He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean Luc Godard
ars poetica
Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light
Oscar Wilde
l'appel du vide
What is Romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §370
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §370
ponder
I attribute capital esthetic and moral values to food in general, and to spinach in particular. The opposite of shapeless spinach, is armor. I love eating suits of arms, in fact I love all shell fish… food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate.
Salvador Dali, from Les Diners de Gala
ars poetica
Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “The Masque of Anarchy”
ars poetica
Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter, that hunts on a lonely hill.
“The Lonely Hunter”, by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp)
quoth the madman
The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.
Vincent van Gogh
l'appel du vide
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yea-sayer.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §276
ars poetica
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “The Masque of Anarchy”
ponder
The animal’s heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm; on the heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise.
William Harvey, De Motu Cordis et Sanguines, “Dedication to the King”, 1628
literacki
I believe that it is a fine thing to struggle for life. It is not with pleasures and with joys that a man grows proud. Proud and gay in the roots of his soul he becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.
Robert Walser, The Walk
quoth the madman
There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.
Benjamin Franklin
ponder
Or is not a poison one of the mysteries of nature? …For what thing is there, created by God, which is not endowed with some great gift for the good of mankind? Why then should poisons be thrown aside and despised when it is not the poison but nature that is being tried? …He who despises poison is ignorant of what resides therein.
Paracelsus, “Seven Arguments, Answering to Several of the Detractions of His Envious Critics”, 3rd argument by way of describing the new prescriptions
ponder
"Monster in face, monster in soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
last words
No herb grows in the gardens against the power of death.
Sigismund III Vasa, on his deathbed
L'appel du vide
The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge - a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
re-pondering
~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 15
quoth the madman
Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of my own moods, I am never far; my thoughts always circle around you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
ponderous
Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism”
literacki
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
ars poetica
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, “The Tyger”
ponder
Or is not a poison one of the mysteries of nature? …For what thing is there, created by God, which is not endowed with some great gift for the good of mankind? Why then should poisons be thrown aside and despised when it is not the poison but nature that is being tried? …He who despises poison is ignorant of what resides therein.
Paracelsus, “Seven Arguments, Answering to Several of the Detractions of His Envious Critics”, 3rd argument by way of describing the new prescriptions
literacki
I believe that it is a fine thing to struggle for life. It is not with pleasures and with joys that a man grows proud. Proud and gay in the roots of his soul he becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.
Robert Walser, The Walk
L'appel du vide
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong—nor do they call it poison.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §19
L'appel du vide
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946
ponder
If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies
and ceases to be what you love.
Osho
literacki
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
literacki
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”
The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
quoth the madman
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
literacki
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.
pondering
The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are bold as a lion.
Bible, Proverbs 28:1
ponderous
Whomever I love, I love better in winter than in summer; I mock my enemies better and more heartily since winter dwells in my home. Heartily, in truth, even when I crawl into bed; even then my hidden happiness still laughs and is full of pranks; even the dream that lies to me still laughs. I—a crawler? Never in my life have I crawled before the mighty; and if ever I lied, I lied out of love. Therefore I am glad in the wintry bed too. A simple bed warms me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty, and in winter it is most faithful to me.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
pondering
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
pondering
Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
ponder
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Heraclitus, Fragments
L'appel du vide
Suspicious. – To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions of morality?
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 101
L'appel du vide
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 101
words and music
Hear me now
Oh thou bleak and unbearable world,
Thou art base and debauched as can be;
And a knight with his banners all bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee!
Man of La Mancha (I, Don Quixote),
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