“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
Oscar Wilde
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Seamus Heaney
The Soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
gravity-rainbow reblogged
blue---rain
There is magic, beauty, romance and poetry waiting for you every step of the way. Life is waiting for you, with open arms. But where are you? You are not present here, in the now. Perhaps you are trapped in the past – thinking about what could have been. Or you have raced into the unborn romance – busy worrying about what has not yet happened. Remember: this moment is the only Life you have! Unless you are present in the moment, you cannot celebrate Life.”
― Avis Viswanathan
Source: blue---rain
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
gravity-rainbow reblogged
1949 Triumph T110 Custom
© A. Robinson
The demand for art and beauty is an indirect demand for the ecstasies of sexuality communicated to the brain. The world become perfect, through 'love'
Nietzsche
gravity-rainbow reblogged
“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (via quotespile)
gravity-rainbow reblogged
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Jean Luc Godard
Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to another. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to him is beautiful, he has known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.
J. Galsworthy
gravity-rainbow reblogged
“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
— Martha Nussbaum, in A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.
William S. Burroughs
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on..
David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
gravity-rainbow reblogged
felinepurrrstory
“Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” Cats have a sense of appearance. Even when they’re sitting doing the wash in that silly position with one leg behind the other ear, they know what you’re sniggering at. They simply choose not to notice. I knew a pair of Persian cats once; the black one always reclined on a white cushion on the couch, and the white one on the black cushion next to it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best, though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best. The lady who provided their pillows called them her Decorator Cats.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty”
gravity-rainbow reblogged
Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.
“The Most Beautiful Woman in Town” by Charles Bukowski (via fuckmetodubstep)
Source: henrycharlesbukowski
gravity-rainbow reblogged
By John Austen
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from the Latin solus (alone) and ipse (self). Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure.