ponder

…my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

—	Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

ponder

“We should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes.
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”

— Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo

quoth the madman

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy.
Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
~Albert Camus

quoth the madman

It is said that Nietzsche after the break with Lou Salome, in a period of complete solitude, crushed and uplifted at the same time by the perspective of the huge work he had to carry on without any help, used to walk at night on the mountains overlooking the gulf of Genoa and light great bonfires of leaves and branches which he would watch as they burned. I have often dreamed of those fires

Camus

quoth the madman

My memories have turned into anxieties.

Fernando Pessoa

ponder

"Oh I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t. ”

—Dylan Thomas, November or December 1936

pondering

“Waiting upon something is based on our belonging in that upon which we wait.”
— Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking

ponder

‘Nature,’ a torturer of genius, steeped in herself and her work, exalts with good reason: there is not a moment when what is alive fails to tremble, to make others tremble. Pity is a strange luxury only the most perfidious and the fiercest creature could invent, out of a need to punish and torture itself – out of ferocity, still.”
— E.M. Cioran - The Trouble with Being Born

literacki

"There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation’s scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there."

~André Breton: Five Ways to Kill a Man

ponder

Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. 

Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. 

There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.

— Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

literacki

"There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight … tonight you could almost touch time."
~Ray Bradbury, “Night Meeting”, from The Martian Chronicles

ponderous

"All that exists will soon change. Either it will be turned into vapour, if all matter is unity, or it will be scattered in atoms."
— Marcus Aurelius

ponder

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
~Aristotle

ponder

"The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by."

— Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian

pondering

"One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself."

— Anne Carson. Nox.

ponder

"Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future."

— Robert Smithson. ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’

pondering

My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked through with it. If one were to go by the blotter, though, nothing of what has been written would remain."
 — Walter Benjanin.

literacki

"Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring./ Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake."

— Wallace Stevens. from ‘Holiday in Reality.’

quoth the madman

"From early on I have suspected that the so important-sounding task “Know thyself” is a ruse of a cabal of priests. They are trying to seduce man from activity in the outside world, to distract him with impossible demands; they seek to draw him into a false inner contemplation. Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world–the world which he only comes to know in himself and himself only in it."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

literacki

Something had just happened to me. Something forbidden. Something strange, filthy, shameless, and beautiful.

Herta Müller, tr. by Philip Boehm, from The Hunger Angel: A Novel

pondering

there is two
types of tired,
I suppose
one is a dire need of sleep
the other is a dire need of peace

Mandeq Ahmed

ponder

I am in a mixed mood, flying before the fury of my own devils.

Virginia Woolf, “Letter to Vita Sackville-West”

pondering

Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean?

Or do you just enjoy baffling the people who try to creep a little nearer?

~Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf c. August 1923

ponder

I am always between two worlds, always in conflict. I would like sometimes to rest, to be at peace, to choose a nook, make a final choice, but I can’t. Some nameless, indescribable fear and anxiety keeps me on the move. On certain evenings like this, I would like to feel whole. Only a half of me is sitting by the fire.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934, Anaïs Nin

ponder

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
-David Foster Wallace

quoth the madman

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoth the madman

“Will madness arrive on the schedule? I don’t know and I don’t seek an answer–just a small quiet space between not knowing, not wanting to know, and finally finding out.”
 -Charles Bukowski

quoth the madman

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
-Vincent van Gogh

quoth the madman

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

quoth the madman

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

quoth the madman

 

“Do it or don’t do it–you will regret both.” -Søren Kierkegaard

ponder

“He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

ponder

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

literacki

“Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?
It is not for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men–even the man who insults and oppresses him–have a natural community.”

-Albert Camus, The Rebel

ponder

Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by desire and illusion.

Arthur Schopenhauer

literacki

And I would have been quite satisfied with intelligence.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

quoth the madman

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible. 

Saint Augustine

quoth the madman

Love is a game in which one always cheats

Honore de Balzac

quoth the madman

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Honore de Balzac

ponder

Only where there are graves are there resurrections.

Friedrich Nietzsche

quoth the madman

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

quoth the madman

Live to the point of tears, in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself

Albert Camus

ponder

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

ponder

Disputes multiply as if everything is uncertain, and are managed as if everything is certain.

David Hume

ponder

“Entry into real life: one rescues one’s personal life from death by living a common life.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §194.

ponder

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

Novalis

quoth the madman

To say it again. Public opinions—private laziness.

Nietzsche; HH

quoth the madman

Help everybody to find his own level, instead of trying to impose the same on all alike.

Crowley

literacki

Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demigods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in this world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

literacki

Darkness and concealment are the dominant characteristic of the primordial time. All life first becomes and develops in the night; for this reason, the ancients called the night the fertile mother of things, indeed, together with chaos, the oldest of beings.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling | The Ages of the World

literacki

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy

ponderous

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant.
You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine’s Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world’s puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

~Hermann Hesse, from ‘Peter Camenzind’

literacki

Read the New Testament as a book of seduction: virtue is appropriated in the instinct that with it one can capture public opinion.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §210

pondering

“The origin of religion lies in extreme feelings of power which, because they are strange, take men by surprise.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

literacki

Things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own–they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of confusion and desire.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, 2, Part 1, Beyond Good and Evil.

ponder

The misanthrope experiences -preceding excessive socializing-an inexplicable guilt akin to that of the Christian after sex.

pondering

I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others.
My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.

~Arthur Schopenhauer

ponder

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

ponder

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
~Crowley

ponder

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
~George Santayana

ponder

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

literacki

“Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”

— Nick Hornby, Songbook

literacki

“We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be unfollowed and defriended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings.”

— Ryan O’Connell, You Don’t Have to Be Friends with Everybody 

ponderous

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

wordy rappinghood

“muditā”

— (noun) An untranslatable Sanskrit word, muditā is described as the feeling of happiness on behalf of someone else. Muditā connotes one of the most sincere and purest manifestations of happiness. This joy comes from an established sense of self, where a sympathetic or vicarious joy exists and you get pleasure from others’ well-being as opposed to envy.

quoth the madman

“If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.”

— Carl Jung

quoth the madman

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”

— Carl Jung

quoth the madman

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.” — Isaac Newton

the play's the thing

 

“Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my heart's core, in my heart of heart, as I do thee.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

ponder

An intelligent man knows Frankenstein wasn’t the monster. A wise man knows that Frankenstein was the monster.

ponder

Never make fun of someone’s passion because that’s the thing that saves them from the world.

ponder

When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth

ars poetica

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

Louise Glück —
“Persephone the Wanderer”

quoth the madman

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Gustave Flaubert.

ponderous

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

Groucho Marx.