[b]God
Deep down I know I don’t exist but I’m too afraid to admit it.[/b]
Clearly a God thing.
Donald Trump deserves to be reunited with his parents.
So, how cruel is that?
The less you know, the more you think you do.
Double that [at least] here, right?
Summer is so weird! No school shootings, right?
See you in the Fall, God.
You were a bad idea.
He’s just sore because Nietzsche killed him.
Children should be seen and not herded up like animals.
Let alone sent to the gas chambers.
[b]C.G. Jung
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.[/b]
Think of the citizens here as, say, idiots.
If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.
It’s a miracle that most of us can make it through the day.
One cannot live from anything except what one is.
Or is this just a typo?
Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.
Thank god for Artistotle’s golden mean, right?
Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind’s eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas–a subjective confession.
Right, like he was no different than the rest of us.
The word “belief” is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it — I don’t need to believe it.
Do you believe this?
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
By the time you’re 35, you should have forgotten which of your philosophy books you’ve read and which you haven’t.[/b]
Not counting those you were assigned to read, right?
Greek ethics: Be true to yourself
French ethics: Be true to the other
German ethics: Be true to the true
American ethics: Be true to the fraud you call truth
That or the fake news.
Psychology: The past hurts
Sociology: The present hurts
Politics: The future will hurt
Philosophy: The past conditional perfect will have hurt if the future conditional perfect does as well
If only analytically.
Philosophy: We’ve got all the questions
Religion: We’ve got all the answers
Literature: We changed all the questions
Politics: We rejected all your answers
Or not of course.
Live your life as if it were
Descartes: a dream
Beckett: a joke
Nietzsche: a clumsy lie
Camus: definitely a death sentence
Definitely all of the above.
[b]Your professor appeared to conceive of the seminar as
Remember back in the days when it was all just a paper chase?
[b]Edward St. Aubyn
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.[/b]
Same when we go in the other direction too.
I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to, said Patrick. The rest is packaging.
For most [as often as not] the packaging of others.
His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.
Of course we’ll have to know the reasons why. Right now, I can’t even imagine doing it myself
As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?
And, no, not just that stuff.
Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about.
You know, in case you actually have to justify it.
Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp, said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.
You’ll either pull this off or you won’t.
[b]Tom Stoppard
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.[/b]
Could it really be as simple [and vexing] as that?
I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.
Like most of the philosophy here, he thought.
What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.
Even though, sure, he may well be starving.
If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
On the other hand, as some might put it, “fuck them”.
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
What am I missing here?
People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
But not much worse he suspected.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.” Epicurus[/b]
Though not necessarily by choice.
“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning." Hermann Hesse
How fucked is this? You know, usually.
“Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.” Plato
Well, given most men, is that really something to brag about?
"What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.” Søren Kierkegaard
Yeah, right. Unless of course you take that leap.
“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.” Søren Kierkegaard
Like life will even notice.
"People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Theodor W. Adorno
Wow, how grim is that?!
[b]Svetlana Alexievich
They call the souls down from heaven. Those who had people die this year cry, and those whose people died earlier, don’t. They talk, they remember. Everyone prays. And those who don’t know how to pray, also pray.[/b]
After all, what have they really got to lose? Not counting those that do.
People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.
Really, not much isn’t beautiful to someone.
According to Darwin’s theory, it’s not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.
Tell that to, among others, the Nietzscheans.
There’s no television. No movies. There’s one thing to do—look out the window. Well, and to pray, of course. There used to be Communism instead of God, but now there’s just God. So we pray.
Come on, Mr. Capitalist, tell them what you pray to.
Any animal is afraid of a human. If you don’t touch him, he’ll walk around you. Used to be, you’d be in the forest and you’d hear human voices, you’d run toward them. Now people hide from one another. God save me from meeting a person in the forest!
Men mostly.
Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.
Trust me: Not always.
[b]Meg Wolitzer
…to find out what another human being feels, a person who isn’t you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That’s what writing is supposed to do.[/b]
Let’s file this one under, “fat chance”. At least I would.
…sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.
Most times though not.
No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.
Or: No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, friendship was allowed to trump family.
[no pun intended?]
I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.
That’s just the postmodern way of course.
When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever.
He thought, “good”. Not counting Sharon of course.
Like everyone we knew, we did what we could to protest the war. We signed, and we worked, and we brought our children with us to storefront offices to make calls and type letters. We used mimeographs, the purple ink getting all over us, the place smelling like a schoolroom, and we headed down to D.C. in a long, fossilized traffic jam of cars. The children cried in the backseat, and we pushed them on the Mall in strollers while they begged for juice, their faces blazing with heat, and Joe was among the writers who stood up and screamed into screechy, inadequate mikes.
The last four wars at least.
[b]Nein
Rage. Rage. Against the dining of the right.[/b]
Of course that includes the left too.
Let’s not forget the good news: “Scientists say humans are alone in the universe”: bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/ar … ggests-yes
Now, let’s get out there and prove it.
Well, friends, as they say: Soccer is a simple game. 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes. And at the end: we all grow old and die alone.
Hell, not much that isn’t true regarding.
We regret to inform you that no: It’s not the end of the world.
You know, whatever that is.
The French will always win. In theory.
Let’s run this by the existentialists.
Meanwhile the score in Turkey: 1. Until further notice, there is no opposing team.
Another BFF for Don Trump.
[b]Ambrose Bierce
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.[/b]
Unless of course you count, “I think that you think that I think that they think that I think that you think that I might possibly exist.”
The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.
The least affectionate: a wet cat.
Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Of course that’s everywhere here.
Hash, x. There is no definition for this word — nobody knows what hash is.
[i]On the contrary:
Hash:
1] a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef or veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan or of meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy.
2] a mess, jumble, or muddle
3] a reworking of old and familiar material
And that’s not even counting all the fucking slang.[/i]
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Does this sound sinister to you too?
You don’t have to be stupid to be a Christian…but it probably helps.
Or, sure, only possibly.
[b]Anthony Powell
Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.[/b]
Imagine then if this were always true.
I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.
We should all be so lucky. Here, for example.
There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.
Tell them that.
His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.
The sheer gall of them!
But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.
You know, around elementary school.
But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
After all, few things are trickier than chance.
[b]Temple Grandin
I am different, not less.[/b]
And, in some respects, more.
Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.
Let’s run this by Peta.
I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.
Let’s run this by Peta too.
I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.
Hell, I remember when this once worked for me.
What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?
You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.
Of course most wouldn’t go quite that far.
You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.
Remember that, Mr. Reasonable. 
[b]Nora Ephron
My religion is Get Over It.[/b]
Okay, but who do you pray to when you can’t?
A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.
Wow, that’s never even occured to me.
The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.
Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help.
Let’s call this a more or less general description.
I hear myself saying these words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I’m really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.
How’s that strike you, Mr. Objectivist?
Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I accomplished something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.
And, let’s face it, isn’t that what you’re doing now?
I’ve always believed that the concept of the Jewish princess was invented by a Jewish prince who couldn’t get his wife to fetch him the butter.
Let’s boot this one to Joker.
[b]Erica Jong
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.[/b]
My guess: the part that revolves around sex.
My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
She’s probably watching the wrong ones.
I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery”, by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.
Not many men like that around. Right, Mr Reasonable?
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
If only up on their pedestals.
Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it…
Of course this can mean practically anything. In other words, that’s just another plot.
And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in… underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.
Let’s pin down exactly how crazy this is.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.” Theodor Adorno[/b]
I know I abjure them.
"There’s nothing more fragrant, more sparkling, more intoxicating than the infinity of possibilities.” Soëren Kierkegaard
Just weighty enough not to be outright silly.
“How the past perishes is how the future becomes.” Alfred North Whitehead
And what might that be?
“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths.” Alfred North Whitehead
Or a fraction thereof.
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows." Alfred North Whitehead
Or, for most objectivists, the other way around.
“History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.” Walter Rauschenbusch
Almost as though it repeats itself.
[b]Nathanael West
…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust.[/b]
Mike: “There’s a sucker born every minute…and two to take him.”
He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
Needless to say, I can’t even imagine it.
They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure.
Of course with some folks leisure is all they’re equipped for.
…what goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock…
What the hell does the sea have to do with it?
It’s solitary drinking that makes drunkards.
I’ll drink to that.
Humanity…I’m a humanity lover. All the broken bastards…
Well, we’ve come to the right place here, haven’t we?
[b]Elias Canetti
…no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men’s places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people’s goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.[/b]
Starting with, say, the Bible?
It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.
Let’s run this here by, among others, Fixed Cross and Mr Reasonable.
Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?
Well, sure, this might be true. You know, of others.
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages.
Though no less so than birth.
The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.
After all, naming something makes it true.
One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.
Trust me: You’ll stop believing that soon enough.
[b]tiny nietzsche
sext: paper or plastic?[/b]
Is this plausible?
a group of college freshmen is called a joy division t-shirt
Remember when it used to be the Beatles?
if I see you in the woods this weekend, run for your life
Or, for that matter, walking down the street.
types of sober:
mostly
kinda
sorta
I’m working on one of them right now.
fucking nihilism, how does it work?
You know, if it fucking works at all.
you throw like a non binary gender
It’s a miracle they can even pick up the ball, he thought.
[b]Günter Grass
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.[/b]
Unless, for some, they’re subpoened by Robert Mueller.
If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
Hey, buddy, you’re talking about the Son of God!
When Satan’s not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn’t even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?
Well, when you get down there, ask him.
…if I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word ‘doorknob’, because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us…
Maybe, but it’s still a really stupid idea.
…there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.
Maybe, but it’s still a really stupid idea.
We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born…
Wow. Did we have to be born? Not many take it in that direction.
[b]Neil Gaiman
He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.[/b]
My guess: Eve.
Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
Still, that’s just on this planet.
You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.
Sure, sounds like it might be true.
Bod shrugged. So? he said. It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.
Really, what else is there here but crippling stoicism.
He told me not to seek revenge, but to seek the Buddha, said the fox spirit, sadly.
Wise counsel, said the fox of dreams. Vengeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it. And…?
I shall seek the Buddha, said the fox, with a toss of her head. But first I shall seek revenge.
Let’s pin down the Buddha’s reaction.
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.
I tried to make stuff up too. And look at me now.