There is something arbitrary in stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it. Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.… Continue reading Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Use me’: a statement of vertiginous simplicity, it is not mystical, but materialist. Let me be your surface and your tissues, you may be my orifices and my palms and my membranes, we could lose ourselves, leave the power and the squalid justification of the dialectic of redemption, we will be dead. — Jean-Francois Lyotard,… Continue reading Jean-Francois Lyotard
Compared to the person I love, the universe seems poor and empty. This universe isn’t ‘risked’ because it’s not ‘perishable.’ But the beloved is the ‘beloved’ for only a single person. Carnal love, because not ‘sheltered from thieves’ or vicissitudes, is greater than divine love. It risks me and the one I love. God by… Continue reading Georges Bataille
Hope is a passion for the possible. ― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. (Penguin Books; Penguin Great Ideas edition May 30, 2006) Originally published 1843.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All. (Penguin Books; Later Printing edition March 30, 1978) Originally published 1883.
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home. — Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. (Harper One, 2003)
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? — Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay. (Kessinger Publishing May 2005) Originally published 1923.
The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the hearts movements, all the hearts “problems”.… Continue reading Roland Barthes
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again. — Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (Stanford University Press; 1 edition January 1, 2000)
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. — St. Augustine, Confessions (c. 397) Oxford University Press; Reprint… Continue reading St. Augustine
