The Art of Tetman Callis

“If you want to achieve something in business, in writing, in painting, in anything, you must follow the rules without knowing them.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)

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“Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety-valve is to the steam engine: every discontent is by means of it immediately relieved in words—indeed, unless this discontent is very considerable, it exhausts itself in this way.  If, however, it is very considerable, it is as well to know of […]

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“Justice is in itself powerless: what rules by nature is force.  To draw this over on to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules—that is the problem of statecraft, and it is certainly a hard one.”– Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Law and Politics” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)

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“Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal.  We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what […]

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“If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it.  But if you do that you will produce nothing great.  If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you […]

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“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and […]

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“If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to […]

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“The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking.  What young man is by nature diligent, sober, and regular in his habits?  Respectful […]

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“In a society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by millions of people–and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its banks.  Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less than does civilized society: […]

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“What is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty?  Is it the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina?  Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us […]

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“Never try to put too much into any single piece.  There is always a point beyond which it cannot be improved, and further attempts to improve it will in fact destroy it.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

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“When you do not think good and when you do not think not-good,what is your true self?  You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it, you cannot admire it, you cannot sense it.  It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.  When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed.” — Mumon, […]

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“If you think you shouldn’t write it, do. That’s where the good stuff is.” — Averil Dean (interviewed by Rob W. Hart in LitReactor)

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“There’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—‘Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist.’  Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between a writer’s knowledge if what is and his vision of what ought to be?” – Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

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“What matters is that my uncle wouldn’t stop doing drugs. And that one night he got so wasted, he passed out on the railroad tracks and his friends left him there. Because there are people who will leave you on the railroad tracks and there are people who would never do something like that. Not […]

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“You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded.  That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated.  It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents.  It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism […]

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“Nothing else really matters but inspiration, being in an inspired relation to being, so that the activity of making art, the act itself, is more important than anything else, it’s more important than the artifact it produces, the thing that everyone sees or hears or reads, the thing they buy or sell, accept or reject.” […]

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“Look at me, I am telling you a truth here; there are girls on hot days you must kiss between the shoulders; there is the soft spot on the belly of a shorthaired dog; a rhubarb pie is baking; a thrush sings; fogs lift; waves break, days break, bread, hearts, vessels, understand?  Look at me, […]

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“There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”

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“To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”

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“Do you think it’s possible to live and not regret what you have done with your life?  And do you think regret is an emotion, or something more like of a place a person comes to, where you could walk, you know, or sit, or lie in it, like in a house, and go to […]

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“The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

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“The secret is there isn’t any secret.  No mystery.  We know it all.  We’re afraid to believe in what we know, and talk is the sound of our terror.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

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“You take a thing like love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding like a threat.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

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“Beats me why so many of the finest things in life have got to stink so bad.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

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“The most important predictor of obesity remains income level. Fast-food companies are dropping obscene amounts on advertising in low-income communities of color, and are targeting children. African-American kids see at least 50 percent more fast-food ads than do white children their age. A full 25 percent of all Spanish-language fast-food advertising in the U.S. is […]

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“Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part.  Scholars never agree about anything. The rabbis were interested in finding solutions to contradictions, and when three Jews meet they will have three answers to every question.” — Theodore Zeldin (interviewed in The Jewish Chronicle)

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“Capitalism is itself a kind of social technology, one capable of organizing and managing a massive and complex division of labor without concentrating power over the system at any one point. But it is a technology that is much better suited to some tasks than others. When maximizing the output of commodities with the least […]

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“A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife.  The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends

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“There may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends

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