philosophybits:

“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely — that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life”, Untimely Meditations

philosophybits:

“Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

quotespile:

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

philosophybits:

“One rarely falls into a single error. Falling into the first one, one always does too much. So one usually perpetrates another one — and now one does too little.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. Hence, once more, the importance of the Unconscious—as an anesthetist, who puts reason to sleep, and restores, for a transient moment, the innocence of vision. Without the art of forgetting, the mind remains cluttered up with ready-made answers, and never finds the occasion to ask the right questions.”

Arthur Koestler.

philosophybits:

“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

— Bertrand Russell, Letter to Lucy Donnely (November 25, 1902)

Legendary

THE OLD WAY

We stumbled down towards the braided brook

Corduroy’d and curt,

You asked for a break and a light,

You’d rather smoke than air

Probably why you agreed to come with me

I wanted to try fishing, but, raw,

Using nothing but what we could find in that 50 degree light,

“A bad idea” you coughed—and you came back fifteen minutes later

A handmade net and pole, and we sat, dreamily alone

Catching little more than leeches in the fog

I asked you questions of politics, of your past, of your hair color,

Of dreams,

You asked me why we were doing this.

Why, this braided brook, was worth the 30 minute drive an hour out of town, and all the brushes with death that went along with it.

I said, “It’s the OLD WAY”.

Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (1870), Henri Regnault (1843–1871), oil on canvas, 305 x 146 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

“The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of the plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.”

- Albert Camus, The Plague.

“How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

Albert Camus, The Plague.

quotespile:

“When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead