Stephanie's Pillowbook

 

SCHOLAR

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar. [Lao-Tzu]

To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them. [Jacob Bronowski]

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, and to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. [Samuel Johnson|

How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void. [Joseph Joubert]

Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence. [Robert Heinlein]

To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority. It is this point of view – academic minds clinging like oysters to disproved theories – that has blocked every advance of knowledge in history. [Robert Heinlein]

The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works. [Jacques Barzun]

It is not because they desired to have dominion over all lands and nations, and be honoured by all people, or because they desired to have plenty to eat and drink, and other pleasures, that the wise men and prophets longed for the Messianic days, but because they would then be at leisure to study the Law and its teaching without being interrupted by any oppressor. [Moses Maimonides]

Altro diletto, che ‘mparar, non provo. (No other happiness than learning do I feel) [Petrarch]

Obscurantism is the academic theorist’s revenge on society for having consigned him to relative obscurity – a way of proclaiming one’s superiority in the face of one’s diminished influence. [David Lehmann]

Pure scholarship, like pure science and art, is entirely useless. That is why it is admirable, a demonstration that civilized man is neither an animal nor a savage nor a peasant, for whom nothing exists but what is immediately useful. [Richard Aldington]

Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman. [Lord Chesterfield]

Within professional philosophy [Wittgenstein] thought his teaching had done more harm than good. He compared it to Freud’s teachings, which, like wine, had made people drunk. They did not know how to use the teaching soberly. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked. ‘Oh yes,’ Bouwsma replied. ‘They had found a formula.’ ‘Exactly.’ [Ray Monk]

My heart went out to John Leyden, Scottish antiquarian, who died in Java, in 1811, of ‘library miasma,’ an illness caught from disturbing old books. [Margaret Drabble]

[John] Stow had devoted his life, and exhausted his patrimony, in the study of English antiquities; he had travelled on foot throughout the Kingdom, inspecting all monuments of antiquity, and rescuing what he could from the dispersed libraries of the monasteries… Later in life, worn out with study and the cares of poverty, neglected by that proud metropolis of which he had been the historian, yet his good-humour did not desert him; for, being afflicted with sharp pains in his aged feet, he observed that ‘his affliction lay in that part which formerly he had made so much use of.’ Many a mile had he wandered, many a pound had he yielded, for those treasures of antiquities which had exhausted his fortune, and with which he had formed works of great public utility. It was in his eightieth year that Stow at length received a public acknowledgement of his services, which will appear to us of a very extraordinary nature. He was so reduced in his circumstances that he petitioned James I for a Licence to collect alms for himself, ‘as a recompense for his labour and travel of forty-five years, in setting forth the Chronicles of England, and eight years taken up in the Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, towards his relief now in his old age; having left his former means of living, and only employing himself for the service and good of his country.’ Letters patent under the great seal were granted. After no penurious commendation of Stow’s labours, he is permitted ‘to gather the benevolence of well-disposed people within this realm of England: to ask, gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects.’ These letters patent were to be published by the clergy from their pulpit; they produced so little that they were renewed for another twelvemonth: one entire parish in the city contributed seven shillings and sixpence! Such, then, was the patronage received by Stow, to be a licensed beggar throughout the kingdom for one twelvemonth. Such was the public remuneration of a man who had been useful to his nation, but not to himself. [Isaac D'Israeli]

The average PhD thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another. [J. Frank Dobie]

My erudition is no doubt an aspect of my ignorance. [Guillaume Apollinaire]

And in general it would not be a bad idea if many a scholar had the rubbishy books he has written pounded down and made into a bust of him. [Georg Lichtenberg]

A droll thought: a scholar weeping because he cannot understand his own writings. [Georg Lichtenberg]

Dawkin’s Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurationism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. [Richard Dawkins]

Amid the finite and the diurnal, Walker and his kindred souls wrestled onward, for two hours a week. There was a gay antimonianism about the graduate students, too, and he spent long weekends with them in their rooms in the Graduate Halls, listening to records of Lotte Lenya, eating pretzels, then driving up to parties in the canyon, where the air was sulphurated with sexuality and everyone drank Californian wine. On Friday nights, when the students swarmed out to drive-ins and bars to celebrate date-night, they drove around town looking for people giving parties, calling on the married graduates and the younger faculty people to find out what was swinging. It was a world of intellectual vagabonds, sleepers on other people’s couches, and Walker developed a taste for and a loyalty to it all. The graduate students and younger faculty members, who had all spent long years in college, also had an intellectual style Walker envied. They had vast terminologies for talking about literature, and freely used words Walker had never before heard in anyone’s speech vocabulary – mimesis, epistemology, mythopoeic. They had strong specialisms which they talked about in detail – a strong Shelley group banded together in the faculty lounge to talk about Epipsychidion over cups of Maxwell House – and Walker was struck by their real concern with ideas. [Malcolm Bradbury]

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of the subject matter. [Margaret Mead]

Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavour, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress — in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution. [Jones’s First Law]

 

SCIENCE

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. [John von Neumann]

First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it. [Richard Feynman]

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? [Richard Feynman]

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, if you wish to call it that) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. [Richard Feynman]

The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word “science” in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. [Gerald Weinberg]

All scientific knowledge to which man owes his role as master of the world arose from playful activities. [Konrad Lorenz]

Science is simply common sense at its best; that is, rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic. [T.H. Huxley]

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. [T.H. Huxley]

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. [Matthew Sands]

… although to the non-scientist the aesthetic of biology would mean simply the beauties of nature, to the biologist it means much more. For example, the surface beauty of a leaf is nothing compared to the beauty of its cellular structure and of the process of photosynthesis. Learning about these things just increases appreciation. This is contrary to the idea held by many non-scientists that analysis destroys beauty. This latter view is based on a lack of understanding and knowledge of the processes of science. This is why many of the biologist’s beauties are not appreciated by most non-scientists. [Maura C. Flannery]

… [it is] justly esteemed an unpardonable temerity to judge the whole course of nature from one single experiment, however accurate or certain. [David Hume]

… a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. [Douglas Adams]

Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? [Herbert Spencer]

Science is never merely knowledge; it is orderly knowledge. [Josiah Royce]

The religions disperse, kingdoms fall apart, but works of science remain for all ages. [Ulugh-Beg]

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact. [H.L. Mencken]

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. [Galileo Galilei]

In high art and pure science, detail is everything. [Vladimir Nabokov]

… the idea that it [science] takes away mystery or awe or wonder in nature is wrong. It’s quite the opposite. It’s much more wonderful to know what something’s really like than to sit there and just simply, in ignorance, say, “Oooh, isn’t it wonderful!” [Richard Feynman]

Science is a process. It is a way of thinking, a manner of approaching and of possibly resolving problems, a route by which one can produce order and sense out of disorganized and chaotic observations. Through it we achieve useful conclusions and results that are compelling and upon which there is a tendency to agree. [Isaac Asimov]

In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word “simplest.” It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as x/t = k(2x/y2) less simple than “it oozes,” of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgement. [J.B.S. Haldane]

Science is the attempt to comprehend nature by means of concepts. [Bernhard Riemann]

It has been said that tackling a new scientific problem is like going into a darkened room. First you fall over the furniture, then you collide with other people in the room; arguments might develop. With time things settle down, as you learn where most of the furniture is and don’t fall over so often. Eventually someone finds the light switch and everything becomes obvious. [John Pendry]

Observation and experiment are what count, not opinion and introspection. Few working scientists have much respect for those who try to interpret nature in metaphysical terms. For most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it is cheaper, easier, and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it. Outside of psychology it plays almost no part in the functions of the research machine. [Steve Jones]

Science might also be defined as the process of substituting unimportant questions which can be answered for important questions which cannot. [Kenneth Boulding]

Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition. [Stephen Jay Gould]

The difference between art and science is that science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else. [Donald Knuth]

Science is spectrum analysis; art is photosynthesis. [Karl Kraus]

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification. [Karl Popper]

Physics becomes in these years the greatest collective work of science – no, more than that, the great collective work of art of the twentieth century. I say ‘work of art’ because the notion that there is an underlying structure, a world within world of the atom, captured the imagination of artists at once. Art from the year 1900 on is different from the art before it, as can be seen in any original painter of the time: Umberto Boccioni, for instance, in The Forces of a Street or his Dynamism of a Cyclist. Modern art begins at the same time as modern physics because it begins in the same ideas. [Jacob Bronowski]

Science is uniquely distinguished from other human practices: it is the only activity in which the constraints of reality have brought to the quest for deep answers an effective consensus across all the variations that in other respects divide the human species. [Henry H. Bauer]

A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this page of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the ‘personal experience’ of science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion… you have no calling for science and you should do something else. For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion. [Max Weber]

Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain. [Helmholtz]

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. [Claude Lévi-Strauss]

So I want to make the assumption which the astronomer – and indeed any scientist – makes about the universe he investigates. It is this: that the same physical causes give rise to the same physical results anywhere in the universe, and at any time, past, present, and future. The fuller examination of this basic assumption, and much else besides, belongs to philosophy. The scientist, for his part, makes the assumption I have mentioned as an act of faith; and he feels confirmed in that faith by his increasing ability to build up a consistent and satisfying picture of the universe and its behaviour. [Edward Appleton]

… the cardinal rule in science is that a statement must be provable—but that does not mean that it has to be proved now. [J.D. Bernal]

The vault of heaven, studded with nebulae and stars, and the rich vegetable mantle that covers the soil in the climate of palms, cannot surely fail to produce on the minds of these laborious observers of nature an impression more imposing and more worthy of the majesty of creation than on those who are unaccustomed to investigate the great mutual relations of phenomena. I cannot, therefore, agree with Burke when he says, ‘it is our ignorance of natural things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.’ [Alexander von Humboldt]

When the pioneer in science sends forth the groping fingers of his thoughts, he must have a vivid, intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction but by an artistically creative imagination. [Max Planck]

.. it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns only what we can say about nature. [Niels Bohr]

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another. [Thomas Hobbes]

Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength. [Michael Shermer]

The traditional working scientists are at the bottom rung – each one knows almost everything about almost nothing; as one progresses toward the top of the ladder, the subject matter becomes more abstract until one finally reaches the philosopher at the top who knows almost nothing about almost everything. [Alvin Weinberg]

A scientist is one who, when he does not know the answer, is rigorously disciplined to speak up and say so unashamedly; which is the essential feature by which modern science is distinguished from primitive superstition, which knew all the answers except how to say, “I do not know.” [Homer W. Smith]

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof. [Ashley Montague]

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. [Vannevar Bush]

The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty… we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure – that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes that this is true. [Richard Feynman]

Science is but a method. Whatever its material, an observation accurately made and free of compromise to bias and desire, and undeterred by consequence, is science. [Hans Zinsser]

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. [Adam Smith]

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny…’ [Isaac Asimov]

The legendary image of a scientist as a humble searcher for truth is more and more replaced by the image of a scientist as a well-paid brilliant expert, speaking an unintelligible professional jargon, highly competent in a narrowly defined domain but arrogantly extending his competence into fields in which he knows nothing, and neglecting the fact that science is only a small subdivision of human knowledge.
[Hans Primas]

The “silly question” is the first intimation of some totally new development [A.N. Whitehead]

Objectivity in science cannot be proclaimed, it must be built. [Londa Schiebinger]

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. [Donald Knuth]

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life. Born of the sensibility, it sows and creates it in its turn. It is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life. Science, or to use a broader term, knowledge, has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and
propagation of the species. [Rémy de Gourmont]

What is the social value of science? Why should we support it with taxes? Answer: It can keep people honest. Emperors and popes used to insist that people subscribe to lies about the Earth, about the relationships among different sorts of people, and about a lot of other things. They cannot lie to that extent any more. Science can put and keep politicians and prophets in their proper place, at least over some things. [Henry H. Bauer]

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. [Carl Sagan]

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colours, that colour is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. [Carl Sagan]

… almost all scientists believe that as their knowledge increases, their sense of wonder also grows. The scientist sees a flower, said physicist John Tyndall, “with a wonder superadded.” [Martin Gardner]

When reputable scientists correct flaws in an experiment that produced fantastic results, then fail to get those results when they repeat the test with flaws corrected, they withdraw their original claims. They do not defend them by arguing irrelevantly that the failed replication was successful in some other way, or by making intemperate attacks on whomever dares to criticize their competence. [Martin Gardner]

We Americans have refined self-righteousness to a high art, cherishing the romantic image of smart outsiders against the establishment. New Age types see themselves as brave truth-seekers, opposed by a rigid technological priesthood. No matter that this priesthood is dedicated to self-criticism, and to sharing whatever they learn. Science represents this era’s “establishment,” and is therefore automatically suspect. [David Brin]

The important distinction between science and those other systematizations [i.e., art, philosophy, and theology] is that science is self-testing and self-correcting. Here the essential point of science is respect for objective fact. What is correctly observed must be believed… the competent scientist does quite the opposite of the popular stereotype of setting out to prove a theory; he seeks to disprove it. [George Gaylord Simpson]

It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English Schools of Oxford produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. [Peter Medawar]

My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am a custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world… Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research… a study of the classification of American ‘blues’ based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc, visible only under the microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvellous devices, variants of the magic lantern… My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me… To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena – all this is so enticing I cannot describe it. [Vladimir Nabokov]

It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing the title Constructing
Everest.) [Steven Weinberg]

Scientists have discovered many peculiar things, and many beautiful things. But perhaps the most beautiful and the most peculiar thing that they have discovered is the pattern of science itself. Our scientific discoveries are not independent isolated facts; one scientific generalization finds its explanation in another, which is itself explained by yet another. By tracing these arrows of explanation back toward their source we have discovered a striking convergent pattern — perhaps the deepest thing we have yet learned about the universe. [Steven Weinberg]

… science is truly one of the highest expressions of human culture – dignified and intellectually honest, and withal a never-ending adventure. Personally, I feel much the same with regard to the more ecstatic moments in science as I do with regard to music. I see little difference between the thrill of scientific discovery and what one experiences when listening to the opening bars of the Ninth Symphony. [William Thomas Astbury]

Scientists are only men, and are subject to all the foibles of their kind. They have the same drives for freedom, security, certainty, image and status as have other men… the same attraction for the known the familiar and the comfortable, and will cling to old and sterile ideas like a broody hen sitting on boiled eggs. Like those others, there is a lunatic fringe, and a reasonable quota of social misfits, small-pool big-frogs, megalomaniacs, prima donnas, nymphomaniacs, gold diggers, entrepreneurs, prophets and devout disciples. [Frank E. Egler]

[It is] part and parcel of the methodological foundations of science that one does not ask certain fundamental questions. [Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker]

Should we force science down the throats of those that have no taste for it? Is it our duty to drag them kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century? I am afraid that it is. [George Porter]

Science knows only one commandment- contribute to science. [Bertolt Brecht]

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism. [Primo Levi]

My post gave me a direct view of the magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in the act of blowing up – as, in miniature, it was; the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower of more than two hundred mesons.
Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that – a record of the undoing of one of the basic building blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe – could have resisted asking for a closer look. [James Blish]

The Republic has no need of scientists. [The judge who sent Lavoisier to the guillotine]

 

SEA

The English can resume, where they will, their old littoral enjoyments. Once again they will be able to fill their hair with salt and their shoes with stones; they will be free once more to migrate to small and rainy towns that are only crowded at the very time they travel; to leave their comfortable homes to eat unlovely meals in lodgings resided over by cross women of fanatical parsimoniousness… The more reasonable sensuous pleasures of the seaside will also be open to them: the wriggling of bare toes in sand; the working of depressions for buttocks; the popping of blistered seaweed. They will be able to inhale again in the sunshine that curious aroma, always slightly faecal, which belongs to the rearward part of beaches – composed of flies and old newspapers and unintentionally dried fish. [Christopher Marsden]

All the memories of my youth reverberated under my steps, like the shells of the sea-shore. Each wave of the sea, which I see breaking, awakens in me distant echoes. I hear the rumbling of by-gone days, and the never-ending sequence of vanished passion, surging like waves. I remember the passion that I felt, the sadness and the longing that I experienced, which whistled like gusts of wind, like storms in the rigging, and imperative desires whirled in the darkness like a flock of wild gulls in the stormy air…
The other day, in the heat of the day, and alone, I walked eighteen miles at the edge of the sea. It took the whole afternoon. I got back quite intoxicated, for I had imbibed so many smells and so much fresh air. I put my hands over my eyes and I looked up at the clouds. I got lonely, I smoked, I gazed at the poppies, I slept for five minutes on the sand-dunes. A soft rain awoke me. At times I heard the song of a bird cutting across the noise of the sea. Sometimes a little stream, flowing through the cliff, mingled its soft music with the beating of the waves. I went home just as the setting sun was gliding the window-panes of the village. It was low tide. The hammer of the carpenters reverberated on the skeletons of the boats in dry-dock. One could smell the tar, mingling with the smell of oysters. [Gustave Flaubert]

One of the Neapolitans declared that, without a view of the sea, life would not be worth living. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

This idea smote my brain when for the first time I saw the approach of evening over Naples, with its sky of satin-grey and red. You might have died without seeing this! – then came a shudder, a fit of self-pity, at the thought that I was beginning life when already old; and after that tears and joy at being rescued in the nick of time. [Nietzsche, on arriving in Sorrento in 1876]

The waves, as I drove home this afternoon, and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell… What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment… the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is ‘held,’ and then – down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow.
I don’t want to be sentimental. But while one hangs, suspended in the air, held, – while I watched the spray, I was conscious for life of the white sky with a web of torn grey over it; of the slipping, sliding, slithering sea; of the dark woods blotted against the cape; of the flowers on the tree I was passing; and more – of a huge cavern where my selves (who were like ancient sea-weed gatherers) mumbled, indifferent and intimate… and this other self apart in the carriage, grasping the cold knob of her umbrella, thinking of a ship, of ropes stiffened with white paint and the wet, flapping oilskins of sailors. [Katherine Mansfield]

 

SEASONS

Fallen leaves on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils. Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion, therefore April is called ‘the cruellest month’. Autumn is the mind’s Spring; what is there we have, ‘quidquid promiserat annus’, and it is more than we expected. [Cyril Connolly]

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. [Albert Camus]

September is different from all other months. It is more magical. I feel the strange chemical change in the earth which produces mushrooms is the cause, too, of this extra ‘life’ in the air – a resilience, a sparkle. For days the weather has been the same. One wakes to see the trees outside bathed in green-gold light. It’s fresh – not cold. It’s clear. The sky is a light pure blue. During the morning the sun gets hot. There is a haze over the mountains. Occasionally a squirrel appears, runs up the mast of a pine-tree, seizes a cone and sits in the crook of a branch, holding it like a banana. Now and again a little bird, hanging upside-down, pecks at the seed. There is a constant sound of bells from the valley. It keeps on all day, from early to late.
Midday – with long shadows. Hot and still. And yet there’s always that taste of a berry rather than scent of a flower in the air. But what can one say of the afternoons? Of the evening? The rose, the gold on the mountains, the quick mounting shadows? But it’s soon cold. Beautifully cold, however. [Katherine Mansfield]

 

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

… the notion of the ’second self’, the belief that inside every romantic figure, in the dark and chaotic recesses of the soul, was a completely different person and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative – and deeper – reality would be uncovered. [Peter Watson]

Consider what your nature is able to bear before you decide which path in life you will take. [Epictetus]

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs and branches caked with mud collect around; weeds settle and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds migrate, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water – such is our personality. [Cyril Connolly]

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the centre of his world, as the creator of his own acts – but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. [Erich Fromm]

‘Know thyself?’ If I knew myself, I’d run away. [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

And who are you? said he… Don’t puzzle me, said I. [Laurence Sterne]

You don’t have to be able to swim to know a fish, you don’t have to shine to recognize a star. [Ursula K. Le Guin]

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self. [Spinoza]

It is doubtless a vice to turn one’s eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

I have two minds, one of which is perpetually occupied in looking at and examining the other. [Jeremy Bentham]

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown. [Anatole France]

Only the shallow know themselves. [Oscar Wilde]

Observe yourself carefully: of all the feelings you have ever had, has a single one disappeared? No – every one is preserved, is it not? Every one. The mummies in one’s heart never fall into dust, and when you peer down the shaft there they are below, looking at you with their open, unmoving eyes. [Gustave Flaubert]

The ego is not master in its own house. [Sigmund Freud]

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it’s unimportant. [Norman Mailer]

To be too conscious is an illness. [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]

Knowing oneself is a roundabout way of finding excuses for oneself. [Paul Valéry]

A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others. [Paul Valéry]

What surrounds me – things I have bought, written, and published, my children, my books, my order or disorder – all this is more like me than I am like myself. It has more stability and shape than my momentary self. [Paul Valéry]

… nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. [C.G. Jung]

Everything our body does, other than the functioning of the senses, escapes our notice. We know nothing of our most vital processes – circulation, digestion, and so on. It is the same with our spirit; except for the superficial pattern of ideas, we are ignorant of its activities and changes, its crises.
Nothing but an illness makes us aware of the profound workings of our body. In the same way we realise those of our mind and spirit when we become unbalanced. [Cesare Pavese]

I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. [Simone Weil]

Fish are not the best authority on water. [Jane Yolen]

Our identity is always a case of mistaken identity. [Melanie Klein]

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things. [Albert Camus]

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. [George Eliot]

We may listen to our inner self – and still not know which ocean we hear roaring. [Martin Buber]

Man is only man on his surface.
Lift off the skin, dissect; here the machinery begins. And soon you lose your bearings in an inexplicable substance, foreign to all you know and yet the basic stuff of the man you are dissecting.
It’s the same with your desires, your feelings, and your thought. The familiarity and the human aspects of these things vanish on examination. And when, after lifting off the skin of language, I try to look beneath it, what I see bewilders me. [Paul Valéry]

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. [Virginia Woolf]

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our own frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. [H.P. Lovecraft]

Many of our contemporaries admit to the belief that they are subjects of a long epic of ‘metempsychosis’ or ‘metemsomatosis’: they imagine themselves to be a poverty-stricken porter of ancient times, then a Roman patrician, a rat in Ireland at the time of Ptolemy, then an Inca princess or a parrot on the banks of the Amazon; they picture themselves in another body and an entirely different situation, assuming that their essential self is continuous. Of course this type of belief remains clandestine, but its existence tells us that anyone can fantasise themselves as different, while continuing to be ‘themselves’. to assume that any woman is always aware of the fact that she is a woman, down to the last detail, is to attribute an attitude of psychological rigidity to half of humanity, when we know that human beings can imagine themselves as swans, geese or white elephants. {Michele Le Doeuff]

I have seen a lot of my inner self, more than most people, and you’d think I would have gained some new insight, even some sense of illumination, but I am as much in the dark as ever. I do not feel connected to myself in any new way. Indeed, if anything the distance seems to have increased, and I am personally more a dualism than ever, made up of structure after structure over which have no say at all. I have the feeling now that if I were to keep at it, looking everywhere with lenses and bright lights, even into the ventricles of my brain (which is a technical feasibility if I wanted to try it), or inside the arteries of the heart (another easy technique these days), I would be brought no closer to myself. I exist, I’m sure of that, but not in the midst of all that soft machinery. If I am, as I suppose is the case at bottom, an assemblage of electromagnetic particles, I now doubt that there is any centre, any passenger compartment, any private green room where I am to be found in residence. I conclude that the arrangement runs itself, beyond my management, needing repairs by experts from time to time, but by and large running well, and I am glad I don’t have to worry about the details. If I were really at the controls, in full charge, keeping track of everything, there would be a major train wreck within seconds. [Lewis Thomas]

According to this expressivist view, the self contains an inner seed of potential that is capable of self-fulfilment through artistic creativity, communion with nature, and intense relationships with others. The image of self-realisation through the expression of one’s innermost feelings and capacities seemed to offer an alternative to the ‘dehumanising’ effects of the naturalistic outlook. Nonetheless, to the extent that these approaches still bought into the assumptions of ontological individualism, they tended to perpetuate the very view of human reality they sought to overcome…
The only ideal [Rollo May] seems to endorse is commitment, that is, a ‘decisive attitude toward existence,’ ‘the attitudes of… the self-aware being taking his own existence seriously.’ Indeed, commitment to values is necessary if one ‘is to attain integration,’ for values are needed to serve ‘as a psychological centre, a kind of core of integration which draws together [one's] powers as the core of a magnet draws the magnet’s lines of force together.’ Values make possible human freedom and maturity: ‘The mark of the mature man is that his living is integrated around self-chosen goals,’ such a person ‘plans and works toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not.’
It goes without saying, however, that the question here is precisely this ‘what not.’ When values and goals are chosen solely in order to attain integration and maturity, they are being treated as mere means to ends. The result, then, is that values come to be regarded as adventitious, presumably dispensable in favour of other means (perhaps brutality or destructiveness) if those would do the job better… moral discourse is reduced to the calculative-instrumentalist thinking May rightly sees as so debilitating. Moreover, this conception of values as tools on hand for our use threatens to reinforce the objectifying view of the self May wants to eliminate. For when values are thought of as items on hand for our free choice, we will tend to think of ourselves as dimensionless points of raw will, not attached in advance to anything, who can freely pick and choose among the smörgåsbord of values set before us. Thus, though May is right to say that ‘the degree of an individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much he himself believes in the values he lives by,’ he seems unable to account for how the autonomous, disengaged chooser of values could ever come to regard any values as genuinely binding in the first place…

For where all things are equally possible, nothing is really binding, and so no choice is superior to any others. Freedom then becomes, in Rieff’s classic line, the ‘absurdity of being freed to choose and then having no choice worth making.’ [Charles B. Guignon]

The gradual inversion of meaning for the word ‘individual,’ moving from the indivisible and collective to the divisible and distinctive, carries quietly within itself the historical development of self-consciousness, testifies to that complex dynamic of change which separated the person from his world making him self-conscious and self-aware, that change in the structure of feeling which during the Renaissance shifted from a sense of unconscious fusion with the world towards a state of conscious individuation. [?]

Personality is only a persistent error. [Max Jacob]

 

SENTIMENTALITY

The world is so full of positive feelings, naïve sentimentality, self-important rectitude and sycophancy that irony, mockery and the subjective energy of evil are always in the weaker position. At this rate every last negative sentiment will soon be forced into a clandestine existence. Already the merest gibe tends to meet with incomprehension. It will soon be impossible to express reservation about anything at all. We shall have nothing left but disgust and consternation. [Jean Baudrillard]

Whenever people say “we mustn’t be sentimental”, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “we must be realistic”, they mean they are going to make money out of it. [Brigid Brophy]

 

SERIOUSNESS

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college. [P.J. O'Rourke]

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act. [Tara Ploughman]

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. [Werner Heisenberg]

 

SEX

Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. [Lord Chesterfield]

Sex is a baffling thing when it doesn’t happen. I used to wake up in the morning, when I was married, and wonder if the whole world was crazy, whooping about sex all the time. It was like hearing all the time that stove polish was the greatest invention on earth. [Marilyn Monroe]

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision. [Italo Calvino]

A man’s body has always struck me as too highly spiced, too rich, too strong tasting, to be capable of being desired immediately. Some apprenticeship is certainly required. O. confirmed this for me one day, in the Café Victor at Rouen, when she said that the charm of a woman or young boy is disclosed at once, whereas long familiarity and particular attention are needed before a man’s is revealed. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable. [Georg Lichtenberg]

It’s not erotic’ is a pronouncement so closely related to ‘It’s not normal’ that I’m almost embarrassed to see it so often in print. [Carol A. Queen]

I shall never cease to be astonished by the degree of man’s disdainful indifference towards his pleasures, and his consequent failure to extend their domain. Such an attitude reminds me of those unfortunates who are so concerned to subdue their erogenous zones that they wash only their hands and feet. Even those people who appreciate the delights of chance make no apparent effort to reproduce them. No system, no attempt at codifying pleasure. It is a miracle that they are still occasionally capable of giving way to what they so quaintly call vices… As far as I know, the geography of pleasure has never been taught, although proficiency in this subject would constitute an effective weapon against life’s tediums. No one has assumed the responsibility of assigning its limits to the frisson, of drawing the boundaries of the caress, of charting the territory of ecstasy. All that man has succeeded in extracting so far from the individual experience is a series of vulgar localisations. One day, perhaps, scholars will divide the human body up among themselves in order to be able to study the meanderings of pleasure: certainly such a study is as worthy of absorbing a man’s activity as any other. [Louis Aragon]

For sexuality is not an isolated domain, it continues the dreams and joys of early sensuality; children and adolescents of both sexes like the smooth, creamy, satiny, mellow, elastic: what yields to pressure without collapsing or altering and glides under the look or the fingers. Like men, woman delights in the soft warmth of sand dunes, often likened to breasts, in the light feeling of silk, in the soft delicacy of eiderdown, in the bloom of flower or fruit; and the young girl loves especially pale pastel colours, the mist of tulle and muslin. She has no liking for rough fabrics, gravel, rockwork, bitter flavours, acid odours; what she, like her brother, first caressed and cherished was her mother’s flesh. [Simone de Beauvoir]

… imagining himself to be on the edge of a divine mystery, and never expecting that he and Christine were the huge contrivances of certain active spermatozoa for producing other active spermatozoa. [Arnold Bennett]

[Nowadays] you are your sexual nature. [Stephen Heath]

The most refined form of sexual attractiveness – as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure – consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. [Susan Sontag]

One of the greatest of sex allurements would be lost and the extreme importance of clothes would disappear at once if the two sexes were to dress alike; such identity of dress has never come about among any people. [Havelock Ellis]

Nine tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation. [Ortega y Gasset]

I move my head imperceptibly, because of his moustache which brushes against my nostrils with a scent of vanilla and honeyed tobacco. Oh!… suddenly my mouth, in spite of itself, lets itself be opened, opens of itself as irresistibly as a ripe plum splits in the sun. And once again there is born that exacting pain that spreads from my lips, all down my flanks as far as my knees, that swelling as of a wound that wants to open once more and overflow – the voluptuous pleasure that I had forgotten.
I let the man who has awakened me drink the fruit he is pressing. My hands, stiff a moment ago, lie warm and soft in his, and my body, as I lie back, strives to mould itself to his. Drawn close by the arm which holds me, I burrow deeper into his shoulder and press myself against him, taking care not to separate our lips and to prolong our kiss comfortably.
He understands and assents, with a happy little grunt. Sure at last that I shall not flee, it is he who breaks away from me, to draw breath and contemplate me as he bites his moist lips. I let my lids fall, since I no longer need to see him. IS he going to undress me and take possession of me completely? It doesn’t matter. I am lapped in a lazy, irresponsible joy. The only urgent thing is that that kiss should begin again. We have all our time. Full of pride, my friend gathers me up in his arms as though I were a bunch of flowers, and half lays me on the divan where he rejoins me. His mouth tastes of mine now, and has the faint scent of my powder. Experienced as it is, I can feel that it is trying to invent something new, to vary the caress still further. But already I am bold enough to indicate my preference for a long, drowsy kiss that is almost motionless – the slow crushing, one against the other, of two flowers in which nothing vibrates but the palpitations of two coupled pistils.
And now comes a great truce when we rest and get our breath back. This time it was I who left him, and got up because I felt the need to open my arms, to draw myself up and stretch. Anxious to arrange my hair and see what my new face looked like, I took up the hand-mirror, and it makes me laugh to see we both have the same sleepy features, the same trembling, shiny, slightly swollen lips. [Colette]

I have wished to be a woman in order to know new pleasures. [Theophile Gautier]

Sex is a learned art, as much so as ice skating or tight wire walking or fancy diving; it is not instinct. Oh, two animals couple by instinct, but it takes intelligence and patient willingness to turn copulation into a high and lively art. [Robert Heinlein]

At the extremes of sexual behaviour, the difference in the projects is still apparent: men are frequently trying to bludgeon themselves into sensibility, women trying to bludgeon themselves into feeling something. [Don Paterson]

I should like to try flagellation but I am dreadfully afraid one of us would giggle. [Jean Bakewell]

… attributing an erotic value to pain does not at all imply behaviour marked by passive submission. Frequently pain serves to raise muscle tonus, to reawaken sensitivity blunted by the very violence of sex excitement and pleasure; it is a sharp beam of light flashing in the night of the flesh, it raises the lover from the limbo where he swoons so that he may be hurled down again. Pain is normally a part of the erotic frenzy; bodies that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other, seek to find each other, to unite, to confront each other in every possible manner. There is in erotic love a tearing away from the self, transport, ecstasy; suffering also tears through the limits of the ego, it is transcendence, a paroxysm; pain has always played a great part in orgies; and it is well known that the exquisite and the painful intermesh: a caress can become torture, torment can give pleasure. The embrace leads easily to biting, pinching, scratching; such behaviour is not ordinarily sadistic; it shows a desire to blend, not to destroy; and the individual who suffers it is not seeking rejection and humiliation, but union; besides, it is not specifically masculine behaviour – far from it. Pain, in fact, is of masochistic significance only when it is accepted and wanted as proof of servitude…
Masochism exists when the individual chooses to be made purely a thing under the conscious will of others, to see herself as a thing, to play at being a thing. [Simone de Beauvoir]

‘It is easy to establish,’ Freud writes in a section on the sources of infantile sexuality, ‘that all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones [spill over into] sexuality.’ And two pages later: ‘It may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct.’ Almost anything will do the sexualising job, as the examples in this section suggest – examples which include intellectual strain, verbal disputes, wrestling with playmates, and railway travel. Finally, this idea is repeated in the concluding summary of the Three Essays, where Freud speaks of sexual excitement as ‘a by-product… of a large number of processes that occur in the organism, as soon as they reach a certain degree of intensity, and most especially,’ he adds, ‘of any relatively powerful emotion, even though it is of a distressing nature.’
In passages such as these, Freud appears to be moving toward the position that the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organisation of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those compatible with psychic organisation. ‘Any activity, any modification of the organism, any perturbation,’ Laplanche writes, ‘can produce a marginal effect which is precisely sexual excitement at the point where this effect [of perturbation, of shattering] is produced.’ Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self. From this perspective, the distinguishing feature of infantile sexuality would be its susceptibility to the sexual. The polymorphously perverse nature of infantile sexuality would be a function of the child’s vulnerability to being shattered into sexuality. Sexuality is a particularly human phenomenon in the sense that its very genesis may depend on the décalage, or gap, in human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and the development of ego structures capable of resisting or, in Freudian terms, of binding those stimuli. The mystery is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it. In sexuality, satisfaction is inherent in the painful need to find satisfaction. It is therefore not a question of deciding whether or not cruelty – or more specifically now, masochism as the ‘ground’ of all the forms of the cruel – operates independently of the erotogenic zones, or even of seeking out the ‘mutual influences’ to which cruelty and sexual develop,ent would somehow both be subject. Rather, sexuality – at least in the mode in which it is constituted – could be thought of as a tautology for masochism.
I wish to propose that, most significantly, masochism serves life. It is perhaps only because sexuality is ontologically grounded in masochism that the human organism survives the gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development of resistant defensive ego structures to which I referred a moment ago. Masochism would be the psychical strategy which partially defeats a biologically dysfunctional process of maturation. Masochism as the model of sexuality allows us to survive or infancy and early childhood. Little animals already make love; little human produce sexuality. Masochism, far from being merely an individual aberration, is an inherited disposition resulting from an evolutionary conquest. [Leo Bersani]

The attempt to refer all erotic phenomena to the instinct of reproduction is one of the greatest stupidities of our time… Every bough of apple blossom, every flower and every work of man is evidence against so narrow an interpretation of the purposes of Nature. Of the twenty thousand ova capable of being fertilised which are born with the girl-child, only a few hundred are left by the time she has reached puberty, and of these, to take a high figure, a dozen come to fruition; and of the many millions of the man’s spermatozoa, countless troops perish without even reaching a woman’s body. People babble a great deal of nonsense. [Georg Groddeck]

… the sensual pleasure, which the act of impregnation brings to each sex, is not, as you know, necessarily and exclusively linked with that act.. It is not fertilisation that animals seek, but simply sensual pleasure. They seek pleasure, and achieve fertilization by a fluke. [André Gide]

It was Baudelaire who first noticed the disturbing sensuality in the contrast between the white thighs of cancan dancers and their black stockings. [Paul Éluard]

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. [Judith Butler]

The paramecium, a tiny inhabitant of freshwater pools, reproduces by binary fission: that is, from time to time the single cell of this infusorium splits and separates into two identical twin infusoria. This division repeats itself once or twice a day, so that – but for accidental mortality – a single paramecium could produce a million of its like in less than twenty days. Up to this point there is no sign of anything like love:
‘But at longish intervals the paramecia stop feeding; they seem agitated, uneasy; swimming in all directions, as though in search of something, they collide, they strike one another with their cilia. And now two of them approach one another and unite, then two others, and soon the whole population is arranging itself in couples. Perhaps at this moment they give out particular substances, kinds of hormones which, diffused in the liquid medium, make them more attractive to each other. In any case the two paramecia that have joined – conjugated – now press close together, mouth to mouth. This coming together, this embrace, is followed by a still more intimate contact: the members enclosing their respective protoplasms blur, then fade at the forepart of the body, so that the two conjugant cells are now, so it seems, open to each other, in each other. This union takes about a quarter of an hour to achieve. The couple, which so far has been swimming, now sinks to the bottom of the water.’
There follows a description of certain changes in the nuclei, at the end of which the paramecia are ready for the essential event of the conjugation, the exchange of genetic material.
‘In each of the paramecia one of the two nuclei – the sedentary one – remains in place, but the other – the migratory one – passes into the paramecium opposite, across the thin bridge of flesh that now joins the two creatures. Then each migratory nucleus fuses with the opposite sedentary nucleus to form a mixed nucleus, or nucleus of conjugation. These acts take about fifteen hours to complete. Having reconstituted their membranous frontiers, the two paramecia then separate, and each resumes its autonomous existence… Nothing, in appearance, distinguishes the infusorium from what it was before the marriage. And yet it has become essentially different; it has expelled an important part of its nuclear substance (whence perhaps a beneficent purification), and above all, having received from its partner exactly as much as it has given, it has become half the other’ [Jean Rostand].
Thus the force that drives two cells together must not be identified with the force that drives them to reproduce. It is a fundamental discovery, this, that even at that elementary stage of life the phenomenon of reproduction and that of conjugation are distinct. They may coincide, they are not the same. The purpose of love is not procreation. The multiplication of species did not require the invention of sexuality: we know that Life had found other methods – budding, reproduction by fission, parthenogenesis. Sexuality was not necessary. Some have maintained that it is a biological luxury. Certainly it favours the rejuvenation of heredity, the elimination of the defects that gradually accumulate in a line; this is one of its advantages, but nothing justifies us in saying that this is its reason. Experiment shows that asexual reproduction can go on indefinitely.
The force driving the paramecia to conjugate is not the reproductive instinct, but it is not the attraction of the sexes either: when these infusoria come together, the two partners are strictly alike, and they function as hermaphrodites. There is no tendency to compensate for a sexual difference, which does not exist, or to reconstitute a bisexual condition, which was there all the time. We are forced to conclude that the amorous phenomenon precede sexuality. And here again sexualization is only one of the forms of dualization in living things; it eads us on to regard sexual conjugation as one of the ways of compensating for such dualization. It is this corollary that is so perfectly illustrated by the conjunction of the paramecia, which suggests that love is not to be confused with sexuality any more than with the instinct for procreation, and that the force which drives the sexes toward each other is only one means for accomplishing something that is far greater – a tendency to self-deliverance from any differentiation, any particularization, in order to reconstitute a lost identity. Though not the only one, this means of accomplishment is nonetheless the one specific to the Couple, the way laid open by love to Man and Woman towards a reconquest of their primordial condition. Whether it be a permanent or a passing fusion of two individuals, there is what appears to be an elementary type of love, not only in the infusoria, but in the bacteria, and perhaps even, if Rostand is right, ‘in those infra-microscopic creatures the viruses, which are in some respects transitional between the world of life and the world of matter.’ One even wonders whether a ‘general propensity to unite is not a part of the nature of a molecule… insensitive and inert though it be.’ [Suzanne Lilar]

A man’s genitals are naturally disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that will not listen to reason, and will do anything in their mad lust for possession. [Plato]

[How often considered an] alter ego usually more sly, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual. [Balint on the penis]

The turgescence that the male feels as the aggressive stiffening of a muscle will be felt by Genet as the blossoming of a flower. Whether it be the swelling up of an inert air chamber or the unsheathing of a sword, nothing is decided in advance: the entire choice which one makes of oneself gives its meaning to this inner perception. One man feels his transcendence in his penis; another, his passivity. And, in point of fact, it is quite true that an erection is a hardening, a spurt, but it is also true that this induration is undergone. The raw fact is ambiguous; the meaning depends on the individual. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

 

SF

Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. [Miriam Allen deFord]

SF futures are moments of our past. [Fredric Jameson]

Rooted as they are in the facts of contemporary life, the phantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern Science Fiction are incomparably richer, bolder and stranger than the Utopian or Millennial imaginings of the past. [Aldous Huxley]

We can think of science fiction as postmodernism’s noncanonized or ‘low art’ double, its sister-genre in the same sense that the popular detective thriller is modernist fiction’s sister-genre. [Brian McHale]

It is absurd to condemn [science fiction stories] because they do not often display any deep or sensitive characterization. They oughtn’t to… Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, the more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books. The Ancient Mariner himself is a very ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much; he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. [C.S. Lewis]

One good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence. [H. Bruce Franklin]

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens. [Rudy Rucker]

SF has never really aimed to tell us when we might reach other planets, or develop new technologies, or meet aliens. SF speculates about why we might want to do these things, and how their consequences might affect our lives and our planet. [John Clute]

Science fiction is generically concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience. [Donna Harraway]

A revealing way of describing science fiction is to say that it is part of a literary
mode which one may call fabril. Fabril is the opposite of pastoral… Pastoral literature is rural, nostalgic, conservative. It idealizes the past and tends to convert complexities into simplicity; its central image is the shepherd. Fabril literature (of which science fiction is now by far the most prominent genre) is overwhelmingly urban, disruptive, future-oriented, eager for novelty; its central image is the faber, the smith or blacksmith in older usage, but now extended in science fiction to mean the creator of artefacts in general – metallic, crystalline, genetic, or even social. [Tom Shippey]

Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud. [Theodore Sturgeon]

I will argue for an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement… SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. [Darko Suvin]

 

SHYNESS

In a young man it is from an intellectual and also a moral point of view a bad sign if, at an early age, he knows how to deal with people, is at once at home with them, and enters into their affairs prepared as it were; it betokens vulgarity. On the other hand, an attitude of astonishment, surprise, awkwardness, and waywardness in such circumstances points to a nature of a nobler sort. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category, a dimension that opens out into solitude. Moreover, it is an inherent suffering, as if we had two epidermises and the one underneath rebelled and shrank back from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is a part of the alloy that lays the foundation, in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self. [Pablo Neruda]

It is surely discreditable, under the age of thirty, not to be shy. Self-assurance in the young betokens a lack of sensibility: the boy or girl who is not shy at twenty-two will at forty-two become a bore. ‘I may be wrong, of course’ – thus he or she will gabble at forty-two, ‘but what I always say is…’
For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop into natural shapes. Without this fluid the character becomes merely standardised or imitative: it is within the tender velvet sheath of shyness that the full flower of idiosyncrasy is nurtured: it is from this sheath alone that it can eventually unfold itself, coloured and undamaged. [Harold Nicholson]

 

SIMPLICITY

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. [Albert Einstein]

Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. [Clement Mok]

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world’s richest source of rewarding challenges. [Edsger Dijkstra]

I do believe in simplicity. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem he first frees the equation from all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. [Henry David Thoreau]

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning. [Moses Maimonides]

 

SINCERITY

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic. [Oscar Wilde]

The expression of true feelings is always commonplace, and the more sincere one is, the more commonplace one is. For, to avoid banality, we need to choose our words. [Paul Valéry]

Sincerity in art… is mainly a matter of talent. [Aldous Huxley]

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower, nor is modesty either. [Colette]

To write with sensibility requires more than tears and moonlight. [Georg Lichtenberg]

Personal sincerity has no place in literature, because personal sincerity as such is inarticulate. [Northrop Frye]

Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste than in a churchyard. [Benjamin Jowett]

 

SOCIETY

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. [George Bernard Shaw]

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. [Mignon McLaughlin]

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. [G.K. Chesterton]

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seek it, he must serve it too. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

The endless minuet of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crowded together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into streets, offices and factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy’s territory, far, very far from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes. [Raoul Vaneigem]

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. [Theodor Adorno]

We tend to think of any one individual in isolation; it is a convenient fiction. We may isolate him physically, as in the analytic room; in two minutes we find that he has brought his world in with him, and that even before he set eyes on the analyst, he had developed inside himself an elaborate relation with him. There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple, unmixed with other human beings. Each personality is a world in himself, a company of many. That self, that life of one’s own, which is in fact so precious though so casually taken for granted, is a composite structure which has been and is being formed and built up since the day of our birth out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges between ourselves and others… These other persons are in fact therefore parts of ourselves. And we ourselves similarly have and have had effects and influences, intended or not, on all others who have an emotional relation to us, have loved or hated us. We are members one of another. [Jacques Rivière]

The man who feels he is the only man alive and all others are shades is not so very much alive. [Paul Valéry]

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men’s judgements of one another. [Erasmus]

Society, circles, salons, what is called high society, is a miserable play, a bad opera, without interest, which is kept going for a while by the stage effects, the costumes, and the decorations. [Chamfort]

The only way to be popular is for us to be clad in the skin of the stupidest of animals. [Balthazar Gracián]

Our environment is now made up basically of relationships with others. [Ernest Gellner]

A man has as many social selves as there are people who recognise him. [William James]

There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye. [Edward Dahlberg]

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul. [Montaigne]

Any collocation of persons, no matter how numerous, how scant, how even their homogeneity, how firmly they profess common doctrine, will presently reveal themselves to consist of smaller groups espousing variant versions of the common creed; and these sub-groups will manifest sub-sub-groups, and so to the final limit of the single individual, and even in this single person conflicting tendencies will express themselves. [Jack Vance]

Others draw out of us, for example, repartées, flashes of wit, emotions, desires, envy, lust, ideas, kind or unkind acts. How many things we could not know we had in us and were capable of doing, or even desiring, did not a challenge from Another Party, or his mere existence, call them forth!
We get from Others almost all that is essential, the bread we eat, even the language we speak; not to mention the images of ourselves we glean from the way they look at us, their attitudes, remarks, and silences. [Paul Valéry]

We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbour because our ‘natural’ attitude toward the ‘other’ is one of either indifference or hostility. [W.H. Auden]

Never join an organization. [Georges Braque]

… what Reik calls ‘personal rhythm’. On the basis of this determination, tact can be defined a it later on as social adaptation, the bringing into conformity of different and heterogeneous rhythms. Before that, however, comes sexual life, a certain ‘music’ in sexual relations:
“In music, it is a matter of course that questions of ‘tact’ are treated from the standpoint of time. For Takt means time as counted and constituted in units. The transference of this metrical term from music to social life shows that here, too, temporal factors come into play. The society of two may be taken to represent society in general. The temporal factor, as seen in the seasonable beginning and ending of the sexual prelude and in the final ecstasy, is decisive in character. A poet hs spoken of the ideal of love as ‘two hearts and one beat’. Even those who are accustomed to regard sexual attraction as a matter of instinct, in accordance with its dominant element, cannot escape the conviction that happy love is largely dependent upon the temporal concordance of the individual rhythm of two human beings.”
To each individual or subject, then, there corresponds a rhythm, and one can consider social life as a whole, at least on the level of the affective and pulsional, as governed fundamentally – and more or less regulated, between cohesion and discord – by a general rhythmics. Reik emphasises in the latter, calling upon biology and all the well-known phenomena of periodicity and alternance (waking/sleeping, activity/fatigue, etc), its primitive, archaic, primary character – going so far as to suppose a state of pure and simple rhythmic undifferentiation at the origins of human development. [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]

 

SOLITUDE

Beware the bitterness of the lonely ones that turn their back to love, ambition, society. They will some day revenge of having renounced to all that. [E.M. Cioran]

One can acquire everything in solitude except character. [Stendhal]

A lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst. [Martin Luther]

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust? [George Eliot]

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. [Lorainne Hansberry]

In short, solitude is not made for those men who burn themselves up from within. [Giacomo Leopardi]

It’s a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd. [Marilyn Monroe]

Solitude confirms me in my faults, sloth, untidiness, abstraction, morbid imagining and slothful arrogance. [Cyril Connolly]

We should set aside an arrièreboutique, a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and founding there our true liberty and our principal place of retreat and solitude. [Montaigne]

[De Quincey] confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinth shelter of some great city like London or Paris – there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. [J.R. Findlay]

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. [C.G. Jung]

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd. [Thomas Mann]

Living alone, especially by the sea, restores something primitive and childlike to one’s character. [Jean Cocteau]

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude. [De Quincey]

He who lives in solitude may make his own laws. [Publilicus Syrus]

There is a ‘portable’ solitude: so strong, so persistent a conviction of one’s individuality, a selfhood so extreme, that once a man has reached that stage he can mix in society with impunity and never fail, when in the company of others, to distinguish his true self from the outer man whom he displays and who is joining in the conversation. He does not need the desert, for he carries with him, ever ready, the non-existence of what others say, of the values ascribed to him by others and those that others get from him, reciprocally. [Paul Valéry]

Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom). Things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention. if only we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being… [Simone Weil]

And do you think it amusing to have no man of letters to speak to, to keep all one’s thoughts to oneself, never to be able to air or discuss one’s own opinions nor to take an innocent pride in one’s studies, never to be able to ask for help or advice, and to keep one’s courage during so many hours and days of exhaustion and indifference? [Giacomo Leopardi]

I should like to give just one example of the noble awe that the description of complete loneliness can inspire, and I draw for that purpose upon some passages from ‘Carazan’s Dream’ in the Bremen Magazine, volume IV, page 539. In proportion as his riches increased, this wealthy miser had closed off his heart from compassion and love towards all others. meantime, as the love of man grew cold in him, the diligence of his prayer and his religious observances increased. After this confession, he goes to recount the following: ‘One evening, as by my lamp I drew up my accounts and calculated my profits, sleep overpowered me. In this state I saw the Angel of Death come over me like a whirlwind. He struck me before I could plead to be spared his terrible stroke. I was petrified, as I perceived that my destiny throughout eternity was cast, and that to all the good I had done nothing could be added, and from all the evil I had committed, not a thing could be taken away. I was led before the throne of him who dwells in the third heaven. The glory that flamed before me spoke to me thus: “Carazan, your service of God is rejected. You have closed your heart to the love of man, and have clutched your treasures with an iron grip. You have lived only for yourself, and therefore you shall also live the future in eternity alone and removed from all communion with the whole of Creation.” At this instant I was swept away by an unseen power, and driven through the shining edifice of Creation. I soon left countless worlds behind me. As I neared the outermost end of nature, I saw the shadows of the boundless void sink down into the abyss before me. A fearful kingdom of eternal silence, loneliness, and darkness! Unutterable horror overtook me at this sight. I gradually lost sight of the last star, and finally the last glimmering ray of light was extinguished in outer darkness! The mortal terrors of despair increased with every moment, just as every moment increased my distance from the last inhabited world. I reflected with unbearable anguish that if ten thousand times a thousand years more should have carried me along beyond the bounds of the universe I would still always be looking ahead into the infinite abyss of darkness, without help or hope of any return -. In this bewilderment I thrust out my hands with such force toward the objects of reality that I awoke. And now I have been taught to esteem mankind; for in that terrifying solitude I would have preferred even the least of those whom in the pride of my fortune I had turned from my door to all the treasures of Golconda -.’[Kant]

 

SPACE

Mankind will not remain tied to Earth forever. [on Tsiolkovskii's tombstone]

Man belongs wherever he wants to go. [Wernher von Braun]

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years’ War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. [Carl Sagan]

In the night sky, when the air is clear, there is a cosmic Rorschach test awaiting us. Thousands of stars, bright and faint, near and far, in a glittering variety of colours, are peppered across the canopy of night. The eye, irritated by randomness, seeking order, tends to organize into patterns these separate and distinct points of light. [Carl Sagan]

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered
space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. [Carl Sagan]

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus’s rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars. [George Steiner]

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendour of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra… these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known. [Vladimir Nabokov]

What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight. [Aleksei Leonov]

You keep returning to the thought that only very thin walls separate you from the deathly cold and incomprehensible emptiness of space, which can extinguish life instantly and piteously. [Oleg Makarov]

What was most significant about the first lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon, but that they set eye on earth. [Norman Cousins]

We don’t know whether human music will mean anything to nonhuman intelligences on other planets. But any creature that comes across Voyager and recognizes the record as an artefact can realize that it was dispatched with no hope of return. That gesture may speak more clearly than music. It says: However primitive we seem, however crude this spacecraft, we knew enough to envision ourselves citizens of the cosmos… However small we were, something in us was large enough to want to reach out to discoverers unknown, in times when we shall have perished or changed beyond recognition…
Whoever and whatever you are, we too once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you. [Timothy Ferris]

The Moon landings were not about gathering data or testing hypotheses; they were about theatre, about the enactment of many mythical themes that were fed and nurtured by such a spectacular event. It was about the power of humankind, the power of technology, our ability to overcome the apparently impossible and to conquer not just Earth but the whole Universe. And yet at the same time it was about the smallness of humankind, our vulnerability the fact that we inhabit a single small
planet, surrounded by emptiness… [Chris Beckett]

Like the philosophy of Greece, the paintings of the Renaissance and the music of the Enlightenment, the explosion of knowledge about our solar system and the surrounding universe will be remembered for thousands of years as the defining brilliance of our age. To destroy [the space] program for the sake of bean counting, or perhaps as part of some obscure political manoeuvre, is not tolerable. It is not just a mistake, it is a crime – an infamous crime against civilization that is comparable to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. [Robert Zubrin]

When we compare our tiny corner of the universe to the infinite majesty of the whole, our innate, unjustified pride should naturally vanish. Yet, if we realize that, small as we are, we have been able to penetrate the mystery of the universe, establish its history, analyse its composition and draw its map; and that, moreover, we might even soon be able to predict its behaviour to the end of time; and finally that, unfazed by our smallness, we have explored our little home, discovering in the process the origin of earthquakes and volcanoes, we are entitled to a complacent smile, a smile wisely tempered by the comparison of our mortality to the apparent never-ending life of the universe. [Mario Salvadori]

We are community, within and without — that is, our bodies are, in a sense, communities of micro-organisms, and our biosphere is an intricate mesh of interacting communities. It’s only natural to want to extend this and create an interplanetary community. There is beauty and inspiration in the vision of humanity’s spreading into the galaxy, leaving the cradle, becoming who-knows-what. [David Harry Greenspoon]

 

STOICISM

On the night of the 24th of February 1809, when the House of Commons was occupied with Mr. Ponsonby’s motion on the Conduct of the War in Spain, and Mr. Sheridan was in attendance, with the intention, no doubt, of speaking, the House was suddenly illuminated by a blaze of light; and, the Debate being interrupted, it was ascertained that the Theatre of Drury Lane was on fire. A motion was made to adjourn: but Mr. Sheridan said, with much calmness, that ‘whatsoever might be the extent of the private calamity, he hoped it would not interfere with the public business of the country.’ He then left the House; and proceeding to Drury Lane, witnessed, with a fortitude which strongly interested all who observed him, the entire destruction of his property. It is said that, as he sat at the Piazza Coffee-house during the fire, taking some refreshment, a friend of his having remarked on the philosophic calmness with which he bore his misfortune, Sheridan answered, ‘A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’ [Thomas Moore]

If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations – somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy. [Georg Lichtenberg]

 

STUPIDITY

I find myself often a bit overwhelmed by the curious rigidity and opacity of most human beings. There’s something dismally fixed, stony, sclerotic about most of them – a lack of sensibility and awareness and flexibility, which is most depressing. [Aldous Huxley]

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature never puts the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one need answer. [C.J. Jung]

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. [Montaigne]

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse. [William Hazlitt]

Idiot, (n.): A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. [Ambrose Bierce]

Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. The man who knows nothing thinks he is teaching others what he has just learned himself; the man who knows a great deal can’t imagine that what he is saying is not common knowledge, and speaks more indifferently. [La Bruyère]

Those who enjoy their own emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse to do likewise, and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate them. [Johannes Brahms]

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. [Douglas Adams]

… he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave. [William Drummond]

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well: and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. [Joseph Conrad]

The ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they know nothing and care less. They see bodies fall to the earth, they hear sounds, they kindle fires, they see the heavens roll above them, but of the causes and inner working of the whole they are ignorant, and with their ignorance they are content. [Oliver Lodge]

… in 1872 the famous Bishoff, a professor at the University of St. Petersburg, had declared that women were incapable of intellectual activity because their brains were too small. In an attempt to prove this fascinating theory, he instructed that his own brain be weighed after his demise. To everyone’s stupefaction, it turned out to be five grammes lighter than the average female’s! [Michèle Sarde]

Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. [Bulwer-Lytton]

Ignorance of science and technology is becoming the ultimate self-indulgent luxury. [Jeremy Bernstein]

I felt a kind of forlorn sense of being lost in a world of incredibly stupid and malicious dwarfs. [Aleister Crowley]

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal. [Carl Bernstein]

No one in this world, so far as I know… has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. [H.L. Mencken]

Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrassed at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned. [Isaac Asimov]

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Mankind are always ready to adopt or reject what accords with pre-conceived opinions, to make reason subservient to prejudice, and to reject without examination, whatever is discordant with a received system; thus closing the door of science, and excluding themselves from the benefit of light. [George Adams]

The fine flower of stupidity blossoms in the attempt to appear less stupid. [Geoffrey Madan]

Some people’s education merely gives a fixed direction to their stupidity. [Lord Cromer]

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain. [Friedrich Schiller]

 

STYLE

Style is the physiognomy of the mind. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

… every style of writing should bear a certain trace of kinship with the lapidary style that is the ancestor of them all. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

Every style is a means of insisting on something. [Susan Sontag]

The true elements of a style are: crotchets, wilfulness, oversights, compulsions, makeshifts, chance, and echoes. [Paul Valéry]

I’ve come up with another formulation about style: that it’s essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It’s what a composer does NOT do that defines a style. [James Tenney]

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters. [Jules Renard]

The enemies of the aesthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience. [John Dewey]

Style gave significance to the slightest object, to actions and activities, to gestures; it was a concrete significance, not an abstraction taken piecemeal from a system of symbols. [Henri Lefèbvre]

Nothing is real except making rhythm of one’s thoughts and translating it into beautiful gestures. [Jean Cocteau]

The most beautiful works have this quality. They are serene in aspect, inscrutable. The means by which they act on us are various: they are as motionless as cliffs, stormy as the ocean, leafy, green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky. Homer, Rabelais, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Goethe seem to me pitiless. They are unfathomable, infinite, manifold. Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness. It is like the brilliance of light, the smile of the sun; and it is calm, calm and strong. [Gustave Flaubert]

It has always seemed to me that in my writings the thought mattered less than the movement of the thought: the gait. [André Gide]

Suppose, for example, it is necessary to say that one of the male characters was frightened. An Englishman would more than likely say, without exaggerating one way or the other, either positively or negatively: ‘Intensely frightened, James stood motionless, etc.’ A Frenchman: ‘Alfred began to tremble. A deathly pallor covered his handsome face. He withdrew, but with dignity.’ The Russian would prefer to express himself thus: ‘My hero, like a blackguard, got cold feet and trudged off home.’ Perhaps even better: ‘dashed off home.’ [Leontiev]

The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance and individuality. [Evelyn Waugh]

In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps. [W.H. Auden]

What the public reproaches you for, cultivate: it is you. [Jean Cocteau]

One should not recognise a poet by his style but by his gaze. [Jean Cocteau]

Form in a work is that which organises into a closed whole the life given to it as subject matter; that which determines its times, rhythms and fluctuations, its densities and fluidities, its hardnesses and softnesses; that which accentuates those sensations perceived as important and distances the less important things; that which allocates things to the foreground or the background, and arranges them in order… Every form is an evaluation of life, a judgement of life, and it draws this strength and power from the fact that in its deepest foundations form is always an ideology… The world view is the formal postulate of every form. [Lukács]

One thing is needful. – To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.
Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed on them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits – and they may be of the first rank – are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be as rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. [Gustave Flaubert]

… for in my opinion ideas can be as entertaining as actions, but in order to be so they must flow one from the other like a series of cascades, carrying the reader along amid the throbbing of sentences and the seething of metaphors. [Gustave Flaubert]

I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: ‘Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ [Samuel Johnson]

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavour or the colour of a particular human suffering. [Harold Bloom]

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don’t paint badly like other people. [G.E. Moore]

Real style is not having a programme – it’s how one behaves in a crisis. [Frank Auerbach]

The delight of art: perceiving that one’s own way of life can determine a method of expression. [Cesare Pavese]

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn” [?]

 

SUCCESS

You’re a success if you live a life that brings you as close as possible to the dreams you had when you were a kid. [Harlan Ellison]

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. [Walter Pater]

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. [George Bernard Shaw]

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. [Picasso]

The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you. [Nancy Astor]

The awareness of the ambiguity of one’s highest achievements (as well as one’s deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity. [Paul Tillich]

There’s no point in success if you don’t let it go to your head. That’s what it’s for. [John Otway]

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour: what worked once must always work. [Lillian Hellman]

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real! [Thomas Merton]

It is hard to imagine
How stupid and tranquil people are made by success. [Apollinaire]

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a longdesired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends. [Arthur C. Clarke]

There is something vulgar in all success. The greatest men fail, or seem to have failed. [Oscar Wilde]

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal. [Samuel Butler]

 

SUFFERING

The only true wisdom lives far from mankind out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others. [Ijugarjuk]

The human heart becomes deeper through the sharp knife which cuts into it. [Cesare Pavese]

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. [Cesare Pavese]

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. [Oscar Wilde]

If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chamber, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeon of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of world is this meilleur des mondes possibles. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. [W. Somerset Maugham]

The useless, unjust, incomprehensible, inept abomination that is physical pain. [Huysmans]

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering. [Cesare Pavese]

The suffering of pain and distress has become the central issue in ethics today… It has taken time for other concepts – sanctity, reason, virtue – to be put into their current perspective and for philosophers to realise that conditions such as justice, equality and liberty are all morally subordinate to the reduction of pain. Indeed justice, equality and liberty are psychologically and ethically important precisely because they tend to have an analgesic effect. [?]

Our flesh is fragile; it can be pierced or torn or crushed, or one of its internal mechanisms can be permanently deranged, by any piece of matter in motion. our soul is vulnerable, being subject to fits of depression without cause and pitifully dependent upon all sorts of objects, inanimate and animate, which are themselves fragile and capricious. Our social personality, upon which our sense of existence almost depends, is always and entirely exposed to every hazard….

Affliction is not a psychological state; it is a pulverisation of the soul by the mechanical brutality of circumstances. The transformation of a man, in his own eyes, from the human condition into that of a half-crushed worm writhing on the ground is a process which not even a pervert would find attractive. Neither does it attract a sage, a hero, or a saint. Affliction is something which imposes itself upon a man quite against his will. Its essence, the thing it is defined by, is the horror, the revulsion of the whole being, which it inspires in its victim. And this is the very thing one must consent to, by virtue of supernatural love.
It is our function in this world to consent to the existence of the universe. God is not satisfied with finding his creation good; he wants it also to find itself good. That is the purpose of the souls which are attached to minute fragments of this world; and it is the purpose of affliction to provide the occasion for judging that God’s creation is good. Because, so long as the play of circumstance around us leaves our being almost intact, or only half-impaired, we more or less believe that the world is created and controlled by ourselves. It is affliction that reveals, suddenly and to our very great surprise, that we are totally mistaken…

There is a question which is absolutely meaningless and therefore, of course, unanswerable, and which we normally never ask ourselves, but in affliction the soul is constrained to repeat it incessantly like a sustained, monotonous groan. The question is this: Why? Why are things as they are? The afflicted man naively seeks an answer, from men, from things, from God, even if he disbelieves in him, from anything or everything. Why is it necessary precisely that he should have nothing to eat, or be worn out with fatigue and brutal treatment, or be about to be executed, or be ill, or be in prison? If one explained to him the causes which have produced his present situation, and this is in any case seldom possible because of the complex interaction of circumstances, it will not seem to him to be an answer. For his question ‘Why?’ does not mean ‘By what cause?’ but ‘For what purpose?’ And it is impossible, of course, to indicate any purpose to him; unless we invent some imaginary ones, but that sort of invention is not a good thing…

There can be no answer to the ‘Why?’ of the afflicted, because the world is necessity and not purpose…

Silence is the answer…[Simone Weil]

… the commonsense view of pain as a low-level phenomenon directly contingent upon injury is a mistaken one. Pain is actually a high-level process that makes no sense in the absence of sentience. Pain accompanies injury in minds that are capable of subjectivity and this criterion is a reach for animals’. Derbyshire continues: ‘there are good reasons for believing that animals lack the ability for reflection, and therefore lack an inner world and the capacity for reasoning and suffering.’ [?]

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognised Job… [E.M. Cioran]

 

SUICIDE

A doubt has been raised – whether brute animals ever commit sucide: to me it is obvious that they do not, and cannot. Some years ago, however, there was a case reported in all the newspapers of an old ram who had comitted suicide (as it was alleged) in the presence of many witnesses. Not having any pistols or razors, he ran for a short distance, in order to aid the impetus of his descent, and leapt over a precipice, at the foot of which he was dashed to pieces. His motive to the ‘rash act,’ as the papers called it, was supposed to be mere taedium vitae. [Thomas de Quincey]

How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph! [Jules Renard]

I feel no appetite for death, I feel an appetite for not being, for having never been trapped in this maze of nonsense, abdications, renunciations and obtuse encounters which is the ego of Antonin Artaud, who is much weaker than it is. [Antonin Artaud]

And the man who for three quarters of an hour had just planned his own death stood at this very moment on a chair to search his bookshelves for the price list of the Saint-Gobain mirrors. [Stendhal]

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. [Cesare Pavese]

I swear that I’ll hang myself tomorrow
But today I’ll simply get drunk. [Russian song]

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gases smell awful;
You might as well live. [Dorothy Parker]

On the whole, we shall find that, as soon as a point is reached where the terrors of life outweigh those of death, man puts an end to his life. The resistance of the latter is nevertheless considerable; they stand, so to speak, as guardians at the gate of exit. Perhaps there is no one alive who would not already have made an end of his life if such an end were something purely negative, a sudden cessation of existence. But it is something positive, namely the destruction of the body, and this frightens people back just because the body is the phenomenon of the will-to-live. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

You, who can’t do anything, think you can bring off something like that? How can you even dare to think about it? If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn’t be in need of it. [Kafka]

A man who takes a knife and slices deliberately across his throat is murdering himself. But when someone lies down in front of an unlit gas-fire or swallows sleeping pills, he seems not so much to be dying as merely seeking oblivion for a while. [A. Alvarez]

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. [E.M. Cioran]

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

One of G.B. Shaw’s uncles, feeling melancholy, decided to commit suicide and placed his head in a carpetbag intending to suffocate himself. Overcome with the realisation of his preposterous situation he burst into such a fit of laughter that he suffered a heart attack and promptly died.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away. [E.M. Cioran]

 

SURREALISM

Surrealism is born of a consciousness of the derisory condition allotted to the individual and his thought, and a refusal to accommodate oneself to it. [Jean-Louis Bédouin]

I acknowledge without the least embarrassment my profound insensibility in the presence of natural spectacles and works of art that do not immediately produce in me a state of physical disturbance characterized by the sensation of a wind brushing across my forehead and capable of causing a veritable shiver. I never have been able to resist relating this sensation to erotic pleasure and can discover between them differences only of degree. [André Breton]

Let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone. [André Breton]

Even today I rely on nothing but my own receptivity, nothing but that craving to go on roaming in search of any and everything, which I am confident will keep me in mysterious communication with other receptive people, as if we were fated to come together suddenly. [André Breton]

Everywhere Surrealism appears in recuperated form: commodities, works of art, publicity techniques, the language of power, a model of alienated imagination, objects of devotion, and cultural accessories. [J.-F. Dupois]

The ‘convulsive beauty’ aspired to by Surrealism is troubling, effervescent and incomplete; it does not permit of quiet contemplation. It delights in the precarious tension generated by combining opposites such as the static and the dynamic, the banal and the baroque, the ideal and the obscene. Once recognised, this convulsive quality emerges as the most distinctive trait by which to identify the Surrealist presence not merely in an image but in lived experience. It encompasses the unexplained enigma, the short-circuited metaphor, the overheard remark, the fetish, the fortuitous meeting which jolts the motor of consciousness into higher gear, the black humour of the condemned man who is able to laugh even at the foot of the scaffold, the street-sign which beckons with the promise of some unspecified revelation. [Robert Short]

One light afternoon in winter I found myself in the courtyard of the Palace of Versailles. Everything was quiet and peaceful. Everything looked at me with a strange, questioning look. I then saw that each corner of the palace, each column, each window had a soul that was an enigma. Around me I looked at heroes in stone, motionless under the clear sky, under the rays of the winter sun that shone without love like profound songs. A bird sang in a cage suspended in a window. Then I felt all the mystery which pushes men to create certain things. And the creations appeared to me still more mysterious than the creators…
One of the strangest sensations handed down to us from prehistoric times is the sensation of foreboding. It still exists. It is like an eternal proof of the non-sense of the universe. The first man must have seen portents everywhere, and he must have shuddered at every step. [Giorgio de Chirico]

Three favourite surrealist metaphors are particularly apt as expressions of the disequilibrium and latent pressure with which we increasingly live. All three belong to physics: interference, the reinforcement and cancelling out that results from crossing different wave lengths; the short circuit, the dangerous and dramatic breaching of a current of energy; and communicating vessels, that register barely visible or magnified responses among tenuously connected containers. [Roger Shattuck]

Yet let us not forget that this revolution they hailed was one they intended to create in their own existence first of all. Surrealism is not written or painted, it is lived, and they were so many apostles of a new religion celebrated in cafés: the Certa, the Grillon of the Passage de l’Opéra, the Cyrano, on whose table amid cigarette smoke, the clatter of saucers, bursts of laughter and the faint intoxication afforded by orange-curaçao, Aragon accumulated like so many good jokes the dazzling images of Le Paysan de Paris. Certainly this wasn’t literature, he would never have been allowed to produce literature. Artistic work and work in general were in fact vilified and dismissed, life was to be consumed as it was given, not earned. And living meant looking, listening, savouring the atmosphere of those inspired places in postwar Paris: the Passage de l’Opéra, the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Buttes-Chaumont. The surrealists crowded to the Cinéma Parisiana to see L’Etreinte de la Pieuvre (The Grip of the Octopus), to the Théâtre Modene to enjoy the stupid plays performed there or at the Porte Saint-Martin. The most ridiculous shows were the most prized, for they put on stage the popular sentiments and emotions that had not yet been spoiled by culture. The surrealists haunted brothels, treasuring the uncorrupted nature of the whores. They sought cretinization for its own sake. The means were simple enough: merely buy a Sunday ticket at a suburban railway station and shunt for hours and hours on all the tracks of a landscape of desolation, on a journey whose end is never fixed in advance. One day, without a word of warning, Éluard vanished from the group; the credulous claimed he was dead and proclaimed the birth of a new Rimbaud; his poems were reread in a new perspective, his presence was reported by the newspapers in the New Hebrides; then he was back again: he had merely extended the cretinizing journey to the limits of the earth.
When the Passage de l’Opéra was demolished to make way for a new spur of the Boulevard Haussmann, the site of the daily meetings shifted to a café on the Place Blanche: the Cyrano, near the rue Fontaine where Breton had chosen to live, welcomed the surrealists to this Montmartre of suspect boulevards swarming with the odd fauna of whores and their pimps, the crowd of those who pretend to amuse themselves. Encounters here were astounding: circus people (the cirque Médrano was two steps away) accompanied by trapeze girls with their eyes ‘elsewhere’, Americans with their gold-filled mouths, who were to be avoided like the plague, tiny humans, so tiny and so filled with mysteries. The surrealists ventured as far as the Faubourg Montmartre where the Nadjas walk past in pursuit of their secrets. Sundays, they escaped as far as the Clignancourt or Saint-Ouen flea markets where wonders leaped out of each stall, each stray object, each paving-stone.
The important thing was to rediscover life under the thick carapace of centuries of culture – life pure, naked, raw, lacerated. The important thing was to bring the unconscious of a city into unison with the unconscious of men.
’Distractions of cultivated, overcultivated men’, it has been called. Distractions perhaps, but in the Pascalian sense of uprooting from a sick society; ‘cultivated men’ perhaps, in the sense that some of them had studied their ‘humanities’ but had suffered too much from the ‘advantages’ of culture not to try to regain their childhood vision. The important thing was to make the great experiment again: the experiment of life, this time not for oneself but in a group, collectively.
They realized as they proceeded that to try to changes one’s life, one’s own individual life, is to shake the very foundations of the world. The prospect of such a goal was not likely to alarm them. Quite the contrary. [Maurice Nadeau]

Surrealism is attractive because it teaches you how to be romantic without being sentimental, how to rediscover a universe which revolves around your own personality, and how to see visions in cities – le paysan de Paris to whom the gods appear. [Cyril Connolly]

Miserabilism has had its greatest success in creating such near-total confusion that few people recognize how miserable they realy are. It is worth emphasizing that Marx’s dea of the accumulation of misery was not meant as a narrowly economic forulation. It meant rather that the whole quality of human life, as long as capitalism endured, would grow more and more miserable. the function of all miserabilist ideologies is to conceal this truth; to make misery seem like it opposite; to make the world safe for miserabilist exploitation. In the fact that workers now own television sets and automobiles, some have affected to see disproof of Marx’s critique; but that very fact is itself the critique’s most radical confirmation. The television set and the automobile – the electronic device to reduce human beings to immobilised spectators, and the mobile armour which transports those atomized and safely-contained spectators from one form of misery to another – are primary instruments by which miserabilists enforce their squalid tyranny…

Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic dctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom and misery…

Nothing would be more difficult than reconciling surrealism to bourgeois culture. I know that everything continues normally today, as yesterday, as if life were an IOU punctuated now and then with a yawn, a shrug of the shoulders or a punch in the nose. Immobilised beneath a seemingly inflexible net of counterfeit hopes and fears – hopeless and fearless at the same time before a destiny that could hardly be more ruinous to the free development of the human personality – men and women go on fabricating illusory foresights and pitiful afterthoughts as if nothing more important were at stake than the price of cigarettes. But in this grim charade, fortunately, nothing is foolproof. A split second is sufficient to say no, to let the lions escape, to open the wounds of reality, to stop the assmbly line, to set ot for the unknown. Accdents do happen. With surrealism the phoenix of anticipation emerges unfailingly from the ashes of everyday distraction, rising defiantly on wings of vitriol and amber, putting to shame the musty compromises that provide the glue with which the existing agony adheres to so many passing thoughts. Dispelling the mirage of futility, traversing the mirror of fatality, surrealism is resolved to stop at nothing.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly: surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind. [Franklin Rosemount?]

The most conventional statues would be a marvellous embellishment of the countryside. A few marble nudes would create a fine effect in a ploughed field. Animals in streams and groups of solemn characters in black ties in rivers would make charming reefs to contrast with the monotony of the water. Dancing figures in stone would be a delightful adornment to the mountainsides. And, since mutilation is indispensable, the ground would be strewn with heads, the trees with hands, and the stubble with feet. [Paul Eluard]

Grow edible microscopic organisms in lakes. Every lake will become a kettle of ready-made soup that only needs to be heated. Contented people will lie about on the shores, swimming and having dinner. The food of the future…

Regard capital cities as accumulations of dust at the nodes of standing waves, according to te theory of resonant plates (Kundt’s dust figures)…

All the ideas of Planet Earth (there aren’t that many), like the houses on a street, should be designated by individual numbers, and this visual code used to communicate and to exchange ideas. Designate the speeches of Cicero, Cato, Othello, Demosthenes by numbers, and in the courts and other institutions, instead of imitation speeches that nobody needs, simply hang up a card marked with the number of an appropriate speech. This will become the first international language. This principle has already been partially introduced in legal codes. Languages will thus be left to the arts and freed from humiliating burdens. Our ears have become exhausted…

Set aside a special uninhabited island, such as Iceland, for a never-ending war between anybody from any country who wants to fight now. (For people who want to die like heroes)…

Redesign chemical and biological warfare so that it merely puts people to sleep. Then governments wil earn our admiration and deserve our praise…

Serious research in the art of combining human races and the breeding of new ones for the needs of Planet Earth…

Let factory chimneys awake and sing morning hymns to the rising sun, above the Seine as well as over Tokyo, over the Nile, and over Delhi…

On the great mall of Washington, DC we must have a monument to the first martyrs of science – the Chinese Hsi and Ho, state astronomers who were put to death for daydreaming… [Khlebnikov]