here is truth

"We count our miseries carefully, and accept our blessings without much thought."

Chinese Proverb

literacki

"If I’m sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?"

José Saramago, Blindness

literacki

"Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage?"

H.P Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

quoth the madman

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity."

Paulo Coelho, Alchemist

quoth the madman

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

literacki

"If we tear out the last pages of the New Testament, then what we see set forth is a religion of loneliness and human grandeur."

~ Albert Camus - Notebooks

quoth the madman

"A truth that has merely been learnt adheres to us only as an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does, or at most like transplanted skin; but truth won by thinking for our self is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us."

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Thinking For Yourself”

quoth the madman

"I see it all perfectly: there are two possibilities, one can either do this or do that. My honest opinion and friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it, you will regret both."

~ Soren Kierkegaard

maxim

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
—Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,”

quoth the madman

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."

~ Alan Watts

literacki

"The species alone has infinite life, and is therefore capable of infinite desire, infinite satisfaction, and infinite sufferings. But these are here imprisoned in the narrow breast of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, when such a breast seems ready to burst, and can find no expression for the intimation of infinite rapture of infinite pain with which it is filled."

— Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation

quoth the madman

"Here the ways of men divide: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche (Letter to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, 1885).

quoth the madman

"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

— Oscar Wilde 

quoth the madman

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.
I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made
me.
Or half of this gap, since there’s also life…

~ Fernando Pessoa as Alvaro de Campos

raw

 

NYSM

literacki

"Don’t fear God,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure."

Philodemus Herculaneum Papyrus, 1005, 4.9-14

quoth the madman

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."

~ Brendan Gill

quoth the madman

"The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things."

~ Franz Kafka

quoth the madman

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

~Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

quoth the madman

"A man who is a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him."

~ Søren Kierkegaard

massive

ponderous

One of the most frustrating parts of studying philosophy is that I always find myself in dialogue with the dead — and the unfortunate reality of talking to ghosts is that it tends to be a one-sided conversation.

quoth the madman

"Hell is a special favor reserved for those who have asked for it insistently."

~ Albert Camus - Notebooks 1942-1951

the play's the thing

It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in’t.

~ Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene III

quoth the madman

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

~ Anne Sexton

quoth the madman

"Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved."

~ Albert Camus - Notebooks 1942- 1951

quoth the madman

"Any fulfillment is bondage. It obliges one to a higher fulfillment."

~ Albert Camus - Notebooks 1942-1951

quoth the madman

"A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once."

~Pascal

literacki

"How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!"
~Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago

literacki

I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.

~ Søren Kierkegaard, from Either/Or 

quoth the madman

There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. ~Jorge Luis Borges

quoth the madman

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

~ James Baldwin