ponder

The Bardic tradition of magic, when satires were justifiably more feared than curses and when the creator was respected as a powerful magician rather than as someone getting by out on the fringes of the entertainment industry, is one that today’s artists, occultists and writers would do well to reacquaint themselves with.

 You can kill or cure with a word. Get off of your knees.

quoth the madman

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?

~Rose Kennedy

quoth the madman

"You exist only in what you do."

Federico Fellini

literacki

Crushes are fun. Or at least they’re supposed to be fun as long as you keep them that way. As long as you don’t get emotionally invested or fixated or keep imagining your reality to be what it is not – crushes are fun. But if you expect too much or feel too easily, you might end up with self-inflicted heart ache which just leaves you feeling empty-handed or just plain empty. And all of this for someone who never even promised you anything from the start.

Kovie Biakolo, Crushes Are Fun

ars poetica

"We don’t know how to say goodbye:
we wander on, shoulder to shoulder.
Already the sun is going down;
you’re moody, I am your shadow.

Let’s step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.

Or else let’s sit in the graveyard
on the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
in which we shall always be together."

—  Anna Akhmatova, from Poems, trans. Max Hayward

literacki

 

"Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s ‘I’ at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene."

—  Virginia Woolf, The Years

ars poetica

"The Zeroes — taught us — Phosphorous —
We learned to like the Fire"

—  Emily Dickinson, from “[689]”

quoth the madman

"Never take counsel of your fears."

Stonewall Jackson

quoth the madman

"The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention."

Roger Nash Baldwin

quoth the madman

"You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation, by your victory."

James Larkin

quoth the madman

"You can never really go wrong if you take nature as an example."

Christian Dior

quoth the madman

"There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve."

— William S. Burroughs

quoth the madman

 

"How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?"

— Sylvia Plath 

quoth the madman

 

"In every guilty man, there is an innocent part. This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting. We do not think enough about pain."

— Albert Camus, in a letter to Jean Grenier

ponder

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

— Goethe, Faust

quoth the madman

"We are free of the old false certainties of society, and we are at loss for any figure of authority that would excuse us, or limit us or take away our anxieties by telling us who we are or who we ought to be, or for whom we ought to be. Zizek writes, “there is no longer a Destiny preordaining the contours of my guilt [but this] in no way allows me to enjoy the innocence of the autonomous subject delivered from any externally imposed standard of guilt”"

— Andre Vantino

ponder

"Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it."

— Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

ponder

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."

— Antonio Gramsci

quoth the madman

"Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. 

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

— Carl Sagan

ponder

"The first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders."

— Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”

literacki

"Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

ponder

"Fear is the mother of morals."

— Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil

ars poetica

"Once more, ere I move on
And send my glance forward,
Lonely, I raise my hands
To you, to whom I flee,
To whom I, in the deepest depths of my heart,
Have solemnly consecrated altars,
So that, at all times,
His voice would summon me again.
Deeply inscribed upon them glows
The words: To the Unknown God.
I am his, although up till this hour
I’ve remained in the company of sinners:
I am his—and I feel the noosed ropes
That pull me down in the struggle
And, should I flee,
Still force me into his service
I want to know you, unknown one,
You who have reached deep within my soul,
Wandering through my life like a storm,
You incomprehensible one, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, “Once More ere I Move On”

pondered

"Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives."

— Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil

ponder

"For the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentially of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art…In life, a man commits himself, draws in his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait."

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

pondering

"Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is the world, and only in the world does he know himself."

— Merleau-Ponty

quoth the madman

"Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them."

— Emile Cioran