ponder

“For the movement of faith must be made continually on the strength of the absurd…I for my part can indeed describe the movements of faith, but I cannot perform them. When learning how to make swimming movements, one may be said to describe the movements all right but one isn’t swimming; likewise I can describe the movements of faith but when I am thrown into the water I make other movements, I make movements of infinity, while faith does the opposite, having performed the movements of infinity it makes those of finitude.”

— Soren Kierkegaard, on discussing faith compared to actually practicing.

ponder

“If God exists all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

ponder

“Did God create Man, or did Man create God?”

—NietzscheThis phrase is very frequently misinterpreted, more often than not to imply a rhetorical as opposed to empirical question. Nietzsche meant to leave the reader with much less of an elusive question, or to set a much more definable antecedent, so to say that humans are far more equipped than to instill blind faith any longer in an imperial cosmogony; now we take this statement to include the vast array of technological advancement which exists currently.

quoth the madman

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one”

— Heidegger (German philosopher) 1889 – 1976

quoth the madman

“It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

— Andre Breton

ponder

“Enlightenment is understanding that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to be except exactly who you’re being right now.”

— Neale Donald Walsch

pondering

“You can’t measure time by days the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

ars poetica

“You will exist, right there.
An eternal suspension
within me.”

— Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems

literacki

“Don’t attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you’re lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is know yourself… know what you want.”

— Janet Fitch, White Oleander

ponder

"My sadness belongs to that fringe of melancholy where the loss of the loved being remains abstract. A double lack: I cannot even invest my misery, as I could when suffered from being in love."

- Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse

ponder

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”

— Ingmar Bergman

ars poetica

"I wait gluttonously for God."

~Arthur Rimbaud, Bad Blood, A Season In Hell

ponder

“Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.”

— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

quoth the madman

“Will a self. - Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘know thyself’, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from Assorted Opinions and Maxims.

quoth the madman

“You have more freedom than you are using”

— Dan Attoe

quoth the madman

“Because your existence in time and space is unique, there are lives that only you can touch.”

— Harry Palmer

quoth the madman

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

ponder

“What we see is not made up of what we are seeing but rather from what we are.”

— Fernando Pessoa

ponder

“We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.”

— Charles Bukowski

literacki

“We all carry within us our prisons our crimes, our destructiveness. But to unleash them in the world is not our duty. Out duty consists in fighting them in ourselves and in others.”

— Albert Camus, L'Homme revolte, p. 373.

quoth the madman

“God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”

— Richard Dawkins

quoth the madman

“You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

—  Tristan Tzara

ars poetica

The anagram of the name from its cipher–
birds light across the silhouetted sky.
The birds and not the sky.
Your body leaves a trace in the valley of snow.
The trace and not the body.
— Jacqueline Winter Thomas, from “One Year of Winter”

ars poetica

“But you will lie dead, nor will there be any memory of you, now or in the future, for you will have no share in the Pierian roses, but invisible, in the house of Hades, you will wander to and fro, fluttering with the shadowy ghosts.”

~Sappho

ponder

"Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Every period’s ending is the mind’s paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution."

— Emil Cioran - A Short History of Decay

literacki

That is my triumph; I do not compromise; I am not timid.

 

~Virginia Woolf, The Waves

quoth the madman

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

~Oscar Wilde

literacki

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.

~ John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

quoth the madman

I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.

 

~Zelda Fitzgerald

ponder

It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.

 

~Katherine Mansfield, from Bliss, And Other Short Stories

ponder

What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

 

~Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

literacki

All great and precious things are lonely.

 

~John Steinbeck, East of Eden

literacki

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

 

~Jane Austen, Emma

ponder

I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

 

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

literacki

If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?

 

~Marcus Sedgwick, Midwinterblood

ponder

But whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.

 

~Kate Chopin, The Awakening

ponder

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.

 

~Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

literacki

I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap.
Probably not even real.

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

literacki

Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind.

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

literacki

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of not knowing.

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

literacki

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

ponder

It was stolen. As most beautiful things eventually are.

~S, J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

ponder

This is what happens, of course: men get lost, men vanish, men are erased and reborn.

~S, J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

literacki

Some things can only be seen in the shadows.

~Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

literacki

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

~Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

literacki

At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

~Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

quoth the madman

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

quoth the madman

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

— Charles Bukowski

ponder

Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

quoth the madman

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoth the madman

Let’s say that life is this square of the sidewalk. We are born at this crack and we die at that crack. Now we find ourselves somewhere inside the square and in the process of walking outside of it. Suddenly, we realize our time in here is fleeting. Is our quick experience here pointless? Does anything we say or do in here really matter? Have we done anything important? Have we been happy? Have we made the most of these precious few footsteps?

— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

quoth the madman

It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

— Mark Haddon

quoth the madman

I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.

— Joan Didion

quoth the madman

Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

— Christopher Hitchens

quoth the madman

I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.

— David Lynch

quoth the madman

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

— Richard Dawkins

quoth the madman

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

— Viktor E. Frankl

quoth the madman

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

— Soren Kierkegaard

ponder

"From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?"

— Albert Camus, The Rebel

quoth the madman

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

— Jean Genet

quoth the madman

A cage went in search of a bird.

— Franz Kafka

quoth the madman

All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

— Albert Camus

quoth the madman

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

— Jack Kerouac

ponderous

I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.

— Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

quoth the madman

You are the music while the music lasts.

— T. S. Eliot

quoth the madman

As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

— Albert Camus

quoth the madman

This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time.

— Chuck Palahniuk

ponder

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

— Henry Stanley Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940, originally published anonymously; commonly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoth the madman

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

pondering

“The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”  - Ken Kesey

quoth the madman

You are free and that is why you are lost.

Franz Kafka