pondering

"I feel so shut out, I’m always homesick. But when I get home. I find it’s something else I’m longing for."
- Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman)

ponder

"How easy it is to be “deep”; all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws."
- Emil Cioran

ponder

"Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?" - Carl Gustav Jung, from ‘History in Transition’

quoth the madman

 

"Only the mediocre are always at their best." - Jean Giraudoux

literacki

 

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years." 

- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

quoth the madman

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself"
 - Martin Heidegger

quoth the madman

"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along."
- Carl Jung

literacki

"As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know."
 - C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

ponder

"Other people’s wisdom helps me not at all. Anything they can tell me I’ve told myself in 100 sleepless hours."
- Franz Kafka, from Letters To Felice 

ponder

"Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding." - Plato, The Republic

quoth the madman

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." - Marcel Proust

ars poetica

 

"I am struggling with my own shade—
No struggle is more merciless." 

- Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; “Additons: To Poem Without a Hero”

literacki

 

“She had departed from the early morning of my eyes (while eyelids had fulfilled their sun's favour) she had hidden behind the shadow of my desire”" -
– Odysseus Elytis, The Sovereign Sun

literacki

"In moments of great joy, he invariably felt a sensation of melancholy come over him—he could not tell why." - The Idiot, F. M. Dostoevsky

literacki

I drink up every tear you weep - they are the holiest joy I know."
- Charles Baudelaire, “sad madrigal”

quoth the madman

"The lines of thy eyebrows and forehead are quite, quite interesting: they are like ruins of strange palaces, buried in ashes after an earthquake." - Leonid Andreyev

literacki

However personal they may be, all these human sounds are transitory."
- Marcel Proust, from In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

quoth the madman

There are as many kinds of love, as there are hearts." - Leo Tolstoy

quoth the madman

"If I love you, it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness."
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1:

quoth the madman

"Must one suffer eternally, or eternally flee from beauty? Nature, pitiless enchantress, always victorious rival, let me be! Tempt no longer my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist screams with fear before being vanquished."
 - Charles Baudelaire

quoth the madman

 

"Compassion is the basis of morality." - Arthur Schopenhauer

quoth the madman

"I would rather die of fire than of void." - Emil Cioran

literacki

"My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me."
 - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

ars poetica

"The illusion that kept me going
Was a queen only on stage:
Once undressed, her reign was over"
- Fernando Pessoa

quoth the madman

I’m already my future corpse
Only a dream links me to myself
The hazy and belated dream
Of what I should have been - a wall
Around my abandoned garden."

- Fernando Pessoa

quoth the madman

"You pick roses? Aren’t you just picking
Colorful motifs of death? But pick roses.
Why not pick them, since it pleases you
And everything is its own dissolution?"
- Fernando Pessoa

quoth the madman

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
- Carl Jung

quoth the madman

"I watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult."
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 6: 1955-1966

ponder

"And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living." 

- Fernando Pessoa

ponder

I like to serve; I do not like to be a slave; slave to my past, slave to my future plans, slave to my faith, to my doubt, to my hatred, or to my love.
If I like to serve, whether a creature or a thought, and to renounce myself through love, I intend that the lease, freely consented to, should be constantly renewable and that reason or love should constantly dictate the clauses to me anew." '

- André Gide, from a journal entry featured in The Journals Of Andre Gide Vol II 1914-1927

quoth the madman

I am a law only of mine own, I am not a law for all. This - is now my way, - where is yours?

Friedrich Nietzsche

quoth the madman

I no longer see in me anything but cracks, impotence, useless agitation. I feel corrupt; everything that I touch is corrupt.

Georges Bataille

ponder

We began with the thought that animism might be the default mode of human existence… and anything else, a temporary aberration.

‘Sensing and Knowing: David Abram in conversation with Dougald Hine’

ponderous

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself

ponderous

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

H.D. Thoreau

ponder

"Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

ponder

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things." - Rainer Maria Rilke

ponder

“When Shelley’s corpse washed ashore, a friend identified it by a copy of Keats’s 1820 volume in the coat pocket, which he knew Shelley had taken with him. Then, after cremation in which Shelley’s heart, hardened by calcium, did not burn, this same friend snatched it from the embers and presented it to Mary Shelley, who kept it thereafter in her desk, wrapped in a copy of ‘Adonais.”

quoth the madman

"Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love."
- Marc Chagall

quoth the madman

 

Blue skies make us sadder than gray skies because they offer us hope which we do not have the courage to entertain."
- Emil Cioran

ars poetica

"I have sung over so many abysses,
And lived in so many mirrors." 

- Anna Akhmatova, from The First Warning 

ponder

"Sometimes I dream of a remote and vaporous love like the schizophrenia of a perfume."
- Emil Cioran

quoth the madman

"Sincerity is probably the most daring form of bravery"
-  W. Somerset Maugham

ponder

 

"But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep - into evil." 

- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

quoth the madman

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

quoth the madman

 

"I would rather die of fire than of void." 

- Emil Cioran

ars poetica

 

The most reliable thing on earth is sorrow, / And the most enduring—" 

- Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; “In May”

ponder

"I should have a hell for my anger, a hell for my pride – a hell for every caress; a proper symphony of hells."
 - Arthur Rimbaud; Selected Poems & Letters

ponder

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. 
~Ludwig Börne

quoth the madman

 

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. 

~Edward Albee

pondering

Gazing at the stars will not save you from the abyss at your feet.
 ~Dr. Idel Dreimer

quoth the madman

 

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

 ~Edward R. Murrow

quoth the madman

I am a part of all that I have met. 
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

pondering

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. 
~Aesop

ponder

One epitaph is sufficiently comprehensive for most persons:—Here lies A MORTAL. In that word is comprised a brief space of trivial joys, and trivial sorrows. The rest is a phantom. ~William Benton Clulow, Horæ Otiosæ, 1833

quoth the madman

We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation. 
~François VI de la Rochefoucault

ponder

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

~Albert Einstein

pondering

You can tell so much about a person by the way they leave you.

Redvers Bailey

ponder

la douleur exquise

(idiom) A French, untranslatable phrase, describing the heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have. To say this phrase is synonymous with unrequited love limits its beauty. Unrequited love describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t corresponding, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise evokes the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated.

literacki

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

literacki

 

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

quoth the madman

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
-Francis Bacon

ponder

Personality has power to uplift, power to depress, power to curse, and power to bless.

Paul Harris

literacki

"I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."
~Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self