pondering

"Sexual life was given to man to distract him perhaps from his true path. It’s his opium. With it everything falls asleep. Outside it, things resume life. At the same time, chastity kills the species, which is perhaps the truth."

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951

literacki

"A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart."

— Goethe, Faust

quoth the madman

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

— Eugene Ionesco

ponder

"The time has come to prove by deeds that mortals
Have as much dignity as any god,
And not to tremble at that murky cave
Where fantasy condemns itself to dwell
In agony. The passage brave
Whose narrow mouth is lit by all the flames of hell;
And take this step with cheerful resolution,
Though it involve the risk of utter dissolution."

— From Goethe's Faust

quoth the madman

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl."
— Vladimir Nabokov

literacki

"Whatever noblest things the mind received,
More and more foreign matter spoils the theme;
And when the good of this world is achieved,
What’s better seems an idle dream.
That gave us our life, the noblest urges
Are petrified in the earth’s vulgar surges."

— From Goethe's Faust

ponder

“[Man] belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it”

~Camus

ponder

"Hope never seems to leave those who affirm,
The shallow minds that stick to must and mold -
They dig with greedy hands for gold
And yet are happy if they find a worm."

— From Goethe's Faust

ponder

Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake

1. Allow the angel to reach room temperature. Then kill it.

2. Kill God. Set Him aside.

3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

4. Ecstatically whip, as if possessed by a storm-wind of freedom, 1-½ cups of excellent egg whites with ¼ tsp. salt and 1-½ tsp. cream of tartar. Continue until peaks are as if raised to their own heights and given wings in a fine air, a robust air.

5. Gradually add ¾ cup sugar, about 3 tbsp. at a time.

6. You are brilliant.

7. Now, add 1 tsp. vanilla and ¼ tsp. almond extract, and then sift together 1-¼ cups flour and ¾ cup sugar.

8. Blend in God and the angel. Emboldened, add the egg mixture.

9. Gaze into the überbatter. The überbatter will gaze into you.

10. While prancing about in a frenzy of self-satisfaction and anticipation, use a rubber scraper to push the überbatter into an ungreased 10" tube pan, for it is destined to be there.

11. Bake on a lower rack until done, usually 35-40 minutes, while reciting to the upper rack a long, convoluted anecdote about your childhood.

12. Invert the tube pan over a bottle for a few hours. Then impetuously rap the pan. Shout, “Aha!” and slide a knife along the pan’s insides.

13. Call what tumbles out a cake if you dare. Call it miraculous even.

14. Eat it. It is delicate, morbid, loveable, and you will die depressed, delirious, and overweight.

ponderous

"You must–do you hear me?–you must work more than you do. You were born to write poetry: write it! All the rest is futile–beginning with your pleasures and your health: get that into your head. Besides, your health will be the better for your following your calling."

- Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Guy de Maupassant

ponder

 

"...less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with others, or self-reflection. While life has become more manageable for many people, it has become commensurately less engaged."
~ Kirk Schneider, 2004, Rediscovery of Awe, p. 20

ponder

"The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil."
~ Ernest Becker (1975), Escape from Evil, p. 135-136

ponder

"Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, Mitigate, counteract, or transmute."
~ Stephen A. Diamond, 1996, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, p. 85

ponder

“Is all fair in love and war? Probably, and that’s why I try to avoid both.”

~Miz Hyacinth, my grandmother

pondering

"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."
     ~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 78

ponderous

"Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying."
     ~ Albert Camus, 1955, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, p. 10

ponder

"These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning in life in a general way."
     ~ Viktor E. Frankl, 1959/1984, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 85

pondering

"Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level."
      ~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 196

ponder

Bad reductionism is when you bake a cake then pull a crumb off it and say ‘the first word of the recipe is responsible for this crumb’.

ponder

I don’t think Descartes was as smart as Leibniz. Leibniz was smarter than anybody—maybe anybody who ever lived. I don’t know about the guys on the other side of the pacific—the Chinese, the Indians—but from our guys, on our team, it’s hard to find anybody as smart as Leibniz. On the other hand, that may be why almost everything he said was false

ponder

"One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way."
     ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894/1990, The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.), p. 170

pondering

"Though love is instinctive, it cannot develop without a certain stimulus and use."
     ~ Lu Xun, 1925/1961 ("Guafuism" in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 214

pondering

 

" Existential angst permeates our society. It is in our art, music, literature, movies, and plays: it is behind the increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide; it is the ennui and the sense of hopelessness that threaten to swallow our children."
      ~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 62

literacki

"In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology."
     ~ Sam Keen, 1991, "The Enemy Maker" (in C. Zweig & J. Abrams, Meeting the Shadow), p. 198

literacki

"Gods and goddesses, also, are personifications of principles; while theologians and philosophers often remind us that the word God points to a mystery so deep that it can never be captured in human form, most of us continue to personify God."
     ~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 1999

ponder

Camus is like that person going to the Betty Crocker cook-off without their recipe

pondering

"Instead of being hypnotized by the enemy we need to begin looking at the eyes with which we see the enemy... We need to become conscious of..."the shadow." The heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunder into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and corporate psyche and face the enemy within. Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self.
     ~ Sam Keen, 1991, "The Enemy Maker" (in C. Zweig & J. Abrams, Meeting the Shadow), p. 198-199

ponder

There’s nothing I’d want to do forever. I remember thinking as a kid, ‘What could God possibly reward me with?’ I started with pizza, and it all went downhill from there.

ponder

Some philosophers try to dismiss things with hand-waving; Kant, on the other hand, just wipes everything off the table

ponderous

 

"...you have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world."
     ~ Lu Xun, 1919/1961 ("Random Thoughts - Dying in Bitterness," in Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 2), p. 52

ponder

 

"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse."
     ~ Nietzsche, 1892/1966, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.), p. 18

ponder

"Do not ignore it. Fuck it. Cry your heart out. Then fuck it some more."

- Charles Bukowski, from Selected Letters Vol. 4

ponder

"...man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil."
     ~ Ernest Becker (1975), Escape from Evil, p. xviii

ponder

“A squirrel necessarily having the property of squirrelhood is trivial.”

ponder

“When you start explaining things to people, they start burning down buildings.”

ponder

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

—

Bob Dylan

ponder

 

Maybe it’s just in America, but it seems that if you’re passionate about something, it freaks people out. You’re considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.

—	Tim Burton

ponder

"Myth opens the door to a world that cannot be predicted and controlled, where truth is more amorphous, multifaceted, relative, pluralistic."
     ~ David N. Elkins, Beyond Religion, p. 193

ponder

"It is highly significant and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one's own sensitivity with suffering of one's fellow human beings."
     ~ Rollo May, 1975, The Courage to Create, pp. 16-17

ponder

“Some philosophers try to dismiss things with hand-waving; Kant, on the other hand, just wipes everything off the table.”

pondering

 

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

—	Jodi Picoult

ponder

"What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself."
     ~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 204

ponder

"Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level."
      ~ Ernest Becker, 1973, The Denial of Death, p. 196

literacki

"She almost felt sometimes that she must stop people in the streets, if they looked good, kind people, just to say to them; “I am unhappy”. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water."

- Virginia Woolf, from Mrs Dalloway

ponder

"But I am too tired, too noble, in a perverse way. It sickens me."

- Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

literacki

We are ghosts, hungry for something bigger than what our lips are kissing

— Anis Mojgani, from “The Branches are Full and These Orchards are Heavy”

ponder

"But watch out for one thing: take care lest you enjoy being bored, for that is dangerous."

- Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louis Bouilchet

ponderous

"If you seek happiness and beauty simultaneously, you will attain neither one nor the other, for the price of beauty is self-denial."

- Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet

literacki

What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

 

pondering

Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.

—  Miguel Ruiz

ponder

"…love will consume us only in the measure of our self-surrender."

- Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

ponderous

Sexual energy not used by homosexuals for procreation, as it is by heterosexuals, should be channelized elsewhere where its ends can be creativity.
~Harry Hay, 1951

quoth the madman

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
~Gore Vidal, 1960

pondering

"Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

- Edward Said

pondering

"Do you know what they say? They say that alcohol, if it has an effect on your psyche, takes you back to old states of consciousness, and old reactions. But some people it doesn’t stimulate at all, there is only a nervous reaction of repulsion."

- D.H. Lawrence, from Collected Stories

ponder

"Don’t speak to her. It makes her go away. She, too, is a ghost of silence. We talk far too much. But now I am going to be silent too, and a ghost of silence."

- D.H. Lawrence, from Collected Stories

ponder

"He did not talk, was very silent. But he was always something. If you were in a room with him, you always noticed him more than anybody, more than women or men, even very clever people. He was stupid, but he made you physically aware of him; like a cat in the room. I tell you, that little bit of you where you keep your courage was enchanted by him; he put over you an enchantment."

- D.H. Lawrence, from Collected Stories