“A horrible end is preferrable to unending horror”. German proverb.
“We live without feeling the country beneath our feet”, Epigram Against Stalin, Osip Mandelstam, Russian Poet
“Novelists usually talk about how they feel or what they think, but it is far more important for them to learn to observe what is happening around them.” Peter Carey, Australian novelist.
“For something to happen, something must begin. The first shape of hope is fear. the first appearance of the new is terror.” Heiner Mueller, German dramatist, poet, essayist, director.
Joseph Addison, the 18th-century essayist and poet, said: “Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments.”
‘I’m always a beginner, and the most important thing is always the next piece. We artists never know if we can do it again. You have done something – and most of the time I hate what I have done a few years ago – and you don’t know if you can do something now. The good artists are usually the very young or the very old. The ones who are very young are so stupid that they have no fear. And when they are very old they aren’t afraid any more. In the meantime, you are always, always, afraid.’ Christian Boltanski
Sobre los gustos, no hai disputa (One can’t argue about tastes)
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum (It’s no use debating taste and colours.)
“Αρμονίη αφανής φανερής κρείτων” Ηρακλειτος
Hidden harmony is better than the apparent one” Heraclitus
“Burn out, like a short-lived candle! Life is nothing more than a shadow that moves, a bad actor who overacts for a while on the stage of life, and then is gone forever. Life is a story told by an idiot, with lots of drama, but which in the end has no meaning. (Or, perhaps, indicates that the state of not being, the state of nothingness, is the only true reality.)
Shakespeare, Macbeth
“You can’t think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don’t think at all.”
Alberto Moravia, Boredom
“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world wars, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modenr political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical and paradoxically free individuation.”
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
“Individuals predestined to gourmandism are generally of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips, and well-rounded chins. The women are buxom, pretty rather than beautiful, with a tendency to run to fat. Those women whose gourmandism consists chiefly of love of sweet things have finer features, a more deliccate air, neater features, and above all, a very special way with their tongues”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste
“When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.”
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/or, Part II
. . . and in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hel l I suffer seems a heaven.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
“In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.” Alberto Moravia
“It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the being of man and the world are eternally justified.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
“… a poor wretch woke up in Hell and shouted, “What tiime is it?” – whereupon the devil answered, “Eternity”!”
Soren Kierkeggard, Either/or, A Fragment of Life
“There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” -Nabokov
“Litigation really is the sincerest form of flattery” Lex, Apple vs. Samsung, 19 April 2011, Financial Times
