[stavanpancholi]

“Production anticipates reproduction; production produces change in such a way as to superimpose the impression of speed onto that of monotony. Some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation. They're both right.”

— Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’

[tavuklupilavv-deactivated202401]

[philosophybits]

“Creativeness is something mysterious and hidden. The revelation of creativeness does not come from above but rather from below — it is an anthropological, not a theological, revelation.”

— Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act

[megairea]

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

Stephen King, Bag of Bones, 1998

[thirdity]

“Art playing on its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object was still an art of great works. But art playing at re-cycling itself indefinitely by helping itself to reality? Most contemporary art is engaged in just this: appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology. In these innumerable installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things — and simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unoriginality, banality and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. Admittedly, it is claimed that all this mediocrity is sublimated in the transition to the level of art, which is distanced and ironic. But it is just as worthless and insignificant at that level as before. Transition to the aesthetic level rescues nothing. In fact the opposite is true: it is mediocrity raised to the second power. It claims to be worthless: ‘I’m worthless, I’m worthless!’ and it really is worthless!”

— Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

[philosophybits]

“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.”

— Michel de Montaigne, Essais

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they’re also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you’ve experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.”

— Diane Ackerman, from An Alchemy of Mind (Scribner, 2004)

[philosophybits]

“The problems of life cannot be solved by the automatic application of universally-valid norms. We cannot say that under the same conditions one must act in one certain way, everywhere and always. This cannot be said, first of all, because conditions are never exactly the same. We might state the maxim conversely: man must act individually and solve the moral problems of life individually, must manifest his creativity in the moral acts of his life….”

— Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man

[thirdity]

“Most present-day images — be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images — are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared.”

— Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena

[hungryfictions]

anne lamott, bird by bird

[philosophybits]

“Genius, in spite of vulgar conception, is a condition of chaos and unutterable restlessness. Not for nothing has genius been counted kin to madness. Genius flings itself hither and thither because it has not the Sitzfleisch necessary for industrious success in mediocrity.”

— Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

[quotespile]

“There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.”

— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

[philosophybits]

“If emptiness itself is rejected, no action will be appropriate. … If there is essence, the whole world will be unarising, unceasing, and static. The entire phenomenal world would be immutable. If it (the world) were not empty, then action would be without profit. The act of ending suffering and abandoning misery and defilement would not exist.”

— Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Garfield tr. (24:37-39)

[philosophybits]

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

[philosophybits]

“To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

[philosophybits]

“The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.”

— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

[philosophybits]

“There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Controversy”