He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean Luc Godard
ars poetica
Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light
Oscar Wilde
l'appel du vide
What is Romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §370
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §370
ponder
I attribute capital esthetic and moral values to food in general, and to spinach in particular. The opposite of shapeless spinach, is armor. I love eating suits of arms, in fact I love all shell fish… food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate.
Salvador Dali, from Les Diners de Gala
ars poetica
Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “The Masque of Anarchy”
ars poetica
Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter, that hunts on a lonely hill.
“The Lonely Hunter”, by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp)
quoth the madman
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
Vincent van Gogh
l'appel du vide
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yea-sayer.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §276
ars poetica
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “The Masque of Anarchy”
ponder
The animal’s heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm; on the heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise.
William Harvey, De Motu Cordis et Sanguines, “Dedication to the King”, 1628
literacki
I believe that it is a fine thing to struggle for life. It is not with pleasures and with joys that a man grows proud. Proud and gay in the roots of his soul he becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.
Robert Walser, The Walk
quoth the madman
There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.
Benjamin Franklin
ponder
Or is not a poison one of the mysteries of nature? …For what thing is there, created by God, which is not endowed with some great gift for the good of mankind? Why then should poisons be thrown aside and despised when it is not the poison but nature that is being tried? …He who despises poison is ignorant of what resides therein.
Paracelsus, “Seven Arguments, Answering to Several of the Detractions of His Envious Critics”, 3rd argument by way of describing the new prescriptions
ponder
"Monster in face, monster in soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
last words
No herb grows in the gardens against the power of death.
Sigismund III Vasa, on his deathbed
L'appel du vide
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge - a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
re-pondering
~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 15
quoth the madman
Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of my own moods, I am never far; my thoughts always circle around you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
ponderous
Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism”
literacki
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
ars poetica
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, “The Tyger”
ponder
Or is not a poison one of the mysteries of nature? …For what thing is there, created by God, which is not endowed with some great gift for the good of mankind? Why then should poisons be thrown aside and despised when it is not the poison but nature that is being tried? …He who despises poison is ignorant of what resides therein.
Paracelsus, “Seven Arguments, Answering to Several of the Detractions of His Envious Critics”, 3rd argument by way of describing the new prescriptions
literacki
I believe that it is a fine thing to struggle for life. It is not with pleasures and with joys that a man grows proud. Proud and gay in the roots of his soul he becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.
Robert Walser, The Walk
L'appel du vide
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong—nor do they call it poison.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §19
L'appel du vide
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946
ponder
If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies
and ceases to be what you love.
Osho
literacki
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
literacki
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”
The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
quoth the madman
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
literacki
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.
pondering
The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are bold as a lion.
Bible, Proverbs 28:1
ponderous
Whomever I love, I love better in winter than in summer; I mock my enemies better and more heartily since winter dwells in my home. Heartily, in truth, even when I crawl into bed; even then my hidden happiness still laughs and is full of pranks; even the dream that lies to me still laughs. I—a crawler? Never in my life have I crawled before the mighty; and if ever I lied, I lied out of love. Therefore I am glad in the wintry bed too. A simple bed warms me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty, and in winter it is most faithful to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
pondering
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
pondering
Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
ponder
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Heraclitus, Fragments
L'appel du vide
Suspicious. – To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions of morality?
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 101
L'appel du vide
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 101
words and music
Hear me now
Oh thou bleak and unbearable world,
Thou art base and debauched as can be;
And a knight with his banners all bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee!
Man of La Mancha (I, Don Quixote),
L'appel du vide
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 492
ponder
Ah! Mon ami! At last I am about to leave this world, where the heart must either break, or become hard as bronze.
Last words, Nicolas Chamfort
L'appel du vide
"Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely."
~Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Dirge without Music”
ars poetica
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
~Stacie Cassarino, “Summer Solstice,” from Zero at the Bone
ponder
~Maximo Parkaz
literacki
~“Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
ponder
ars poetica
I am being pulled by two opposing forces:
a thirst for life
and a despair for the hopeless;
towards home.
Wherever
that may
be.
~Opposing Forces, T.Wuggles
ponder
"I feel a curious stirring within me, as if
undreamed of things were forcing their way up into the light and I’m
helpless against them."
- Albert Camus, from Caligula & Three Other Plays
pondering
"You have all the power—you can break the silence
with even with the smallest sounds. And then you don’t want to do it.
You try to be as quiet as you can be."
- Daniel A. Gross, from This Is Your Brain On Science
▼
ponder
"We hesitate. Wary, ironic, disillusioned. What a
difficult bridge this present has become! How many, many trips do we
need to undertake so as not to be empty and invisible."
- Susan Sontag, from I, etcetera: Stories
▼
pondering
“‘Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above
is like that which is below.” – Isaac Newton
ponder
“I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
ponder
“Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”
— Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
ponder
“Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more & more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.””
— Franz Kafka, Diaries
literacki
“Death is a liberation because to die is to need no one else.”
— The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
quoth the madman
“Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world”
— Albert Camus, Notebooks I 1935 - 1942
quoth the madman
Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016, RIP)
ponder
“We are the test of a salvation of which we know almost nothing.”
— François Laruelle, Christo-Fiction
ponder
"If death delivers us from the world, whether into paradise or hell, oblivion or having-been, birth introduces us to a world that is not of our making and to a past that we have the impossible task of making our own."
— Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude
ponder
The Bardic tradition of magic, when satires were justifiably more feared than curses and when the creator was respected as a powerful magician rather than as someone getting by out on the fringes of the entertainment industry, is one that today’s artists, occultists and writers would do well to reacquaint themselves with.
You can kill or cure with a word. Get off of your knees.
quoth the madman
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
literacki
Crushes are fun. Or at least they’re supposed to be fun as long as you keep them that way. As long as you don’t get emotionally invested or fixated or keep imagining your reality to be what it is not – crushes are fun. But if you expect too much or feel too easily, you might end up with self-inflicted heart ache which just leaves you feeling empty-handed or just plain empty. And all of this for someone who never even promised you anything from the start.
ars poetica
"We don’t know how to say goodbye:
we wander on, shoulder to shoulder.
Already the sun is going down;
you’re moody, I am your shadow.
Let’s step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.
Or else let’s sit in the graveyard
on the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
in which we shall always be together."
— Anna Akhmatova, from Poems, trans. Max Hayward
we wander on, shoulder to shoulder.
Already the sun is going down;
you’re moody, I am your shadow.
Let’s step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.
Or else let’s sit in the graveyard
on the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
in which we shall always be together."
literacki
"Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s ‘I’ at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene."
— Virginia Woolf, The Years ars poetica
"The Zeroes — taught us — Phosphorous —
We learned to like the Fire"
— Emily Dickinson, from “[689]”
We learned to like the Fire"
quoth the madman
"You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation, by your victory."
James Larkin
quoth the madman
"There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve."
— William S. Burroughs
quoth the madman
"How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?"
— Sylvia Plath
quoth the madman
"In every guilty man, there is an innocent part. This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting. We do not think enough about pain."
— Albert Camus, in a letter to Jean Grenier
quoth the madman
"We are free of the old false certainties of society, and we are at loss for any figure of authority that would excuse us, or limit us or take away our anxieties by telling us who we are or who we ought to be, or for whom we ought to be. Zizek writes, “there is no longer a Destiny preordaining the contours of my guilt [but this] in no way allows me to enjoy the innocence of the autonomous subject delivered from any externally imposed standard of guilt”"
— Andre Vantino
ponder
— Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
ponder
"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."
— Antonio Gramsci
quoth the madman
"Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
— Carl Sagan
ponder
"The first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”
literacki
"Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
ars poetica
"Once more, ere I move on
And send my glance forward,
Lonely, I raise my hands
To you, to whom I flee,
To whom I, in the deepest depths of my heart,
Have solemnly consecrated altars,
So that, at all times,
His voice would summon me again.
Deeply inscribed upon them glows
The words: To the Unknown God.
I am his, although up till this hour
I’ve remained in the company of sinners:
I am his—and I feel the noosed ropes
That pull me down in the struggle
And, should I flee,
Still force me into his service
I want to know you, unknown one,
You who have reached deep within my soul,
Wandering through my life like a storm,
You incomprehensible one, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you."
And send my glance forward,
Lonely, I raise my hands
To you, to whom I flee,
To whom I, in the deepest depths of my heart,
Have solemnly consecrated altars,
So that, at all times,
His voice would summon me again.
Deeply inscribed upon them glows
The words: To the Unknown God.
I am his, although up till this hour
I’ve remained in the company of sinners:
I am his—and I feel the noosed ropes
That pull me down in the struggle
And, should I flee,
Still force me into his service
I want to know you, unknown one,
You who have reached deep within my soul,
Wandering through my life like a storm,
You incomprehensible one, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, “Once More ere I Move On”
pondered
"Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives."
— Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil
ponder
"For the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentially of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art…In life, a man commits himself, draws in his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
pondering
"Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is the world, and only in the world does he know himself."
— Merleau-Ponty
quoth the madman
"Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them."
— Emile Cioran
quoth the madman
~Virginia Woolf
ponder
~Chinese Proverb
literacki
"That feeling, it’s got no touch with how things are in the day. It was a night kind of knowing, like when you wake up in the dark and hear your own name, your own voice – and then when you get beyond that, when you get to calling a name that’s not your own, but that’s got even more of what’s you in it, more of what’s got your heart…"
- Sidney Beckett, from Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography
▼
pondering
~Maya Angelou
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