Irony

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• 'Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
  And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low:
  So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
  No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
  View'd his own feather on the fatal dart,
  And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.
  • George Gordon, Lord Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers : A Satire (1809)

• Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony.
  • James Branch Cabell

• Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
  • Albert Camus

• Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.
  If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence.
  Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.
  If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein's army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large.
  Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.
  • Brain Droppings by George Carlin

• Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.
  • Rufus Choate, as quoted in A Treasury of Great American Quotations : Our Country's Life & History in the Thoughts of its Men and Women (1964) by Charles Hurd

• When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.
  • Robertson Davies, in The Cunning Man (1994)

• The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.
  • Robertson Davies, in The Cunning Man (1994)

• Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
  • Anatole France, as quoted in Satanic Satire in the Modern Novel (1925) by Sidney Stephen Greenleaf, p. 25

• Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Journal entry (1847)

• Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I, between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth-pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I, between the I and the idea of the I.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, (III B 19)

• Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.
  • Søren Kierkegaard in On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates

• Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
  • Søren Kierkegaard in On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates

• The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

• Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
  • Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

• Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without.
  • Mrs "Horrible" Morrible in Wicked (1995) by Gregory Maguire

• Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end.
  • Mrs "Horrible" Morrible in Wicked (1995) by Gregory Maguire

• If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
  • W. Somerset Maugham in Strictly Personal, ch. 31 (1941)

• He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both.
  • W. Somerset Maugham in Then and Now : A Novel (1946), p. 136

• Surely the cosmic irony that loves men's dullness because it alone can preserve them from madness, and retorts upon the cosmic terrors with a jest, is higher than gallantry and more enduring. It arrives at tolerance for all human shortcomings; it embraces high and low in its sympathies; it achieves urbanity as a final goal. It is the stuff of which great literature is made.
  • Vernon Louis Parrington, reviewing the work of James Branch Cabell in The Pacific Review (December 1921), later published in Main Currents in American Thought (1927)

• God is an iron.
  • Spider Robinson

• Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
  • Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms as translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), p. 126

• Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
  • Morpheus in The Matrix by the Wachowski brothers

• Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.
  • Edwin Percy Whipple, in Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life (1859), Lecture III : Wit and Humor, p. 102

• If parody alone can adequately render the reality of our times, only irony offers us the freedom and detachment that are the essential condition of responsible analysis and action.
  • Theodore Ziolkowski, in the Foreword of a 1969 edtion of The Glass Bead Game (1943) by Hermann Hesse