pondering

“What’s the worst thing I’ve stolen? Probably little pieces of other people’s lives. Where I’ve either wasted their time or hurt them in some way. That’s the worst thing you can steal, the time of other people. You just can’t get that back.”

—   Chester Bennington

pondering

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

—   The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

pondering

"On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are. We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals."

— Paper Towns (John Green) pg. 198 

pondering

"This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence."

— Leonard Bernstein

ponder

"The first thing to do is to keep silent — to abolish audiences and learn to be your own judge. To keep a balance between an active concern for the body and an awareness of being alive. To give up all feeling that the world owes you a living and devote yourself to achieve two kinds of freedom: freedom from money, and freedom from your own vanity and cowardice. To have rules and to stick to them…If this price is paid, then there is one chance in ten of escaping from the most sordid and miserable of conditions: that of the man who works."

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

quoth the madman

"The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking the world to give him."

— Albert Camus - Notebooks 1935 - 1942

ponderous

"What do we desire when we look at beauty? To be beautiful ourselves. We imagine that beauty carries with it great happiness, but this is a mistake."

— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human, aphorism 149: The slow arrow of beauty

ponder

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
~W.B. Yeats

quoth the madman

 

"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

ponderous

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."

— Emile M. Cioran

ponder

"We are afraid of the enormity of the possible."

— Emile M. Cioran

ponder

“You are so good. So good, you’re always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you’re gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, don’t it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.”

— Silas House, This is My Heart for You

literacki

“Dear hands—I know you love poetry, but you can’t bring a metaphor to a fist fight.”

— Rudy Fransisco, excerpt from “The Body”

ponder

"…always Nietzsche speaks, struggles, suffers for himself alone. He addresses no one and no one responds. Worst of all: no one is listening."

— Stefan Zweig - “Nietzsche”

literacki

"Desire that wants only the same cannot escape conflict in order to appropriate the other’s transcendence."

- Luce Irigaray, To Be Two p. 18

pondering

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."

- Marcel Proust

ponder

"For Self-Consciousness, and hence philosophy, to exist, then, there must be in Man not only positive, passive contemplation, that merely reveals being, but also negating Desire, and hence Action that transforms the given being. The human I must be an I of Desire – that is, an active I, a negating I, an I that transforms Being and creates a new being by destroying the given being."

- Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 38.

ponder

 

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

- Jonathan Safran Foer

ponder

"It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality."

- Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

truthiness

"Life is a pile of insignificant and ironic ruins."

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Prince of my heart

ponder

"The love I’ve known is the love of
two people staring
not at each other, but in the same direction."

- From To the Dead by Frank Bidart

pondering

"A space must be maintained or desire ends."

- Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

ponder

"Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."

- Walter Benjamin

ponder

 

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And a length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

~Proverbs of Hell - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

ponder

"All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

 

But the following Contraries to these are True.
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight"
~The Voice of the Devil - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

ponderous

"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water."
~Proverbs of Hell - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

pondering

"Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits.
The cistern contains; the fountain overflows."

~Proverbs of Hell - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

pondering

"As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey."

~Proverbs of Hell - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

ponder

 

"The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird of the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or Too much!"

~Proverbs of Hell - William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

ponderous

“He had it, and one saw by looking at him that he did; that was all… . He had to an eminent degree a thoroughly demonic nature, so that hardly anyone else can be compared to him. The Greeks counted demonic natures of that sort among the demigods… . His life was the procession of a demigod… . One may very aptly say of him that he found himself in a state of perpetual inspiration… . He was one of the most productive men who have ever lived.”

–Goethe on Napoleon

ponder

"What do we desire when we look at beauty? To be beautiful ourselves. We imagine that beauty carries with it great happiness, but this is a mistake."

— Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human, aphorism 149: The slow arrow of beauty

quoth the madman

“Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.”

—   Robert Smithson

ponder

“Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.”

—   James Luceno,

literacki

“Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.”

—   Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

ponder

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

—   William Shakespeare, Hamlet

literacki

“Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot.”

—   Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi