[salisabahi]

The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.

[petaltexturedskies]

I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

[salisabahi]

Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

[madragoras]

DIFFERENCE VERSUS COMPREHENSION

Difference is not a thing, it is a process. It unfolds - or better, it is an unfolding (and a folding, and a refolding). It is a live. This is the vitality at the heart of things. People want to comprehend. But many want to comprehend to be in control. To avoid risk. But to comprehend, it has to be stabilized. The movement has to stop, barring new possibilties. The multiplicity and diffusion of concepts and perspectives is not a difficulty or a problem of philosophical thought. It is actually the very point of it. To quote Gilles Deleuze quoting Spinoza, men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation. Below are multiplicity of views . . .

"The real is what resists symbolization absolutely."

- Jacques Lacan

"It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality."

- Gilles Deleuze

"Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting."

- Michel Foucault

"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution."

Jacques Derrida

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality."

- Theodore W. Adorno

"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy."

- Martin Heidegger

"The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I am not."

- Fernando Pessoa

And I would like to rest my case with another Derrida quote . . .

"Nothing is complete by itself; it can only become complete through what it lacks. But what every particular thing lacks is infinite; we cannot know in advance what complement it calls for."

- Jacques Derrida

[salisabahi]

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.” -Goethe

[gnossienne]

Milan Kundera (1929-2023), "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979)

[salisabahi]

“I thought that small talk was too small, I thought big talk was too pretentious, I thought music was noise, and I thought art was bullshit.”

[oneinchbarrier]

[neliectoill]

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

— Anna Karenina

[salisabahi]

On passe sa vie à romancer les motifs et à simplifier les faits.

[salisabahi]

Herkes bilir ki hayat, yaşanmak zahmetine değmeyen bir şeydir.

Albert Camus

[salisabahi]

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

[salisabahi]

Ces enfants dont je n'ai pas voulu, s'ils savaient le bonheur qu'ils me doivent !

-Cioran

[sandytree1]

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature

[perfectfeelings]

“But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[chaoticambivalence]

"There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture." - Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[mindmuseum]

“When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being