83 Irony Quotes To Ponder

Irony has a unique way of highlighting the absurdities and contradictions in life, often making us pause and ponder the deeper meanings behind our everyday experiences. From literary greats to modern thinkers, many have used irony to illustrate their insights and observations with sharp wit and clever nuance. In this curated collection, we've gathered the top 83 irony quotes that are sure to provoke thought, elicit smiles, and maybe even a bit of self-reflection. Join us as we explore these memorable lines that capture the essence of irony—one of the most intriguing tools in the art of language.

1. “Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.” - Woody Allen

2. “Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,a medley of extemporanea,And love is a thing that can never go wrong,and I am Marie of Romania.” - Dorothy Parker

3. “It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.” - Alexander McCall Smith

4. “Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.” - Henry James

5. “Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.” - Jane Austen

6. “I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.” - Steven Wright

7. “Food is an important part of a balanced diet.” - Fran Lebowitz

8. “We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford."...""And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.""I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty."Such as?""Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords.""Would you die for them?""Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No.""Well then.""Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.” - Douglas Adams

9. “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” - Mark Twain

10. “Nobody steals books but your friends.” - Roger Zelazny

11. “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.” - Robert Hughes

12. “[...] cela m'excite de penser à tout ce qui fuit dans la vie au nom de la vie.” - Nicole Brossard

13. “She walks in beauty.” - Ron Rash

14. “But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.” - Kate Morton

15. “I worked for Miss Margaret thirty-eight years. She had her a baby girl with the colic and the only thing that stopped the hurting was to hold her. So I made me a wrap. I tied her up on my waist, toted her around all day with me for a entire year. That baby like to break my back. Put ice packs on it ever night and still do. But I loved that girl. And I loved Miss Margaret.Miss Margaret always made me put my hair up in a rag, say she know coloreds don't wash their hair. Counted ever piece a silver after I done the polishing. When Miss Margaret die of the lady problems thirty years later, I go to the funeral. Her husband hug me, cry on my shoulder. When it's over, he give me a envelope. Inside a letter from Miss Margaret reading, 'Thank you. For making my baby stop hurting. I never forgot it.'Callie takes off her black-rimmed glasses, wipes her eyes.If any white lady reads my story, that's what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you-she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table-it's so good.” - Kathryn Stockett

16. “It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God's will, and a Christian Republic is born.” - Hooman Majd

17. “Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.” - Dan Simmons

18. “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.” - Charles Baudelaire

19. “He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.” - Stephen Crane

20. “Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.” - G.K. Chesterton

21. “There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.” - Peyton C. March

22. “So, now I've been to see a drug counselor who told me I need to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.” - Libba Bray

23. “Even things that are true can be proved.” - Oscar Wilde

24. “Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.” - John Barrymore

25. “Irony takes nothing away from pathos.” - Gustave Flaubert

26. “The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.” - Christopher Hitchens

27. “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…” - Christopher Hitchens

28. “Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.” - Christopher Hitchens

29. “One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.” - Christopher Hitchens

30. “He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.” - Mark Twain

31. “Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony.” - Lemony Snicket

32. “To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.” - Roger Zelazny

33. “I cannot say much for this Monarch's Sense--Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was on the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very difuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen against, and show my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information.” - Jane Austen

34. “When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.” - Albert Camus

35. “Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.” - Brando Skyhorse

36. “Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.” - Colleen McCullough

37. “I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.” - Tobias Wolff

38. “These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.” - Sarah Dessen

39. “People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.” - Terry Pratchett

40. “Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)” - Andrew Young

41. “I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.” - Sherman Alexie

42. “Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?” - Patricia Cornwell

43. “Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it.” - Maureen Johnson

44. “Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware things are not supposed to fall up. For that matter, criminals aren’t supposed to get it on with crimefighters. Yet here we were: Catwoman, Batman, icy, sweat, dripping, up. Sometimes life is like that.” - Chris Dee

45. “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.” - Diana Rowland

46. “I can’t help but think that if she was going to kill herself, she might as well have done it earlier. Perhaps when I was a toddler. Or better yet, an infant. It certainly would have made my life easier. I asked my uncle Hugh (who is not really my uncle, but he is married to the stepsister of my current mother’s brother’s wife and he lives quite closeand he’s a vicar) if I would be going to hell for such a thought. He said no, that frankly, it made a lot of sense to him. I do think I prefer his parish to my own.” - Julia Quinn

47. “The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.” - C.S. Friedman

48. “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.” - Muriel Barbery

49. “It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.” - Wendell Berry

50. “There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?” - Salley Vickers

51. “...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mould. It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

52. “What do you take me for? That fool Socrates, who upheld the law at the cost of his own death – just to be ironic? I suspect that act was actually the result of his secret embarrassment of his hideous nose.” - Benson Bruno

53. “Gods can screw anything and anybody. For reference, see history.Atticus O'Sullivan” - Kevin Hearne

54. “You know,' she begins, 'you fellas ought to be looking after each other.' Her comment makes me realise that through the lies, the greatest irony is that we are looking out for each other. It's just that in the end, we're letting her down. That's what injures us.” - Markus Zusak

55. “But the people only talked about how ugly her face looked. No one even bothered to mention what a sweet, kindhearted girl she was. Now, don’t be amazed! That is just the nature of humans, to notice the one flaw among a person’s ten good qualities.” - Janaki Sooriyarachchi

56. “Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.” - Peter Bogdonavich

57. “He sure put things into words good.” - S.E. Hinton

58. “I think sometimes people think cheerful is a synonym for dumb, so no one is ever cheerful.” - Mindy Kaling

59. “Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts!” - Courtney Milan

60. “As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: "I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.” - Milton Rokeach

61. “Religious people were big on saying "the tongue is a mighty weapon, so use it wisely," and then forsaking this claim when the music director slept with the minister's wife or when the youth minister did what he did.” - Tiffany King

62. “I am not going to give you disclaimers about what you can expect to find in my story. I went through menopause recently and find I don't much care about anyone's sensibilities anymore. I am called BadSquirrel for a reason. Considering how incredibly rude and grouchy I have become, I expect all of you to be extremely grateful to the QMBG (Queen Mother Bitch Goddess for those of you who haven't kept up) for all of the good warm fuzzy bits of my story. If you like it, it's because she went through it and took out all the really disturbing parts and made me behave.” - BadSquirrel

63. “If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious Pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive lenity of the government, had at length provoked the divine justice.” - Edward Gibbon

64. “Then you do not belong here. Death holds no sweetness in this house. We are not warriors, nor soldiers, nor swaggering bravos puffed up with pride. We do not kill to serve some lord, to fatten our purses, to stroke our vanity. We never give the gift to please ourselves. Nor do we choose the ones we kill. We are but servants of the God of Many Faces.""Valar dohaeris." All men must serve."You know the words, but you are too proud to serve. A servant must be humble and obedient.""I obey. I can be humbler than anyone."That made him chuckle. "You will be the very goddess of humility, I am sure. But can you pay the price?""What price?""The price is you. The price is all you have and all you ever hope to have. We took your eyes and gave them back. Next we will take your ears, and you will walk in silence. You will give us your legs and crawl. You will be no one's daughter, no one's wife, no one's mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will not be your own.” - George R.R. Martin

65. “Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?” - Anne Frank

66. “Don't we all hope to die with a smile on our faces?” - Jeff O'Brien

67. “Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?” - Philip Pullman

68. “Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.” - Stephen King

69. “Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?” - Michael Moorcock

70. “Yup, believe it: I was born on March 28, yet my name is April.” - Sarah Mlynowski

71. “I don’t get you people. You watch the Godfather on television and tons of people are getting shot and stabbed to death, blood splattering everywhere and it is entertaining. But, when they killed a horse, people were outraged.” - Mario Stinger

72. “The only ironic thing about that song is that it's called 'Ironic' and it is written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic when you think about it. (on Alanis Morissette's 'Ironic')” - Ed Byrne

73. “I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.” - Rachel Hartman

74. “You might as well laugh at yourself,everyone else is.” - BJ Neblett

75. “How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!” - Leo Tolstoy

76. “The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.” - Christopher S. Hyatt

77. “My momma always said, 'You and Elvis are pretty good, but y'all ain't no Chuck Berry.” - Jerry Lee Lewis

78. “He smelled the smells of commerce and listened to the cursing of the sailors, both of which he admired: the former, as it reeked of wealth, and the latter because it combined his two other chief preoccupations, these being theology and anatomy.” - Roger Zelazny

79. “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 wait a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!' But they always do.” - Elizabeth Wein

80. “I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.” - Genevieve Ross

81. “- Senhor Uhtred! - Como sempre, Willibald reagiu à minha provocação. - Esse peixe - ele apontou o dedo trêmulo na direção dos ossos - foi um dos dois que Nosso Senhor usou para alimentar 5 mil pessoas!- O outro devia ser um peixe incrivelmente grande - respondi. - O que era? Uma baleia?” - Bernard Cornwell

82. “Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness.” - Shannon L. Alder

83. “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.” - Oscar Wilde