The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
minecanary reblogged
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they know only too well that it will flee.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (via eternalsages)
Source: eternalsages
minecanary reblogged
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Bertrand Russell (via sharone710)
minecanary reblogged
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
minecanary reblogged
It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently asserted.
Source: foreignpolicy.com
minecanary reblogged
minttrope-deactivated20150608
These are secretaries, office workers, shopkeepers, people who listen to others in cafes: around forty they feel swollen, with an experience they can’t get rid of. Luckily they’ve made children on whom they can pass it off. They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom. Convenient past! Past handed out of a pocket! little gilt books full of fine sayings. “Believe me, I’m telling you from experience, all I know I’ve learned from life.” Has life taken charge of their thoughts? They explain the new by the old—and the old they explain by the older still, like those historians who turn a Lenin into a Russian Robespierre, and a Robespierre into a French Cromwell: when all is said and done, they have never understood anything at all…You can imagine a morose idleness behind their importance: they see the long parade of pretences, they yawn, they think there’s nothing new under the sun.
Nausea by Sartre
minecanary reblogged
People totally feel free to make fun of Mormonism. I think that’s a really weird thing. It’s the one religion people feel like they can make fun of. Everybody does it, I just did it a little while ago.
But, it’s weird to me, it’s funny. People make fun of Mormonism but I feel like on some basic level aren’t all religions kind of ridiculous sounding when you talk them through? You know what I mean? Don’t they all sound like a bad novel, a bad sci-fi novel? People are like ‘Mormons are ridiculous, I don’t know what they’re doing. Anyway, I’m gonna go to church and eat some Jesus. Alright, that’s ridiculous.’
W. Kamau Bell [x]
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
What if the only thing life has to fear is life itself?
At a lecture Monday evening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, paleontologist Peter D. Ward laid out the argument that life as we know it serves to make Earth less habitable—a downward spiral that might spell the eventual end of life on the planet. Ward, a professor at the University of Washington, calls this the Medea hypothesis, named for the murderous mother of Greek mythology. It is a direct challenge to scientist and futurist James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which asserts that life constantly tweaks the dials on Earth’s control systems to keep the planet in a nice, habitable homeostasis.
Ward has a recent book on the subject, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press, 2009). To illustrate the difference between his theory and Lovelock’s, the traveling Ward, in town to make the media rounds for his book, used a hotel analogy for Earth. Gaians, Ward says, think that hotel guests are likely to repaint their rooms and leave fresh flowers before checking out, whereas Medeans think that guests are liable to throw furniture out the window, trashing the room like Keith Moon in his prime.
Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on Earth. So what the hell, leap.
Cynthia Heimel
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
Lao Tzu
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
Hitchens responding to the question of why he was so outspoken as an atheist