“Satan has one pure pleasure: waiting until you have forgotten him, moved on with your life, feeling, if not a certain variety of cheerfulness, precisely, then at least the deficiency of immediate despair, and stepping up beside you on the street, nestling up behind you in your bed, to remind you in his hissy whisper of just who and what you are not.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Travel shows you what you already know in ways you don’t recognize. How little you understand when you begin your journey. How much less when you end it.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Our entire popular culture is in essence about high school: about reliving it, about its social relations, about the fears it hammers into your plans.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that the reason the earth-ball is swarmy with transgression lies not in the fact that Man has foundered, failed, fallen, but that he has never risen, flourished, revised his basic constitution in the slightest, has always been, in a word, exactly what he is now: sin lodged in skin.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“One must learn to stay put in order to see.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We hardly find any persons of good sense, save those who agree with us.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“To be a great man one should know how to profit by every phase of fortune.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“If there be men whose folly has never appeared, it is because it has never been closely looked for.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“It is as proper to be boastful alone as it is ridiculous to be so in company.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We may forgive those who bore us, we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“We deceive ourselves if we believe that there are violent passions like ambition and love that can triumph over others. Idleness, languishing as she is, does not often fail in being mistress; she usurps authority over all the plans and actions of life; imperceptibly consuming and destroying both passions and virtues.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“the villagers
are yelling.
they are out
for blood.
you are not
a monster;
you want to
say, but you
do not have
language
for this
because you are
a monster, just
not the kind
they think.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “double cross”
“Humility is often a feigned submission which we employ to supplant others. It is one of the devices of Pride to lower us to raise us; and truly pride transforms itself in a thousand ways, and is never so well disguised and more able to deceive than when it hides itself under the form of humility.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“True eloquence consists in saying all that should be, not all that could be said.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Sovereign ability consists in knowing the value of things.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“If you die, a dog will wait a week
before eating your corpse. A cat
will wait a day.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “what you eat”
“Some days I am the only
sane person in the world
and I get lonely.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “open water”
”No one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events which lie outside the possibility of general or even of rare experience—that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing,” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
“One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale)
“Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome, was trampled down (—I do not say by what kind of feet—): why? because it was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!… Later on, the Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before—a culture compared with which even our nineteenth century may well think itself very impoverished and very ‘late.’—They wanted booty, to be sure: the Orient was rich…. But let us not be prejudiced! The Crusades—higher piracy, that is all! German knighthood, Viking Knighthood at bottom, was there in its element: the Church knew only too well what German knighthood can be had for…. The German knights, always the ‘Switzers’ of the Church, always in the service of all the bad instincts of the Church—but well paid…. That it is precisely with the aid of German swords, German blood and courage, that the Church has carried on its deadly war against everything noble on earth! A host of painful questions arises at this point. The German aristocracy is virtually missing in the history of higher culture: one can guess the reason…. Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases and ellipses in original)
“A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The crafts, trade, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in a word the entire compass of professional activity, are in no way compatible with anything other than mediocrity in ability and desires; these things would be out of place among the élite, the instinct pertaining to them is as much opposed to aristocracy as it is to anarchy. To be a public utility, a cog, a function, is a natural vocation, it is not society, it is a kind of happiness of which the great majority are alone capable, which makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre it is happiness to be mediocre; mastery in one thing, specialization, is for them a natural instinct. It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it. When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases in original)
“The old God, all ‘spirit,’ all high priest, all perfection, promenades in his garden: but he is bored. Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain. What does he do? He invents man—man is entertaining…. But behold, man too is bored. God’s sympathy with the only kind of distress found in every Paradise knows no bounds: he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first blunder: man did not find the animals entertaining—he dominated them, he did not even want to be an ‘animal.’—Consequently God created woman. And then indeed there was an end to boredom—but also to something else! Woman was God’s second blunder.—‘Woman is in her essence serpent, Heva’—every priest knows that; ‘every evil comes into the world through woman’—every priest knows that likewise. ‘Consequently, science too comes into the world through her’…. Only through woman did man learn to taste the tree of knowledge.—What had happened? A mortal terror seized on the old God. Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God—it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin. This alone constitutes morality.—‘Thou shalt not know’—the rest follows.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases and ellipses in original)
“The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct—all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds a guarantee of the future in the instincts henceforth excites mistrust. So to live that there is no longer any meaning in living: that now becomes the meaning of life…. What is the point of public spirit, what is the point of gratitude for one’s descent and one’s forefathers, what is the point of co-operation, trust, of furthering and keeping in view the general welfare?… So many ‘temptations,’ so many diversions from the ‘right road’—‘one thing is needful’…. That, as an ‘immortal soul,’ everybody is equal to everybody else, that in the totality of beings the ‘salvation’ of every single one is permitted to claim to be of everlasting moment, that little bigots and three-quarters madmen are permitted to imagine that for their sakes the laws of nature are continually being broken—such a raising of every sort of egoism to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases and ellipses in original)