literacki

Something had just happened to me. Something forbidden. Something strange, filthy, shameless, and beautiful.

Herta Müller, tr. by Philip Boehm, from The Hunger Angel: A Novel

pondering

there is two
types of tired,
I suppose
one is a dire need of sleep
the other is a dire need of peace

Mandeq Ahmed

ponder

I am in a mixed mood, flying before the fury of my own devils.

Virginia Woolf, “Letter to Vita Sackville-West”

pondering

Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean?

Or do you just enjoy baffling the people who try to creep a little nearer?

~Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf c. August 1923

ponder

I am always between two worlds, always in conflict. I would like sometimes to rest, to be at peace, to choose a nook, make a final choice, but I can’t. Some nameless, indescribable fear and anxiety keeps me on the move. On certain evenings like this, I would like to feel whole. Only a half of me is sitting by the fire.

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

ponder

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
-David Foster Wallace

quoth the madman

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoth the madman

“Will madness arrive on the schedule? I don’t know and I don’t seek an answer–just a small quiet space between not knowing, not wanting to know, and finally finding out.”
 -Charles Bukowski

quoth the madman

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
-Vincent van Gogh

quoth the madman

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

quoth the madman

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

quoth the madman

 

“Do it or don’t do it–you will regret both.” -Søren Kierkegaard

ponder

“He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

ponder

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

literacki

“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

ponder

Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by desire and illusion.

Arthur Schopenhauer

literacki

And I would have been quite satisfied with intelligence.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

quoth the madman

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible. 

Saint Augustine

quoth the madman

Love is a game in which one always cheats

Honore de Balzac

quoth the madman

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Honore de Balzac

ponder

Only where there are graves are there resurrections.

Friedrich Nietzsche

quoth the madman

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

quoth the madman

Live to the point of tears, in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself

Albert Camus

ponder

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

ponder

Disputes multiply as if everything is uncertain, and are managed as if everything is certain.

David Hume

ponder

“Entry into real life: one rescues one’s personal life from death by living a common life.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §194.

ponder

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

Novalis

quoth the madman

To say it again. Public opinions—private laziness.

Nietzsche; HH

quoth the madman

Help everybody to find his own level, instead of trying to impose the same on all alike.

Crowley

literacki

Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demigods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in this world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

literacki

Darkness and concealment are the dominant characteristic of the primordial time. All life first becomes and develops in the night; for this reason, the ancients called the night the fertile mother of things, indeed, together with chaos, the oldest of beings.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling | The Ages of the World

literacki

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy

ponderous

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant.
You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine’s Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world’s puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

~Hermann Hesse, from ‘Peter Camenzind’

literacki

Read the New Testament as a book of seduction: virtue is appropriated in the instinct that with it one can capture public opinion.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §210

pondering

“The origin of religion lies in extreme feelings of power which, because they are strange, take men by surprise.”
—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

literacki

Things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own–they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of confusion and desire.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, 2, Part 1, Beyond Good and Evil.

ponder

The misanthrope experiences -preceding excessive socializing-an inexplicable guilt akin to that of the Christian after sex.

pondering

I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others.
My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.

~Arthur Schopenhauer

ponder

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself
~Martin Heidegger

ponder

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
~Crowley

ponder

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
~George Santayana

ponder

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

literacki

“Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”

— Nick Hornby, Songbook

literacki

“We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be unfollowed and defriended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings.”

— Ryan O’Connell, You Don’t Have to Be Friends with Everybody 

ponderous

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

wordy rappinghood

“muditā”

— (noun) An untranslatable Sanskrit word, muditā is described as the feeling of happiness on behalf of someone else. Muditā connotes one of the most sincere and purest manifestations of happiness. This joy comes from an established sense of self, where a sympathetic or vicarious joy exists and you get pleasure from others’ well-being as opposed to envy.

quoth the madman

“If you are a gifted person, it doesn’t mean that you gained something. It means you have something to give back.”

— Carl Jung

quoth the madman

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”

— Carl Jung

quoth the madman

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.” — Isaac Newton

the play's the thing

 

“Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my heart's core, in my heart of heart, as I do thee.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

ponder

An intelligent man knows Frankenstein wasn’t the monster. A wise man knows that Frankenstein was the monster.