -
It's kind of ironic that if I get my Ph.D., I'll be a real doctor
-- Marcia Cross -
I'm just trying to portray what I find ironic or humorous.
-- Max Cannon -
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It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.
-- Meg Rosoff -
By my reckoning, I only need about 200 more takeout coffee cups to complete my bitterly ironic mosaic of Al Gore.
-- Merlin Mann -
How ironic, she thought, as she fell to her certain death, that at that moment she would have given anything to be a giant goose again.
-- Michael Buckley -
Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.
-- Michael Cadnum -
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To be honest, I don't watch a lot of TV. It's kind of ironic because I'm on TV.
-- Nina Dobrev -
It’s pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
-- Noam Chomsky -
The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not,
-- Orson Scott Card -
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Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.
-- Paul Fussell -
Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.
-- Paul Fussell -
Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic, as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils.
-- Paul StametsSource : "TEDMED: Can Mushrooms Help the Immune System Fight Cancer? Interview With Paul Stamets, Mycologist". Interview with Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 2, 2011.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
-- Paul Valery -
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It's quite ironic I suppose, it's that thing about being in a group when you all start out as friends and then invariably end up hating each other. So I just thought they needed telling really, in case they were labouring under the apprehension that they were still friends.
-- Peter HookSource : Interview with Matt Cotterill, higher-frequency.com. April 15, 2006.
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How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.
-- Peter Sloterdijk -
It’s ironic. At last I have my freedom. But at a price. Now my destiny is mine to choose. - Stanley aka Nine
-- Pittacus Lore -
One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us.
-- Rachel Held Evans -
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The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying - indeed a rival of the religious life.
-- Randolph BourneSource : Randolph Bourne (1992). “The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918”, p.136, Univ of California Press
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A lot of my friends are club people. It's not me. It's funny to represent that, because it's not me. I don't fit into a gay club setting. It's just ironic that I represent that somehow.
-- Randy Harrison -
Isn't it ironic that after 70 years Russia wants God back while we are trying to kick him out?
-- Ravi Zacharias -
It's ironic, but true, that in this age of electronic communications, personal interaction is becoming more important than ever.
-- Regis McKennaSource : Regis McKenna (1985). “The Regis touch: million-dollar advice from America's top marketing consultant”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company
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Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.
-- Renata AdlerSource : Renata Adler (1999). “Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker”
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It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
-- Richard HofstadterSource : "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life". Book by Richard Hofstadter, pp. 145-146, 1963.
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What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!
-- Rita Dove -
I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
-- Rita Rudner -