"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
— Borges
ponder
“Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is not for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men–even the man who insults and oppresses him–have a natural community.”
— Albert Camus, The Rebel
literacki
"Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it."
literacki
"Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such…"
pondering
"But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law."
— Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
quoth the madman
more and more
beautiful things.
It’s enough to drive one mad.
I have such a desire
to do everything,
my head is bursting with it.”
— Claude Monet
The Play's the thing
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
quoth the madman
~Kurt Vonnegut
quoth the madman
“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
— Oscar Wilde
ponder
"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."
Jean Paul Sartre
ponder
"The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism."
Walter Kaufmann, “Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Revised and Revisited"
quoth the madman
"How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,—you must have noticed them in the street,—how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?"
Emily Dickinson
literacki
"His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
quoth the madman
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
literacki
"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can."
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
quoth the madman
"Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a science without assumptions; the very notion of such a science is unthinkable, absurd. A philosophy, a “faith” is always needed to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a raison d’etre."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
literacki
"I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth – lying low – grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me (134)."
Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea
ponder
"It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night."
Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
ars poetica
"I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Lord of the Rings” (271-2).
ponderous
"These hours and days leave no trace, and therefore, one may have as many of them as one likes."
Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel
ponder
"Surely I am not the now? Perhaps I am, though, in a certain way. Saying ‘now’ is not a speaking about something as an object, but it is surely a declaration about something…When I saw ‘now’ I do not mean the now as such, but in my now-saying I am transient. I am in motion in the understanding of now and, in a strict sense, I am really with that whereto the time is and wherefore I determine the time…Time is constantly there in such a way that in all our planning and precaution, in all our comportments and all the measures we take, we move in a silent discourse: now, not until, in former times, finally, at the time, before that, and so forth…"
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
ponder
"Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroys its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it."
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (52).
literacki
"Precisely because of its exceptional status, theory is a kind of stand-in for happiness. The happiness that would be brought about by practice finds no correlative in today’s world apart from the behaviour of the man who sits in a chair and thinks."
Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a New Manifesto
ponderous
“human beings are most inclined
to love the things
that hurt them the most
not because we are masochists by birth,
but because
we are taught from a young age
that true love is going to, is supposed to, hurt you in ways
you cannot fathom”
to love the things
that hurt them the most
not because we are masochists by birth,
but because
we are taught from a young age
that true love is going to, is supposed to, hurt you in ways
you cannot fathom”
— Lorinda Ament, Masochism is a Learned Trait
quoth the madman
“There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.”
— Edgar Allen Poe
literacki
"To be a ‘normal cultural man’ is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick— whether one knows it or not: 'there is such a thing as fictitious health.’"
quoth the madman
"If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something."
ponder
"No person is really here yet, is really alive. Because, after all, life means being-present, does not mean only before or after, foretaste or aftertaste. It means plucking the day, in the simplest and most basic sense, means acting concretely towards the Now. But precisely because our nearest, most genuine, continuous being-present is not one, no person is yet really living, precisely from this perspective."
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