Carvings on the Wall
"Science is the ultimate pornographic, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.”
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
"These plunderers of the world [the Romans, or insert {placeholder} for empire of choice], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the oceans. Stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich, by ambition, if their enemy be poor. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire. And where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Tacitus
"I think with my entire body"
Brad Lehl
"You can't avoid the act of interpretation"
Brad Lehl
"It is a pleasure to be lost, but a disaster not be be found."
D.W. Winnicott
"Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base"
John Bowlby
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
Flannery O’ Conner
“Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.”
Joseph de Maistre
“Both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied, and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.”
John Stuart Mill (BTW. Did he ever read Hegel?)
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living".
Karl Marx
"Money can never satisfy, because it is not an infantile desire".
Brad Lehl
"Child is Father to the Man"
Wordsworth, then later, Freud.
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America".
Otto von Bismarck
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
A Downward Look
by James Merrill
“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
Joseph De Maistre.
“I am the ripe shard and the world is the gaping anus”
Martin Luther
“When we are no longer children we are already dead”
Constantin Brancusi
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
Jesus Christ
"Time is a game played beautifully by children".
Heraclitus
"After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
J.G. Ballard
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians."
John Maynard Keynes
"I've only got seventh grade education, but I have a doctorate in funk, and I like to put that to good use."
James Brown
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."
Jesus