Knižní střípky @kniznistripky - Tumblr Blog

“Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It includes purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”

— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book Of Tea

... my heart suddenly beating — Thinking I'm gonna get the local vibrations instead here I am almost fainting only it isn't an ecstatic swoon by St Francis, it comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me — In me and in everyone — I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices like thoughts about life or meditations under trees and the 'ultimate' and all that shit, in fact the other pitiful devices of making supper or saying 'What I do now next? chop wood? I see myself as just doomed, pitiful - An awful realization that I have been fooling myslef all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else.

Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

Definition is always limitation - the "fixed" and "unchangeless" are but terms expressive of stoppage of growth. Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We never forgive others because we know that we ourselves are in the wrong. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!

Okakuro Kakuzo - The Book of Tea

And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman, is woman, and will be woman so long as the stars drift in the sky and the heavens flux eternal change. Greater than our toil and eneavor, the play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing and mystery - greatest of all has been woman.

Jack London - The Star Rover

But how describe emotion in words? The charm of woman is wordless. It is different from perception that culminates in reason, for it arises in sensation and culminates in emotion, which, be it admitted, is nothing else than super-sensation. In general, any woman has fundamental charm for any man. When this charm becomes particular, then we call it love.

Jack London - The Star Rover

It takes the cold patience of the Asiatic to conceive and execute huge and complicated conspiracies.

Jack London - The Star Rover

The woman factor explains many things of men.

Jack London - The Star Rover

Modern physics plays perhaps only a small role in this dangerous process of unification. But it helps at two very decisive points to guide the development into a calmer kind of evolution. First, it shows that the use of arms in the process would be disastrous and, second, through its openness for all kinds of concepts it raises the hope that in the final state of unification many different cultural traditions may live together and may combine different human endeavors into a new kind of balance between thought and deed, between activity and meditation.

Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy

After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence - that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.