August 2011
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to...”
– - Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
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Words on my love and solitude.
I often think of true love. I often think of hidden passages. I often think about children scrambling through them. I often think of a wonderful library, a garden, and most of all, that truly beautiful Woman who gives these things their life. And now her absence. So much uncertainty - I cannot know where She will go from here - and my heart cries out, rebelling against its helplessness. I...
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“I know that I’ve said publicly that Remus Lupin was supposed to be on the H.I.V....”
– J.K. Rowling on Remus Lupin & HIV/AIDS, Lexicon Book Court Case (via thehpfacts)
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Plotinus: on the love of true Beauty
“This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love- just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not...
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither...”
– Milan Kundera (via curlesque)
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Epictetus: on the importance of his beard.
“‘Come then, Epictetus, shave off your beard.’
If I am a philosopher, I answer, ‘I will not shave it off.’
‘But I will take off your neck!’
‘If that will do you any good, take it off.’”
- Epictetus; Discourses, book 1 ch.2 (considering the context, it is probably more on the importance of acting in accordance with reason, and that...
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Persevere. Gladly.
“‘What aid, then, must we have ready at hand in such circumstances?’ Why, what else than the knowledge of what is mine, and what is not mine, and what is permitted me, and what is not permitted me? I must die: must I, then, die groaning too? I must be fettered: and wailing too? I must go into exile: does anyone, then, keep me from going with a smile, cheerful and serene?...
“[Art] should remain play, but also be poetic play. All art is dedicated to joy, and there is no higher and more serious task than of making people happy. The highest enjoyment, however, is the freedom of the inner life of feeling in the living play of all of its powers.”
-Friedrich Schiller
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“Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a determination to endure.”
-Plato, The Republic
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Herz, Mein Herz
Herz, mein Herz, sei nicht beklommen und ertrage dein Geschick. Neuer Frühling gibt zurück, was der Winter dir genommen.
Und wie viel ist dir geblieben, und wie schön ist doch die Welt! Und mein Herz, was dir gefällt, alles, alles darfst du lieben!
Heinrich Heine
Never before now, have I hung on someone’s every word; utterly terrified.
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“It is almost the definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never...”
– Cardinal J. Newman
(via moderndaygent)
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Awesome reunion with Friends.
The Moon Elf wizard Al’Calmilitae Oussea’undlin of Silverymoon met with a paladin, a bard, and their stalwart dwarven companion in the High Forest. Many orcs were slain, a tome of ancient magic was found, hope was brought into a shattered world with the appearance of the avatar of Sylvanus, and now events are being recounted in the passive voice (and complete sentences are presented...
tttttatiana-deactivated20130520 fragte: HI JEREMY
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“The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”
– Jonathan Franzen, “The Reader in Exile”, How to Be Alone: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) pp. 164-178, 178. (via firefliesinthelabyrinth)
GEW4531
Just downloaded the texts for my “Age of Goethe and Schiller” class; all auf Deutsch.
- Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie
- Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther
- Schiller, Maria Stuart
- Lessing, Nathan der Weise
- Hoffmann, Der Sandmann
This course will be a challenge, considering my mediocre German skills. But I’m ready for a challenge. I’m just hoping my 4 other...
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“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that...”
– — Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (via speculative fiction sexualities)
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“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which...”
– Michel Foucault (via anachronixt)
Bach: Air from orchestral suite no. 3
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography
What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings...
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