a known world
1.
Everything is uncertain.
The Buddha shits, the same as anyone.
Your truths may be true for you.
All truths are opinions.
Your opinion is not the only valid one.
The opposite of every great truth is equally true.
There are two sides to every coin.
The world is too complex to comprehend.
Our brains are too limited to understand reality.
We are not meant to know the Truth.
It is my right to be ignorant.
Everything is meaningless.
Nothing matters.
2.
Look for the Truth if you must, but don't find it.
The search is what's important.
Anyone who thinks they know something is a fool.
It is better to travel than to arrive.
The wisest man is he who does not believe he is wise.
Those who speak do not know.
The older I grow, the less I know.
3.
Reason is useless.
Thinking gets you nowhere.
The great philosophers themselves used reason, and they didn't agree.
Plato was a great man.
Descartes possessed courage.
Kant had integrity.
Hume was honest.
It is an exaggeration to say that Western philosophy is thoroughly evil.
The great questions of life are unsolvable.
4.
Whatever you do, do it in moderation.
The best things carried to excess are wrong.
A wise person is anyone who follows a middle course.
Contentment is the highest virtue.
We will never know the reason for our existence, not until we die at least.
No one will ever know why the evil prosper and the good suffer.
Our suffering will always be a mystery.
5.
All religions proclaim the one God.
If there was no God, life would be meaningless.
All religions are spiritual.
Meditation and prayer leads to enlightenment.
Christians are spiritual; atheists are materialists.
Anyone who wears robes and smiles is spiritual.
The Pope and the Dalai Lama are spiritual men.
Mother Teresa is good, while Hitler is evil.
Doing good is good.
Keep going to church.
Submit.
Humility is the greatest of all virtues.
6.
People who judge are evil.
Do not judge others.
Stop being judgmental.
Truth brings forth hatred.
To think is to differ.
Thinking causes pain.
Thinking upsets people.
The highest virtue is to accept our limitations and tolerate other people's weaknesses.
You must tolerate other people's views.
You must have faith in people.
There are more good people in the world than bad.
7.
Man is born to believe.
We cannot live without hope.
Hope feeds the soul.
Without hope, we would never get out of bed.
Everything's going to be alright.
8.
Have the courage to believe in yourself.
Don't listen to other people.
Let nobody deter you from doing what you believe is right.
You are important.
You only live once.
History never repeats.
9.
The Devil finds work for idle hands.
I earn a wage, therefore I am good.
Businessmen are virtuous.
A busy life is a virtuous life.
There is no substitute for hard work.
Work harder and run faster than everyone else.
One should aim to live a rich and varied existence.
Variety is the spice of life.
10.
Honour your parents.
Pursue a career.
Get married.
Love your wife unconditionally.
Family means everything to me.
Having children puts everything in perspective.
Children are valuable.
Always listen to little children.
11.
Motherly love is pure and selfless.
Mothers are saints.
The feminine is the spiritual aspect of ourselves.
Our emotions are spiritual.
Christmas is a special time of year.
12.
Women have souls.
Women think.
Women are conscious.
You can't judge a woman from the dress she wears.
13.
Men and women are equal.
Women are more emotionally mature than men.
Women are more caring than men.
Women are less violent than men.
Women are less egotistical than men because they are less dominating.
It is wrong to think of women as slaves to fashion. A part of them is deeper.
Women are not victims.
14.
Everybody needs somebody to love.
Love one another.
Without love, there is nothing.
Love is wonderful.
Love conquers all.
The world needs more love.
A hug a day keeps the demons at bay.
The more love, the less war.
15.
Lighten up, for heaven's sake!
Don't take yourself seriously.
Concentrate on the positives.
Always look on the bright side of life.
It is better to be entertaining than wise.
A smile goes a long away.
Laughter is the best medicine.
If you can't find something pleasant to say about someone, then say nothing at all.
Put people at their ease.
Never make an enemy.
Dare to be naive.
16.
Relax.
Take it easy.
We are meant to be happy.
If it feels good, do it.
If you've got it, flaunt it.
We can do what we want, as long as we don't hurt anyone else.
Anything you do is right.
Do what works.
Don't fight it.
Anything which feels this good can't be wrong.
Go with the flow.
Everything just is.
Be happy.
Life and Death
The Magazine of The Society for the Elimination of All Truth
"And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric."
- Samuel Beckett
Hope is as hollow as fear.
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
Your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
You will always keep your balance.
What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
That arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
What do we have to fear?
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
Then you can care for all things."
- Lao Tzu
"To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression or message that carries moment, passion and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or censoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being."
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
- Kafka
"Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everydayness of his own life. To be aware of the possibilities of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
- Walker Percy
"Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations."
- Oscar Wilde
first light washes in
froth on a dark crest
the dream still dawdles
with slow wings
your figure next to me asleep
brightness is a burnished blinding
the child in me remembers forgetting
a known world
where birds fly in and out,
the old human in me resurrects
with warmth in the throat
the child as unfamiliar
memory territory
how soft your body in the morning:
all of you one winged eyelid
will you own me still?
you open the balcony door
for the blind angel to stumble out
and fade away behind our seeing
everything a mirror
everything a mirror
we must meet again
- Breyten Breytenbach
Lady One
"The illusion that you could get someone else to do it for you. To think for you. Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-to-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely - but it was the bottom line. It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn't call the Messiah.
He'd call you."
- Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All
"The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world."
- Sidney Jourard
"A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational - it may embody any of those qualities - but because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden."
- E.M Forster
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
- Ray Bradbury
- Joseph Chilton Pierce
"I've lost the will to paint literally. I don't see the point in worrying away with a paintbrush trying to reproduce a literal photographic texture like cloth or skin. Paint is best at being paint. Paint can never be as perfect as nature when it is trying to imitate nature. It's a lost cause. Paint can only be as beautiful as nature when it is nature, when it is it's own texture. Marks on paper have their own beauty, and it is this slipping from the literal world into the world of abstract qualities that I try to achieve in my work. If I need a shirt to look like a shirt I'll scan it into my computer. If I want a shirt to feel like the wind, or like a constricting skin, or angry, or like a consoling embrace, then maybe it should be painted or drawn . . . "
- Dave McKean
Art Quotes - The Quote Cache
Belief & Technique for Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under,
crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
"The process of writing can be a powerful tool for self-discovery. Writing demands self-knowledge; it forces the writer to become a student of human nature, to pay attention to his experience, to understand the nature of experience itself. By delving into raw experience and distilling it into a work of art, the writer is engaging in the heart and soul of philosophy - making sense out of life."
- Georg Buehler
"Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
. . . Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself."
- Susan Sontag
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life; they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."
- Anne Lamott
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
- Ray Bradbury
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
- Cyril Connolly
Fish secrete highly reflective compounds
That act as a skin of mirror.
It is thought the fishes' sides
are painted in landscapes,
mountainous."
- Annie Dillard
"It is not the poet's business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them."
- James Elroy Flecker
1913
The Oubliette
An oubliette was originally a dungeon where you put people about whom you wished to forget (the word comes from the French 'oublier', to forget).
however frightening or strange
that self may prove to be."
- May Sarton
"Before we can become who we really are,
we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are,
here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger."
- Thomas Merton
of who you imagine yourself to be."
- Jim Britt
"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.
In our human lives, we are often impatient, ill-tempered, inappropriate. We find it difficult to treat our intimates with the love we really hold for them. Despite this, they bear with us because of the larger, higher level of family that they honor even in our outbursts. This is their commitment.
As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born."
- Julia Cameron
The Artist's Way
Examination at the Womb-Door
Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial? Death.
Who owns the whole rainy stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.
Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than death? Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
- Ted Hughes
Examination at the Womb-Door
And what I wrote I wrote in the water
I wrote:
on the verge of spilling over.
38.
It's that door shaped like you yourself behind which stands everything and nothing. You push at it. I push at it. You push at it every day and it doesn't open and you can't stop marveling and still and only when we suddenly decide to pull towards us we can't stopping marveling how this honor is just for me.
- Leevi Lehto
Quite Another Eternity
<< Home