Andrew Hugill: Pataphysics: A Useless Guide

"If physics proposes: 'You have a brother and he likes cheese,' then metaphysics replies: 'If you have a brother, he likes cheese.' But 'Pataphysics says: 'You don't have a brother and he likes cheese.'"
- Georges Perec

"Obviously 'Pataphysics does not even need to exist in order to exist."

"The apostrophe resembles a hiccup before the loud belch that is the word."

"To understand pataphysics is to fail to understand pataphysics."

The spiral is the primary symbol of pataphysics and has become a badge of the Collège, with a complicated hierarchy of colors and sizes designating rank within the organization.

'Pataphysics is a system in which there are no rules, only exceptions (or, more properly, where each exception creates its own rule), and where everything is equivalent—nothing is more important than anything else.

What distinguishes pataphysics from other artistic/philosophical movements that developed in the period from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century…is that it is not so much a movement as a collection of ideas. Since these ideas stand in counterpoint to science, rather than art, pataphysics has managed to sustain itself most effectively, finding fertile ground in any mind that thinks the objective truths of empiricism at least demand a little playful tweaking, if not wholesale reevaluation. Which is not to say that pataphysics is simply antiscientific, or even antirational. As always, the relationship between the parodistic aspects of pataphysics and the thing it parodies is complex: ironic, or even, as Marcel Duchamp would have said, meta-ironic. But we can say that pataphysics is subjective, privileging the particular above the general, the imaginary above the real, the exceptional above the ordinary, the contradictory above the axiomatic. Not that there is any choice in these matters: in pataphysics this is just the way things are.

"Contemporary science is founded upon the principle of induction: most people have seen a certain phenomenon precede or follow some other phenomenon most often, and conclude therefrom that it will ever be thus. Apart from other considerations, this is true only in the majority of cases, depends on the point of view, and is codified only for convenience—if that!"
- Alfred Jarry (Doctor Faustroll)

"'Pataphysics, then, is an inner attitude, a discipline, a science, and an art, which allows each person to live his life as an exception, proving no law but his own." 
- Roger Shattuck