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[domcurmudgeon]

Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school.

The Man Without Qualities

[domcurmudgeon]

To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

The Man Without Qualities

[domcurmudgeon]

The master used to read us The Hobbit - can you believe it? That's all we used to talk about - small men in holes. We had a protest about it [...] we were saying this is supposed to be English literature and we're reading this shit, when we're supposed to be reading Shakespeare and medieval poetry.

Mark E. Smith (poorly) articulates my childhood frustration with The Hobbit

[domcurmudgeon]

We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that's the whole of eternity. I sometimes fancy something of the sort.

Crime and Punishment

[domcurmudgeon]

The fifteenth chapter is come at last; and brings nothing with it but a sad signature of "How our pleasures slip from under us in this world;" For in talking of my digression---I declare before heaven I have made it! What a strange creature is mortal man! said she.

Tristram Shandy

[domcurmudgeon]

A few summers ago I began to suspect I had once been a horse. At nightfall the thought would stir in me like a horse in a barn. As soon as I put my man's body down to sleep, my horse memory would begin to wander.

Felisberto Hernández, “The Woman Who Looked Like Me”

[domcurmudgeon]

Animals come into being from moisture evaporated by the sun

Anaximander

[domcurmudgeon]

When Chi-sun Fei sent him medicine he received it with a deep bow but said, 'Since I do not recognize it, I will not put it to my mouth.'

Confucius

[domcurmudgeon]

To tolerate the existence of an oppressive social system in one place or another, simply because it is packaged and sold as revolutionary, is to condone universal oppression. To accept alienation as inevitable in any one domain of social life is to resign oneself to reification in all its forms.

On the Poverty of Student Life

[domcurmudgeon]

The next discord is caused by women, who soon become antithetical to cultural trends and spread around them their conservative influence.

Sigmund Freud, feminist, on why women just don’t get it and are always holding him back!, Civilization and Its Discontents

[domcurmudgeon]

In spite of all man's evolutionary progress the smell of his own excretions is scarcely disagreeable to him yet, but so far only that of the evacuations of others.

Sigmund Freud on why one always thinks one’s own shit doesn’t stink, Civilization and Its Discontents

[domcurmudgeon]

Putting out fire by urinating [...] therefore represented a sexual act with a man, an enjoyment of masculine potency in homosexual rivalry.

Sigmund Freud on why everyone is gay but him, Civilization and Its Discontents

[domcurmudgeon]

What is the use of reducing the mortality of children, when it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest moderation on us in begetting them, so that taken all round we do not rear more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for sexual life in marriage and probably counteracted the beneficial effects of natural selection?

Sigmund Freud on the sexual benefits of disposable children, Civilization and Its Discontents

[domcurmudgeon]

You're filthy rich - you don't have to do anything you don't want to

Mad Men

[domcurmudgeon]

The socialism of the bourgeoisie simply consists of the assertion that bourgeois are bourgeois--for the benefit of the working class.

who do you think?

[domcurmudgeon]

I know the studying you do in your bedroom, said my uncle. Damn the studying you do in your bedroom. I denied this. Nature of denial: Inarticulate, of gesture.

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

[domcurmudgeon]

There were Protestant fundamentalists hoping they wouldn't be dismissed by neocon intellectual from Queens and neocons talking to fundamentalists thinking: I wonder if when they look at me they see what Annie Hall's grandmother saw when she looked down the table at Woody Allen.

Joan Didion, “In the Realm of the Fisher King” in After Henry