Page 142 of 292
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2024 9:43 pm
by iambiguous
Existentialism...
“The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.” Simone de Beauvoir
All the way to the grave as likely as not.
“But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress...” Friedrich Nietzsche
The fool!
“We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.” Susan Moody
Then pick one:
1] might makes right
2] right makes might
3] moderation, negotiation and compromise
4] flip a coin
“We get somber about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…” Sean J. Halford
God knows?
“And that’s the message. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.” Ali Smith
Yo, Benjamin Button! You're up!!
“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.” Simone de Beauvoir
Or something there about I'm sure.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 12:55 am
by iambiguous
Absurd...
“... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And now...what is he now?
“I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier.” Woody Allen
Unless, perhaps, he happens to be in San Fransisco.
“In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Madagascar. She said, 'Cut it out.'”Steven Wright
Next thing you know, they're getting married.
“Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?” Norton Juster
Not since Ed Sullivan anyway.
“Money can't buy you friends, but you do get a better class of enemy.” Spike Milligan
Still, how much will you cost me?
“The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.” Robert Ingersoll
And now this part: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... SjDNeMaRoX
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 10:14 pm
by iambiguous
Philosophy...
“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.” Patrick Ness
And what could one have to do with the other, right?
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” Frank Zappa
If you want to call that progress.
“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." Benjamin Spock
That'll be the day.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science." Albert Einstein
Next up: true philosophy.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” Richard Dawkins
No, really, actually think that through this time.
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Then those here who are exhausted.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 11:32 pm
by iambiguous
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.
And 2024 may well encompass them all.
Yes, you should talk, he said. Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.
Next up: you should shut the fuck up.
Before I knowed it, I was saying out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say'.
Before I knowed it, I was clicking to submit it.
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.'
'We take a beatin' all the time.'
'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.
Fascism, we'll call it.
This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
And of woman?
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.
Next up: you're fractured and fragmented when you fall.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 8:11 pm
by iambiguous
Despair...
“I will kill myself soon. But until then how do l tame my pain?” Sonali Deraniyagala
You don't?
“Despair is for people who know, beyond any doubt, what the future is going to bring. Nobody is in that position. So despair is not only a kind of sin, theologically, but also a simple mistake, because nobody actually knows. In that sense there is always hope.” Patrick Curry
Philosophically?
I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.” Isaac Asimov
303 days now and counting.
"My days are as long as despair can make them.” Kathryn Harrison
Yet, oddly enough, still 24 hours.
“A desperate soul needs a good and inspiring music” Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
https://youtu.be/Sbsg_lqqKxk?si=zQAdHcVMABm52-WG
“What unites us is our despair. Do other people wish to know that someone else walked this earth with a similar batch of questions and frustration? Am I alone trussed with a long suppressed scream lodged within my breast shouting out in the vacant darkness of night, 'Who am I, where am I, and where shall I go with this dreaded case of hopelessness, self-doubt, and self-loathing that is weighing me down, making me crazy, and blindsiding any chance to discover personal happiness?' On many occasions, I felt like surrendering to life, no longer willing to endure the physical aches and devastating emotional blows that human life requires. Lost, exiled, and living in alienation from the entire world I searched for a reentry port to a meaningful life." Kilroy J. Oldster
The Dead Toad Scrolls of course.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2024 3:08 am
by iambiguous
Osamu Dazai from No Longer Human
Then what's a synonym for woman?
Entrails.
You're not very poetic, are you? Well, then, what's the antonym for entrails?
Milk.
Pasteurized?
Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.
True. But only until the workers of the world unite.
I soon came to understand that drink, tobacco and prostitutes were all great means if dissipating (even for a few moments) my dread for human beings. I came even to feel that if I had to sell every last possession to obtain these means of escape, it would be well worth it.
Next up: opiods.
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind - of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware that they are deceiving one another. But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning. I have not been able to work up much concern over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under the name as “righteousness.” I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only known that one thing I should never have had to dread human beings so, nor should I have opposed myself to human life, nor tasted such torments of hell every night.
And here we all are.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
Some more fractured and fragmented than others.
If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?
Howdy, neighbor.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2024 7:11 pm
by iambiguous
Jodi Picoult from My Sister's Keeper
It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.
Uh, if ever?
Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.
I hear it now.
It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.
Not to mention [as often as not] embarrassing.
Do you know how sometimes -- when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs -- you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?
Or...die?
There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
Let's change that.
Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on when we see one is only a trail of debris.
Don't tell the kids though, okay?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2024 10:56 pm
by iambiguous
Suicide...
“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined." Albert Camus
If you think you know what he means?
“What people never understand is that depression isn't about the outside; it's about the inside." Jasmine Warga
And what could they possibly have in common?
“Some people avoid thinking deeply in public, only because they are afraid of coming across as suicidal.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana
So, how do I come across? 
“The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.” Kurt Vonnegut
God knows?
“Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time.” Wayne Gerard Trotman
God knows?
“It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.” Gillian Flynn
Me? Night and day.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2024 8:24 pm
by iambiguous
Three Colors: Red
Valentine: I'm sorry. I ran over your dog, Rita. A German shepard.
The Judge: That's possible. She disappeared yesterday.
Valentine: She's in my car....alive. I don't know what to do.
[pause]
Should I take her to a veternarian?
The Judge: As you wish.
Valentine: If I ran over your daughter would you be so indifferent?
The Judge: I have no daughter, miss. Go away.
She does. But Rita goes back.
The Judge: Why did you pick up Rita?
Valentine: Because I had run over her. She was bleeding.
The Judge: Otherwise, you'd have felt guilty. You'd have dreams of a dog with a crushed skull.
Valentine: Yes.
The Judge: So who did you do it for?
You know, living in a cynical world.
Valentine: Michel, tell me...do you love me?
Michel: I think so.
Valentine: You love me or you think so?
Michel: It's the same thing.
Next up: "Michel, tell me...do you hate me?"
The Judge: I want nothing.
Valentine: Then stop breathing.
The Judge: Good idea.
And then they come up with a better one.
The Judge: Deciding what is true and what isn't now seems to me...a lack of modesty.
Valentine: Vanity?
The Judge: Vanity.
That and indoctrination.
Valentine: You're not afraid?
The Judge: I wonder what I'd do in their place. The same thing.
Valentine: You'd throw stones?
The Judge: In their place? Of course. And that goes for everyone I judged. Given their lives, I would steal, I'd kill, I'd lie. Of course I would. All that because I wasn't in their shoes, but mine.
See, I told you!
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:22 am
by iambiguous
Ernest Cline from Ready Player One
The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.
So, don't forget to vote.
For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.
And we don't even need quarters here.
I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.
Virtually?
No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school ground, anyway.
They are allowed here though, right?
The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things about attending school online, and I took advantage of it almost daily. The best thing about it was that they could see that you’d muted them, and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Next up: the ability to foe your peers.
So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.
Just like in "real life".
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 9:18 pm
by iambiguous
Nihilism...
“This realization can lead to the demand to live life to the full now, but it can also be a traumatic shock to a believer, who may start to doubt in a way which is wholly disorienting." Andrew Bowie
Fractured and fragmented for example.
"The latter response is part of what Nietzsche terms 'nihilism', which is the result of holding metaphysical beliefs that turn out to be illusory. Avoiding nihilism means never even entertaining such comforting fictions in the first place, so that there is nothing to lose.” Andrew Bowie
I wish I had done that. After all, I could still be a comforted and consoled Christian.
“I'm going to die one day. And that fact alone should force me to live my life to the fullest. But I'm the opposite way around. I want to die because I am consistently eaten up by nothingness.” Juansen Dizon
Suppose you're going to die one day?
“My quietness is a consequence of my deeply entrenched nihilism. I don’t believe there is any real value in my or anyone else’s speaking, and I think that all of human existence is fundamentally unimportant.” Emily R. Austin
He wondered why that didn't shut him up too.
“I am the superhero! I am the Nihilist! My superpowers include logical detachment, emotional invincibility, and the ability to blend in anywhere. I work alone and am never compromised by romantic entanglements, and I don't have a costume because who the fuck cares?” Lianne Oelke
You're schtick might be different.
“Nothing exists, all is shadow and illusion” Bangambiki Habyarimana
From The Book of Wisdom no less.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2024 12:53 am
by iambiguous
God...
“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.” C.S. Lewis
The fool actually believed this!
“I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?” Neil Gaiman
Of course the sunset God also created these natural phenomena:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... _eruptions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... l_cyclones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
“God is the same everywhere.” Leo Tolstoy
If Earth is any indication, that can't be good.
“You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.” Charles H. Spurgeon
Me? He gave it His best shot.
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” Ilya Kaminsky
Right, like you and I are omnipotent.
“If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God?” George Deacon
A new thread, perhaps?
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2024 10:37 pm
by iambiguous
Existentialism...
“Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.” Gary Cox
Define true?
“You are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.” Steven L. Peck
In Hell. Here? Double it for starters.
“It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.” Steven L. Peck
Next up: A Short Stay In Heaven
“Our greatest challenge today...is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.” Kirk Schneide
I doubt it. Though less and less with each passing year.
“When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to one's own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard.” Deborah Eisenberg
In other words, when one contemplated dasein.
“Anybody who has done high school physics knows Newton’s Third Law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You push against a wall; it pushes back against you. I love the poetry hidden in these truths, in the many laws we’ve discovered that underpin the universal fabric. We search for meaning ever hungrier, perhaps even with desperation: the symmetry in the equations freaks us out; for all we know, there is just us on this lonely little marble in the inky void.” Sean J. Halford
I know, I know: let's not go there.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2024 12:16 am
by iambiguous
Absurd...
“The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” Andre Breton
My guess: you can take it too far.
“The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.” Albert Camus
Uh, tell that to the sociopaths?
“Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff?” Steven Wright
Teslas too.
“It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.” Robert Green Ingersoll
Sounds like a personal problem.
“Waiting for Godot has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.” Vivian Mercier
Wow, what if nothing happened here too?
“Hello, I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. By true I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies and in the end, isn't that the truth? The answer is no.” Leonard Nimoy
Fascinating. Though getting less so all the time.
Re: Quote of the day
Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2024 4:50 pm
by iambiguous
Philosophy...
“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.” Mo Willems
You know, if that's even an option.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
Unless of course the progress is unreasonable.
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” Lao Tsu
Go East, young man!
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” Carl Sagan
Whatever that means, right?
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.” William S. Burroughs
More or less.
“Music is...a higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy.” Ludwig van Beethoven
Not all music I'll bet.