Best Irony Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“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.”

“I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out.”

“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.”

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

“So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.”

“That's the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.”

“O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!”

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just”

“Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?”

“I am waiting for the war to be fought”

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”

“sometimes when everything seems at”

“girls”

“Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.”

“Maybe illusion and artifice—lies, even—are a necessary part of romance.”

“Only in war does the madman become sane.”

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'”

“Even things that are true can be proved.”

“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”

“School exams may or may not teach pupils about the beauty and complexity and rules of the world, but they definitely do teach them how to get marks in school exams.”

“On the likeness of the moon, I point to the sun, and the fool looks at my shoe.”

“In order to grow, I promise you'll have to let go of some habits. 10 times out of 10, they'll be the habits you're most in love with.”

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.”

“LIII.”

“God hides the fires of hell within paradise.”

“The human ego is the ugliest part of man. We lift up men who only show us darkness, and put down those brave enough to show us the light. Likewise, people engage in darkness when it is light outside, and acknowledge the light only when it is dark. We abandon those fighting for us to cheer behind those fighting against us. And, we only remember good people and God when it is convenient for us, and take them for granted because their doors are always open - only to chase after closed doors and personalities void of substance and truth.”

“Thank heaven for people who are satisfied with facts that conform to the reality they wish to believe.”

“Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”

“Hell's bells, irony blows.”