The Art of Tetman Callis

“He who wants to become wise will profit greatly from at some time having harboured the idea that mankind is fundamentally evil and corrupt: it is a false idea, as is its opposite; but it enjoyed dominance throughout whole ages of history, and its roots have branched out even into us ourselves and our world.  […]

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“Observe children who weep and wail in order that they shall be pitied, and therefore wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed; live among invalids and the mentally afflicted and ask yourself whether their eloquent moaning and complaining, their displaying of misfortune, does not fundamentally have the objective of hurting those who […]

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“An instant realization sees endless time. Endless time is as one moment. When one comprehends the endless moment He realizes the person who is seeing it.” — Mumon, The Gateless Gate (trans. Senzaki and Reps) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The state never has any use for truth as such, but only for truth which is useful to it, more precisely for anything whatever useful to it whether it be truth, half-truth or error.  A union of state and philosophy can therefore make sense only if philosophy can promise to be unconditionally useful to the […]

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“In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give […]

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“Wherever money achieves preeminence, i.e. cities, it radically reshapes the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of the people who use it to organize their social relations not as ties but exchanges. The minds of intellectually sophisticated metropolitans become quite literally minds of money, full of the thoughts and judgments money would have, if it could […]

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“When the historical sense reigns without restraint, and all its consequences are realized, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live.  Historical justice, even when it is genuine and practised with the purest of intentions, is therefore a dreadful virtue […]

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“Men and ages which serve life by judging and destroying a past are always dangerous and endangered men and ages.  For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this […]

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“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.  […]

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“When platitudes, commonplaces and hackneyed and feeble language are the rule, and badness and corruption received as stimulating exceptions, then the forceful, uncommon and beautiful falls into disfavor.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“A great victory is a great danger.  Human nature finds it harder to endure a victory than a defeat; indeed, it seems to be easier to achieve a victory than to endure it in such a way that it does not in fact turn into a defeat.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale) Share […]

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“One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.” — […]

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“Art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (trans. Golffing) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“What is it that makes Homer so much more vivid and concrete in his descriptions than any other poet?  His lively eye, with which he discerns so much more.  We all talk about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be indifferent poets.  At bottom the esthetic phenomenon is quite simple: all one needs […]

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“The subject—the striving individual bent on furthering his own egoistic purposes—can be thought of only as an enemy to art, never as its source.  But to the extent that the subject is an artist he is already delivered from individual will and has become a medium through which the True Subject celebrates his redemption in […]

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“The great misfortune for intellectual merit is that it has to wait until the good is praised by those who produce only the bad; indeed, the misfortune already lies in the general fact that it has to receive its crown from the hands of human judgement, a quality of which most people possess about as […]

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“The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police.  It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Exaggeration in every sense is as essential to newspaper writing as it is to the writing of plays: for the point is to make as much as possible of every occurrence.  So that all newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting.  What they really […]

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“The art of not reading is a very important one.  It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time.  When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for […]

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“As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a […]

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“Truth is fairest naked, and the simpler its expression the profounder its influence.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Writing” (trans. Hollingdale) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature.  Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing.  It’s as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books […]

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“Writers can be divided into meteors, planets, and fixed stars.  The first produce a momentary effect: you gaze up, cry: ‘Look!’—and then they vanish forever.  The second, the moving stars, endure for much longer.  By virtue of their proximity they often shine more brightly than the fixed stars, which the ignorant mistake them for.  But […]

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“The system is rigged.  Look around.  Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits.  Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.  And Wall Street C.E.O.s—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted […]

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“Government gets used to protect those who have already made it.  That becomes the game.  And so we had the big crash and I thought, O.K.!  We tested the alternative theory.  Cut taxes, reduce regulations and financial services, and see what happens to the economy.  We ran a thirty-year test on that and it was […]

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“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.  Nobody.  You built a factory out there, good for you.  But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to the market on the roads the rest of us paid for.  You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” – […]

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“The weak point in all religions remains that they can never dare to confess to being allegorical, so that they have to present their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio; which, because of the absurdities essential to allegory, leads to perpetual deception and a great disadvantage for religion.  What is even worse, indeed, […]

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“There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (trans. Hollingdale) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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