The Art of Tetman Callis

“It is a wise man who built the first prison, as this is a tomb for the living and brings pleasure to their enemies.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Caution is no guard against destiny and what is written in the book of fate is not to be avoided. Death, which carried off my grandfather, will not leave me, and if my father is alive today he may not be alive tomorrow.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.) Share this… Facebook Pinterest […]

[Read more →]

“You who are seeking this vile world, It is destruction’s net, a pit of sorrows. It is a dwelling which may bring Laughter one day, but will fetch tears the next. Evil befall it! Its attacks never cease; No price, however great, ransoms its prisoners.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.) Share this… […]

[Read more →]

“Visit your love; take no heed of the envious, Who will not help you in your affairs of love. God in His mercy creates no finer sight Than of two lovers lying on one bed In one another’s arms, clothed in contentment, Pillowed on one another’s wrists and arms. If in your lifetime you find […]

[Read more →]

“It is easy to be cynical about government—and rarely does such cynicism go unrewarded. Take, for instance, policy towards women. Some politicians declare that they value women’s unique role, which can be shorthand for keeping married women at home looking after the kids. Others create whole ministries devoted to policies for women, which can be […]

[Read more →]

“If someone says: ‘Love starts with choice,’ tell them: ‘That is a lie; it all comes from necessity.’ “ – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“You wrong Time if you ask it to be fair. Do not blame it; it was not created for fair dealing. Take what comes easily and leave care aside. Time must contain both trouble and happiness.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“There is no wisdom without power. Were they to try to pawn me and my wisdom, Together with my books and my inkstand, For one day’s worth of food, it would not work And such a bargain would be thought contemptible. The poor, their state, their life, How dark they are with troubles! In summer […]

[Read more →]

“You have no power at all over your daily bread; Neither learning nor letters will fetch it for you. Fortune and sustenance are divided up; One land is fertile while another suffers drought. Time’s changes bring down cultured men, While fortune lifts the undeserving up. Come, death, and visit me, for life is vile; Falcons […]

[Read more →]

“A victory for the wrong reason is still a victory.” – Practitioner’s Handbook for Appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 2014 ed. Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Power concerns the organization, arrangement, and distribution of material objects in physical space. Whatever ideas and ideals are brought to bear on this process are necessarily corrupted and weighed down by their contact with decaying matter. Politics, in other words, is the art of juggling corpses and anyone whose highest value is power stinks of […]

[Read more →]

“God proved easy to dispose of. Religion may one day disappear. But human beings cannot live without theology.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Of all literary genres, tragedy alone remains free from the pretensions to arithmetic that, until history caught up with them, were still indulged in by German philosophers and English novelists, who compensated for their thematic anxieties as an ostrich might—by limiting their scope to the trifling situations of everyday morality. Such moralists are nothing more, […]

[Read more →]

“Just as self-hatred is the purest form of pride, the desire to be someone else is the purest form of vanity.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Moderns regard violence as something internal to human beings: they often speak of the violence that originates in mankind, as if violence were a series of actions a man might perform, or—were he less ignorant, irrational, or superstitious—might as well not perform. That is why moderns are always surprised by sudden outbreaks of violence; it […]

[Read more →]

“In practice, everyday morality rarely ever rises to the level of the tragic. Most moral decisions are as simple as basic arithmetic; just so, failures are not matters of knowledge but of social training. Where genuine moral problems are encountered—that is, what are called tragic dilemmas—it is the nature of the dilemma that none of […]

[Read more →]

“The origins of clothing should be sought in man’s desire to forget that his skin is already a kind of uniform. Masks, disguises, costumes—these are worn above all to conceal something from the wearer, who wishes to appear as someone or something else, in order to convince himself that his body is not what it […]

[Read more →]

“The relationship between thought and language is the relationship between a wound and its scar.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Philosophy does not begin in wonder. It begins in anxiety, with the disquieting suspicion that things are not how they should be and are not what they seem.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“Beneath each of us shifts the sand of a desert vaster than the Sahara, the desert of our past, over whose dry dunes memory can only skim, blowing temporary patterns of recollection and reinterpretation across the surface of a noumenal landscape wherein the ever-changing is indistinguishable from the eternally-the-same.” – Hans Abendroth, The Zero and […]

[Read more →]

“Thought exiles man from being, being exiles him from his self, his self exiles him from the external world, the external world exiles him from time, and his tomorrow will exile him from his today just as surely as his today exiled him from his yesterday. Never and nowhere is man truly at home. In […]

[Read more →]

“There are three orders of good ; viz. that which is imparticipable and superessential ; that which is imparticipable and essential ; and that which is essential and participable. Of these, the last is such as our nature contains; the good which ranks among forms is essential; and that which is beyond essence is superessential. […]

[Read more →]

“The human race is imbecile, and of small estimation, sees but a little, and possesses a connascent nothingness; and the only remedy of its inherent error, perturbation, and unstable mutation, is its participation, as much as possible, of a certain portion of divine light.” – Iamblichus, On the Mysteries (trans. Thomas Taylor) Share this… Facebook […]

[Read more →]

“Since the ignorance of, and deception about, divine natures is impiety and impurity, but a scientific knowledge of the Gods is holy and beneficial, the ignorance of things honourable and beautiful will be darkness, but the knowledge of them will be light. And the former, indeed, will fill men with all evils, through the want […]

[Read more →]

“The sunflower moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of a plant to sing.” – Proclus, […]

[Read more →]

“It’s a terrible thing, at any age, to be able to point to some period of your past and say, Those were the best days of my life. For it means that when you divide what is to come by what has already been, the remainder will be the same decimal repeating repeating repeating to […]

[Read more →]

“Life without death in it is no life at all.” – Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“How do you go to hell? You make your ego system harder and harder and harder and are stuck with it. Hell is the place of people stuck on themselves.” – Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.” – Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. MacGuiness) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

[Read more →]