Cosmic Joke Quotes

What?" Henry shouts over the noise when he sees the look on Alex's face. "My life is a cosmic joke and you're not a real person," Alex says, wheezing. "What?" Henry yells again. "I said, you look great, baby!

Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday night read-through to start. [...] Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike", Jimmy Fallon [...] turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it." Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. "I don't fucking care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.

While an elderly man in his mid-eighties looks curiously at a porno site, his grandson asks him from afar, “‘What are you reading, grandpa?’” “‘It’s history, my boy.’” “The grandson comes nearer and exclaims, “‘But this is a porno site, grandpa, naked chicks, sex . . . a lot of sex!’” “‘Well, it’s sex for you, my son, but for me it’s history,’ the old man says with a sigh.” All of people in the cabin burst into laughter. “A stale joke, but a cool one,” added William More, the man who just told the joke. The navigator skillfully guided the flying disc among the dense orange-yellow blanket of clouds in the upper atmosphere that they had just entered. Some of the clouds were touched with a brownish hue at the edges. The rest of the pilots gazed curiously and intently outwards while taking their seats. The flying saucer descended slowly, the navigator’s actions exhibiting confidence. He glanced over at the readings on the monitors below the transparent console: Atmosphere: Dense, 370 miles thick, 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane Temperature on the surface: ‒179°C / ‒290°F Density: 1.88 g/cm³ Gravity: 86% of Earth’s Diameter of the cosmic body: 3200 miles / 5150 km.

I was trying to go... somewhere. But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn't stop walking, couldn't stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it-- it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew. And then to find out the reason I felt like that-- like you were some part of me I'd lost and never ever knew I was missing until I saw you again-- that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don't even know for what-- for thinking that I actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be happy. I couldn't imagine what it was I'd done that I was being punished for--

If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

But if you were Charlotte, and you had been feeling that life was some cosmic joke that had no punchline, and in the space of a moment you had gone from being Charlotte-without-a-kitten to being Charlotte-with-a-kitten, you too would have found it nothing short of remarkable.

It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

Ah, time. The best cosmic joke in the universe.

Jace, you don’t have to—” “I was trying to go…somewhere,” Jace said. “But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after that I couldn’t forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me—I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it—it had never been like that for me before. I’d always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick’s and I knew. “And then to find out that the reason I felt like that—like you were some part of me I’d lost and never even knew I was missing until I saw you again—that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don’t even know for what—for thinking that I could actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be that happy. I couldn’t imagine what it was I’d done that I was being punished for—” “If you’re being punished,” Clary said, “then so am I.

I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.

What if it's just a big, cosmic joke? Then...laugh! .85.

After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

When you’re little, your parents are your whole world. But as you grow, you change. You become your own person, create a family of your own, and you start to forget. What a cruel, cosmic joke the world plays on us, causing us to remember… by

I'm sitting at the bar, rearranging the order of my jokes. I'm under the delusion that I'm having bad shows because of some cosmic misalignment of words, phrases, and ideas. I may as well have cast runes into a spirit bowl, hoping that the collective heart of the audience would open to my necromantic call. Maybe that's how jugglers do it. Those guys never have shitty sets.

As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.

As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.” There

You’d probably start laughing because you’d realize that your fears had been the result of a gigantic cosmic joke that had persisted throughout all of your previous reincarnations.

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us.

Great. I draw the one man in the universe who wants to assume responsibility for conception, when he didn't get any, much less good sex in the process. This must be some sort of cosmic joke.

What?” Henry shouts over the noise when he sees the look on Alex’s face. “My life is a cosmic joke and you’re not a real person,” Alex says, wheezing. “What?” Henry yells again. “I said you look great, baby!

Our situation is like some rigged card game, and the hand the universe laid out for us is made entirely of jesters; we're some cosmic joke. But maybe we don't have to fold so easily. Maybe we can keep playing the game and make kings of ourselves, in spite of it all.

There was no doubt that he was, now and always, and maybe the scathing cosmic joke of it all was that instinctively, like muscle memory, she'd known it all along. Maybe the hilarity had always been in ever thinking she could have him, and now it curdled in her throat, the acidity of a mirthless laugh

I wasn't just wrong. I was wrong in such a vast and specific way that I felt like the punchline of a cruel joke.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. ...

When children act serious, we feel amused by them. People are just children who have taken their roles too seriously. If you feel anything but amused by them, you too have taken your role too seriously.

What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sense of humor.’ Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs. ‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’ ‘Discover what?’ ‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for?

...if you think the worst you'll get the worst, but if you think the best..." "and then everything will blow up in your face anyway. Don't you get the punchline yet? Its the great cosmic practical joke: Knock knock, who's there? Big kick in the Ass.

You can have mad thoughts in here. Like ... tell me, when I die, do they bring my corpse back to my cell to serve out the full term of my second sentence plus those seven years? Perhaps I've already been brought back and have just forgotten it? Maybe I'm already a corpse? A breathing cadaver? But no, no. A cadaver couldn't smile at himself this way. Somewhere, somehow, there's got to be something funny about all of this. Something horrendously funny. A wild cosmic joke on me, a real knee-slapper in some demonic heaven or hell. A while back someone was crying out eerily down the corridor in the echoing half-darkness. "Slur the buds!" he cried out dementedly, repeating those meaningless words over and over again in a ghostly voice, softly hissing and hollow. "Slur the buds! Slur the buds!" That's all I could make out. He must have called it out in that soft hollow hiss a dozen times in the course of fifteen minutes. Still other voices picked it up, and for a short while there was an impromptu ghostly chorus of "Slur the buds!" echoing down these unholy corridors. I never learned what the words meant. I never learned who it was who called out. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe that was just me myself calling out in the demented darkness of my own imagination. Doing time does this thing to you. But, of course, you don't do time. You do without it. Or rather, time does you. Time is a cannibal that devours the flesh of your years day by day, bite by bite. And as he finishes the last morsel, with the juices of your life running down his bloody chin, he smiles wickedly, belches with satisfaction, and hisses out in ghostly tones, "Slur the buds!"

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered. Alex waits on the South Lawn, within view of the linden trees of the Kennedy garden, where they first kissed. Marine One touches down in a cacophony of noise and wind and rotors, and Henry emerges in head-to-toe Burberry looking dramatic and windswept, like a dashing hero here to rip bodices and mend war-torn countries, and Alex has to laugh. "What?" henry shouts over the noise when he sees the look on Alex's face. "My life is cosmic joke and you're not a real person," Alex says, wheezing. "What?" Henry yells again. "I said, you look great, baby!

Let us say plainly what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of that darkened glass. He meant we’re supposed to take it all on faith. If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.

There are three ways you can live life—three again—remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes. You can live life as though it’s all a cosmic accident; we’re nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything’s a bad joke. I can’t.” They couldn’t, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else. “Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he’s aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation. He doesn’t care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don’t matter to him, I don’t matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end. I can’t live that way, either.” Again there was general agreement. “Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live.

Martin never actually met Boris, not to have a proper conversation. Whenever he arrived at a bar Boris always seemed to have just left, and whenever Martin left a bar he was always told the next day that Boris arrived just after. Boris was always on the go, never still for a moment, always in a hurry, always in a mess, always late, always under-prepared, always over-committed, always in demand and always out of reach. ‘You never can pin him down,’ Martin was told by Stephen, who wrote for the Independent. ‘He makes his own rules. Then, if he decides he doesn’t like his own rules, he breaks them,’ said Tom, who wrote for The Times. ‘Life to him is simply one big cosmic joke,’ said Philip, who wrote for the Guardian. ‘He doesn’t take anything seriously.

But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?

Emotions were running so high in the country that I feared there was going to be some violence before the election. I even half-jokingly said to Hillary one day in October that it was beginning to feel like we were upsetting some cosmic natural balance by seeking to "upend the patriarchy." I didn't really believe it, of course, but a large part of the country seemed to believe Hillary represented an existential threat to the proper order of things.

The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worst-case nightmare and into cosmic-joke territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and his son-in-law were united, always aware and yet never quite understanding why they should be the butt of a media joke, and now the target of its stunned outrage.

Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can't fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn't be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C. - who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he'd been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn't invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he'd never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn't make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.

I get this feeling,' I said, pacing a step, the ancient wood floorboards creaking beneath my boots, my power a writhing, living thing prowling through my veins, 'that it's all some sort of joke. Some sort of cosmic trick, and that no one- no one- can be this happy and not pay for it.' 'You've already paid for it, Rhys. Both of you. And then some.' I waved a hand. 'I just...' I trailed off, unable to finish the words. Cassian stared at me for a long moment. Then he crossed the distance between us, gathering me in an embrace so tight I could barely breathe. 'You made it. We made it. You both endured enough that no one would blame you if you danced off into the sunset like Miryam and Drakon and never bothered with anything else again. But you are bothering- you're both still working to make this peace last. Peace, Rhys. We have peace, and the true kind. Enjoy it- enjoy each other. You paid the debt before it was ever a debt.' My throat tightened, and I gripped him hard around his wings, the scales of his leathers digging into my fingers. 'What about you?' I asked, pulling away after a moment. 'Are you... happy?' Shadows darkened his hazel eyes. 'I'm getting there.' A halfhearted answer. I'd have to work on that, too. Perhaps there were threads to be pulled, woven together. Cassian jerked his chin toward the door. 'Get going, you bastard. I'll see you in three days.' I nodded, opening the door at last. But paused on the threshold. 'Thanks, brother.' Cassian's crooked grin was bright, even if those shadows still guttered in his eyes. 'It's an honour, my lord.

Yes, I also came home to settle my father's estate." "Would you have come home if it hadn't also been your job?" "I think you know the answer to that." "You hated him, didn't you?" Nell poured the coffee and pushed his cup across the counter to him so he could fix it the way he liked. Matter-of-factly, she said, "Yes, I hated him. And I think it's a cosmic joke that I ended up with all his property.

Life has a whimsical way of kicking you in the throat. I find it to be one huge cosmic joke at our expense, only nobody is laughing but the forces that be—given that they are even a wee bit human.

I’m a medieval scholar and his name is Dante. If I believed in a higher power I’d wonder if this was some kind of cosmic joke.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.

if you didn’t notice the gray hairs on his muzzle, you might mistake him for a cub. But his eyes were deep, wise, and ancient. Sometimes they were playful and deliriously naïve, as if everything was some big cosmic joke. He was a strange little old bear.

Mulla Nasrudin is a Sufi figure, one of the oldest centers of Sufi anecdotes, and he shows whatsoever I have been saying here: that the world is a cosmic joke – he represents that. He is a very serious joker, and if you can penetrate him and understand him, then many mysteries will be revealed to you. Mulla Nasrudin illustrates that the world is not a tragedy, but a comedy. And the world is a place where if you can learn how to laugh, you have learned everything. If your prayer cannot become a deep laughter which comes from all over your being, if your prayer is sad and if you cannot joke with your god then you are not really religious. (p. 139, When The Coin Disappears)

In those times there was nothing else to grab hold of. Justice, truth, the greater good: they all seemed like a twisted joke told by some cosmic drunk. So why not join him? It was a lot better than thinking about dead wives or murdered old men.

lingo)? To whimsically joke about such bizarrerie with phrases like “pockets of interference” and “cosmic static” belies your talents as a thoughtful member of our profession. And the rest of it: the hyper-uncanniness, the “ontological games,” the generally cosmic substance of these places, and all that other transcendent nonsense. I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you’ve gone so far into the ultra-mentational hinterlands of metaphysics that

For example, Gross and Levitt have the kind of “mental imperialism,” as John Michel once called it, which just can’t resist ridiculing all non-Western cultures and their non-Western sciences. They dismiss all alternative healing, especially from the Orient, with a hoity-toity arrogance only equaled by Christian theologians writing about Oriental religions; and this seems especially narrow and provincial in 1995, since the American Medical Association, once a hotbed of that kind of prejudice, has grown increasingly open-minded in the past 20 years and prints more and more studies in their Journal in which researchers investigate alternative therapies scientifically, instead of just dismissing them with racist jokes like Gross and Levitt. (The A.M.A. has even printed studies in which alternative medical theories seem to work (!), although of course this research requires replication before it will become generally accepted.)

* H.L. Mencken, literary critic and freethinker, wrote a fictitious “news story” about the violent opposition when the first bath-tub appeared in America. He thought everybody would get the joke, an error I have often made myself with some of my own jests. Instead, millions believed his story, and although Mencken denied it many times, the denials never circulated as fast or as far as the myth. Many people still believe religious conservatives rioted when plumbers installed the first bath-tub in Washington, DC.

It is often easier for us to destroy each other than it is to resolve our differences. Such is the cosmic joke of human nature!

We are written in the stars, yet lost in stories not ours - Cosmic Joke

this speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

Another cosmic joke for Gaia to laugh at: Annabeth dies trying to keep her boyfriend, the son of Poseidon, from drowning.

Whether accidental or designed or a cosmic joke between green aliens, the human experience is an unbelievably amazing one. Our ability to love and create — that alone makes this entire experiment worthwhile.

The cosmic joke in the journey of the seeker is that the energy that fuels the seeking is precisely what is being sought. In Zen this is called ‘riding an ox in search of an ox.’ Wei Wu Wei compared it to looking for your spectacles, not realizing that they are on your nose and, were you not looking through them, you wouldn’t be able to see what you are looking for.

There’s no point in being monk-philosophers. Be warrior-philosophers. Wake the people up. The world need its intellectuals to move up the front, where the war rages most fiercely, not to cower away in pointless journals.

Always push your boundaries. Always exceed what you think you are capable of. Transgress all limits. The ultimate transgressor is “God”!

While you are working to earn money, you are treated as a slave, but while you are spending money, you are treated as a king.

Life is a satirical black comedy, told with the straightest of faces. Few are in on the joke. You need to have the drollest sense of humor, as dry as tinder.

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less.

What did you see?” ​“The great joke,” he said, and laughed again. “The huge, terrible, absurd cosmic joke. I can tell you, there is no right, there is no wrong, there is no death, there is no pain…,

The cosmic joke to this project is that all of the groups donating DNA secretly programmed sequences to cause their genetic strand to be predominant. This set the precedent for eternal conflict. Humanity was doomed to fight and be controlled. No one group would ever be in charge. The project was doomed for failure before it even began!

When she died of lung cancer a few years later, it felt like a malicious cosmic joke. When Grandpa married Margaret the fundamentalist Christian, that was the punch line.

He was a man uneasy on the earth. He recognized himself as purposeless and of a species purposeless and born into a universe that had no purpose. He saw human life and indeed all life as the result of a series of accidental cosmic occurrences. He viewed the human mind as he viewed the beak of a bird or the roots of a tree, saw it as nothing more nor less than the latest chapter in the history of adjustments to those reasonless occurrences. With a deathly seriousness, he divined that everything about himself, as well as about his entire serious kind, possessed an element of exquisite and excruciating comedy. Occasionally he laughed at the huge joke of human pomposity; more often then long thin crooked fingers of his powerful hands would rise quickly and nervously to his head, and there try to caress the crop of thick black wiry hair into some kind of order... From the enormous futility, he derived no sense of liberty whatever, but instead only a kind of bleak, questioning unrest. Any horror might be true: there was no golden Book or Rules to prevent it.

To be sincere is one thing, to be serious is another. A man who loves life is sincere, authentic, but never serious. Remember, an authentic religious person is not fear-oriented, he is love-oriented. A really authentic religious person becomes religious to enjoy life more, to enjoy it deeply and totally. A real religious man looks at life as a game: it is not business, it is a game. Hindus call it LEELA, a play; not even a game but a play. There is a difference between a game and play. Children play, but you even make a game out of play. Then it becomes business-like, then even in playing you are seeking victory, success, gain, profit. Life is a play. There is nothing to be achieved out of it, it itself is the goal; there is nowhere to reach, it itself is the Ultimate. It is just like children playing, you cannot ask them: For what are you playing? What is the purpose? They will say: We are simply playing. It is so beautiful! Profit is not their concern, and profit should also not be your concern, but play. Life is a moment to celebrate, to enjoy. Make it fun, a celebration, and then you will enter the temple. ...if you have lived, lived a life of celebrations, then you can die celebrating - it is fun. When you know that you are not going to die, that something in you is eternal, then the whole of life becomes fun. It is a great cosmic joke and you can play with it.