When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.[/b]
What if it really is as simple as that.
Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.
Like night and day.
Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.
I know that I did.
Of course I was just lucky.
Life had made her an expert at mashing feelings into a storable size.
That and burying them altogether.
Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.
Can you say that? Would you even want to?
Kya was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother.
I once asked him/satyr why he switched so… he said he didn’t know.
He seems to have reverted back to his natural default setting, and not those of the OCD thinking that had consumed his mind with their invasive demeanour, that at some point happens to us all.
Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them. [/b]
Sounds about right, he thought.
Farewell my friends, I go to glory.
Well, she’s either there or she’s not.
It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
Well, she was a racist, right?
No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.
White rhythm anyway.
These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.
Yep, they’re still around.
To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings. [/b]
Some will diagree. Vehemently, for example.
One never gets to know a person’s character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments… It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.
Here? To post or not to post!
To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.
No, he really meant it.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Would you like me to explain that?
Unless our souls had root in soil divine
We could not bear earth’s overwhelming strife.
The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine,
Convinces me of everlasting life.
Would you like me to explain that?
Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” Nikola Tesla[/b]
Nope, not yet.
“Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.” Nikola Tesla
All that science stuff for example.
"It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” Franz Kafka
Yo, Kids, are you going to take that?
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” Edgar Allan Poe
Yeah, there is that part.
“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” Edgar Allan Poe
That probably means something important, right?
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don’t be ashamed of who you are, embrace who you are.[/b]
Like who you are is irrelevant.
If you’re weird, it’s good to be weird.
Well, not counting some of the weirdos here, anyway.
That is really the freedom that allows you to create something that is exciting because who knows what’s true?
See, I told you.
Nipples aren’t killing children. They should be more concerned about the wars that are happening. There’s so much violence in the world. There are so many legitimate things to be upset about besides nipples.
The bigger the better, I always says.
I’ve always felt like I’m from another planet.
Well, she’s always on mine.
I’m not into social media. I’m like from another century.
That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.[/b]
So, what do you think, close enough?
A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
A context, right?
The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved.
Not much that doesn’t explain.
Unfortunately?
…love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
Hate too.
I know: like that will ever stop them.
Don’t you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Not counting Norman Rockwell of course.
Or Bob Ross?
And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.
I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I’m not supernatural. I’ve done nothing extremely special to deserve the position. It happens every couple of years, and it’s happened to hundreds of people before me.
Happen to anyone here?
In the birthing process, you come out just realizing how stupid and weak men are! I mean, I might as well not have been in there, we’re useless!
I actually think I know what he means.
Do I really look like a guy with a plan?
Now in particular.
Want know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not one bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me, and he says, ‘why so serious?’ He comes at me with the knife. ‘Why so serious?!’. He sticks the blade in my mouth. ‘Let’s put a smile on that face!’
You tell me.
I’m born to be a father. And I’ve been looking forward to this all my life.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
Among other things, duh?
I like being moved. I don’t like being pushed.
Wow, she wondered, why didn’t I think of that?
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’
Must be a technical thing, right?
People who aren’t artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don’t have time to be inspired.
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.[/b]
Of course we know better, don’t we? Or, rather, some of us do.
Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.
And reading a post?
The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
Just not the ones here, he suspected.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
And then written by the winners, of course.
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
People in England must just wake up every day and thank god that America exists, which continually saves them from being the dumbest country on earth.[/b]
Can any Brits here confirm this?
British novel: what if I didn’t follow society’s strict conventions perfectly?
French novel: what if I didn’t follow society’s strict conventions at all?
Russian novel: what if I didn’t follow society’s strict conventions such as “don’t murder people”?
American novel:
nerds really need to understand that liking science fiction doesn’t automatically make you smarter than people who like sports
Now that’s bullshit.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but owning things isn’t a job.
On the other hand, “you’re fired”.
A libertarian is someone who thinks society will be better if the cops report directly to the billionaire elites, without the pretense of an elected official to oversee them.
What, they don’t now?
I just finished writing a comic about Hegel and for a second I got worried that it was too mean spirited and the Hegel nerds would be upset by it, but then I remembered who cares.
In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.
You know, vaguely.
Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: ‘There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’
And some will hunt them to extinction.
Death’s crude pluck, as always, stealing the show.
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves. [/b]
And not just pit bulls.
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Well, with a few exceptions of course.
One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.
Where the hell is he going with this?
A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.
Okay, but how about one with, uh, a “condition”?
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Actually, I wouldn’t go that far.
War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off.
Excepting the military industrial complex of course.
