“ Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov (via wahnbriefe) (via tragos) (via petersantiago) (via crashinglybeautiful)
Signa // Verba
“ And those that were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche (via samsaramotel)
kvetchlandia: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Part I 2006. Rheingold und Walküre. Oper Bonn. Choreographisches Theater Johann Kresnik. Stage and Costumes: Gottfried Helnwein. Inszenierung und Choreographie - Johann Kresnik. Musik - Gernot Schedlberger. Libretto und Dramaturgie - Christoph Klimke.
“ While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Lewis Carroll (via tiffanyhoran) (via sympathyfortheartgallery)
kvetchlandia: George S. Zimbel Alvin Nikolai at the Henry Street Settlement, New York 1951
“ If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C.S. Lewis (via psychotherapy) (via quote-book) (via interrobangag) (via libraryland)
“ At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive – social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself – become void, and the enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity. The human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained, because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity, of which the achievements of self-preservation can only be defined as functions – in other words, self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (translated by Edmund Jephcott) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
“ It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent fictional content for his novel. The fiction is already there. The writers task is to invent the reality … The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is completely fiction.
J.G. Ballard (via sansfin)
liquidnight: Dave McKean - Ideas, Kent, England, 1994. From The Sandman Dustcovers
“ We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Richard Dawkins (via morningbell) (via spaceships) (via arsvitaest) (via crashinglybeautiful)
liquidnight: Toni Frissell - Portugal, 1946. From Toni Frissell: Photographs 1933-1967
“ A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them, for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Sigmund Freud (via psychotherapy)
“ I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals (via samsaramotel)
“ si hoc legere scis nimium eruditiones habes.
essentially it says, “if you can read this, you’re overeducated.” (via mnmal)
