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

ponderous

“I dislike people who get out of things unscraped. No scars, no scratches. Agnosceo veteris vestigia flamme. Refined through a scar.”

—   Danilo Kiš 

ponder

“It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

—   Charles Bukowski

ponder

“The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”

—   Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988

quoth the madman

“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

—   Aldous Huxley

quoth the madman

“The rare ability to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.””

—   Aristotle

ponder

“The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts”.”

—   Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

ponderous

“Talibus orabat dictis, arasque tenebat,
cum sic orsa loqui vates:
“Sate sanguine divom, Tros Anchisiade,
facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis”

Then thus replied the prophetess divine:
“O goddess-born of great Anchises’ line,
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way”
    

facilis dēscensus Avernō,  ”the descent to Hell is easy”
From Virgil’s Aeneid (Aeneis, Book VI, lines 124-127), with reference to Avernus, a metonym for the underworld; above translation by John Dryden, 1697)

literacki

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”

—    F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night 

ponderous

“:من اناری را ، می کنم دانه ، به دل می گویم
خوب بود این مردم ، دانه های دلشان پیدا بود
می پرد در چشمم آب انار : اشک می ریزم
~
I am seeding a pomegranate and to my heart I whisper:
“If only the seeds of other’s hearts could be transparent.”
The pomegranate nectar hits my eye: I weep…”

—   سهراب سپهری

literacki

“So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.”

—   Toni Morrison, from Beloved

ponder

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.
— Charles Wright, from section 3 of “Three Poems for the New Year,” The Other Side of the River

ponderous

“I demand unconditional love and complete freedom. That is why I am terrible.”

— Tomaz Salamun

quoth the madman

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

ponder

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.”

—   Friedrich Nietzsche

ponderous

"To dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present."

~Martyn Lloyd-Jones

literacki

“We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.”

—   Virginia Woolf,

literacki

“She seemed to have lost her grasp of time at some point while she was deeply absorbed in her own thoughts. Only her heart continued to tick off the time in its hard, fixed rhythm.”

—   Haruki Murakami,