24 quotes found
“I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.”
“Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.”
“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
“If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
“Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.”
“You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”
“With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...”
“But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscio...”
“Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of hi...”
“In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous pe...”
“. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.”
“No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. ...”
“Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to spe...”
“And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, a...”
“History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is ...”
“More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humani...”
“For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a c...”
“. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving ...”
“I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its th...”
“I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality befo...”
“Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.”
“Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make ...”
