ponder

"I’ll relieve the cause—but not the symptom"
— Dr. Frank-N-Furter (a scientist)

pondering

“Nothingness haunts being.”            

— Jean-Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness

ponderous

“Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness
of the soul.”

— Allen Ginsberg, in a letter to Jack Kerouac

ponder

Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double. It is the abyss of the present, the time without present with which I have no relation, towards which I am unable to project myself. For in it I do not die. I forfeit the power of dying. In this abyss they die — they never cease to die, and they never succeed in dying.

~Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?

pondering

A starry sky, for instance—look, that is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions. So much in criticism of myself and in praise of you.

~Vincent van Gogh, “Excerpts from Letters,” Theories of Modern Art

literacki

The universe is a solitary place, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce in solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.

~Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

ponder

Our world is the cinder of innumerable living beings.

ponder

~In contrast to imitation, which sustains belief in preexisting “organic” reality, simulation retroactively “denaturalizes” reality itself by way of disclosing the mechanism responsible for its generation.

“We cannot simply say: discard the images and you see reality. If we discard the images nothing remains. Just some pure abstraction.”
- slavoj zizek on cyberspace

ponder

When everyone else’s life looks amazing by comparison, remember that what you get from most folks on social media outlets like this one is their ‘highlight reel’.
In my experience, it’s not about ‘perfect’, it’s about ‘better’. And for humans, being ‘better’ also has it’s highs and lows as well.
It’s not about not having problems, it’s about having a *better* class of problems and about being better suited to deal with them.
 

ponder

Being cause of myself, doing things because they are a duty that is caused not from outside is a burden and the temptation to seek relief from this burden through perversion was Sade’s temptation.

Andre Vantino on Zizek’s Sade - “The Sadean perversion emerges as the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant’s avoiding the consequences of his breakthrough. Sade is the symptom of Kant,” Zizek thus concludes.

ponder

“Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

—   Michael Scott

quoth the madman



"the very injunction to be happy and just to enjoy yourself can turn into a ferocious superego monster. ..The very lack of explicit prohibitions burdens the subject with an often unbearable guilt."

- Slavoj Zizek

ponder

"We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary."
- Lenin, Socialism and War (1915)

ponder

Consciousness could easily be a curse. …Melancholia speaks of it best: “What’s the point in eating?! I’ll only hunger again.” ..the desire for the death of the other is a defense against the insatiability of desire itself."

ponder

"One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore."

- André Gide, The Counterfeiters

ponder

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears." - Marcus Aurelius

literacki

"Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?"

- Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

ponder

"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them."

- How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

ponder

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

quoth the madman

“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.”

– Benjamin Franklin