“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
—Paul Tillich (via 07121843)
October 2011
33 posts
“[…] For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat—hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: “What would I do without the office?” or again: “My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.” Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing without a thought in her head, a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment. When we are aware of every gift, the contradictory intoxications we can enjoy (including that of lucidity) are indescribable.”
—‘Love of Life’ from ’Lyrical and Critical Essays’ by Albert Camus
Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
“Liberty is the most precious possession of all mankind. Food and water are nothing; clothing and shelter are luxuries. He who is free stands with his head held high, even if hungry, naked and homeless. I dedicate my own life, whatever may be left of it, to the cause of liberty—liberty for all men, everywhere.”
—
Victor Hugo
Here, the French novelist and author of Les Misérables (1862) eloquently expresses what we’d today call the deontological libertarian argument: freedom for freedom’s sake.
(via whakahekeheke)
“The woods are hopeless. Don’t waste your time, they will be destroyed. So will the marsh. It is a losing game mankind has played for more than a century. Sadness is what you are, do not deny it. The universe is a lonely place, a painful place. This is what we can share between us, period.”
—Caterine Vauban in “I Heart Huckabees”
“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
—A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (via thechocolatebrigade)
XKCD.com # 893 "65 Years"
”The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.”
“‘Tut! tut!’ cried Sherlock Holmes. ‘You must act, man, or you are lost.’”
—The Five Orange Pips, Arthur Conan Doyle
“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”
—Saul Bellow (via thechocolatebrigade)
Jean-Paul Sartre Summary →
sonoma.edu
A highly summarised but nonetheless interesting introduction to Existential principles of Jean-Paul Sartre.
“
There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain.
For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocracy.
” —Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf (via greatrelease)“I was speaking before of Heidegger and I said that mortality according to Heidegger is what makes my time mine, such that it cannot be shared with another—nobody can die in my place—and such that it is totally indeterminate. This will lead Heidegger to say that time must be thought from the perspective of the future. My death always remains “still come,” and hence a magnificent paradox—my event is the sole event I will never live. When my death arrives, I won’t be there to live it. Death will therefore never happen to me. It’s both what will never happen to me, and the only thing which can really happen to me. Because, say you catch a flu, or you fall in love with the man or woman you love, then they leave…all this happens. Nothing is ever quite irremediable, so nothing ever happens conclusively, inasmuch as the only things that are conclusive are the irremediable things. Except death. It’s only death which conclusively happens to you. The problem is that it won’t really happen either. So it’s nothing but a phantom. It has never been, and it will never arrive. There are nothing but phantasms.”
-Bernard Stiegler
“There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.”
—Eugène Ionesco
“My alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.”
—Erich Fromm
Existentialist Shakespeare
Macbeth, V.v.24-28
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.”
—Georges Duhamel (via portofondraise)
“Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.”
—Michel Houellebecq (H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)
