Joseph Gallo > Joseph's Quotes

“...the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.”
― Paul Valéry

“On God's part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The pure soul is a pure lie.”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich

“The universe transformed into a Sunday afternoon . . . it is the very definition of ennui, and the end of the universe.”
― E.M. Cioran

“It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something. I cannot begin.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke; Kuniyo Takayasu

“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.”
― Franz Kafka

“Do you like to watch blood? Do you like to watch your own blood? Do you like to watch any blood spurting, gurgling, gushing, falling into very clear clean glass containers, missing and falling on to the floor sometimes, going all over until everything is that funny foamy red color, with all your towels, rugs, cloths and sponges soaked and the smell . . . ? Do you? Do you like to watch flesh being snipped, sliced, carved, shredded and made over. Do you? Do you like to watch your own flesh . . . . . . . . . ?”
― David R. Bunch, Moderan

“Our man, it seems, being human was a walking welcome mat for many problems”
― David R. Bunch, Moderan

“very early in Moderan the mighty Stronghold masters had solved for themselves the flesh-woman question, or, to be more precise, the wife-nuisance roadblock. And for that I honor them. I mean, my beamish hat is off to them, for that was QUITE a solving! We have no such problem, of course, in the essence times. If I don't like the beams of the woman I'm with, or if I like too much the beams of the woman I'm with and she won't reciprocate, I just signal back to the Love Dictator's office my discontent and he orders one of his little clerk mechanics to call the old beams home, and the Love Dictator then transmits me, personally, a new package.”
― David R. Bunch, Moderan

“If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.”
― Simone Weil

“Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in his life when he has definitely acknowledged to himself that there is no final good here below. But as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Men feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our ego. In order to bear it we have to love truth more than life itself.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence...To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Evil inhabits the soul of a criminal without being felt there. It is felt in the heart of the man who is afflicted and innocent.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“There is little opiate delusion in Jesus's grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him. The measure of your love in his view is whether they kill you or not.”
― Terry Eagleton, The Gospels: Jesus Christ

“You say that men are utterly incapable of renouncing violence, and, in this fact, that Christ is not involved in this violence, you see the proof of his divinity. I find that to be very true. But the question remains: how are men able to renounce violence? The answer is: the Spirit slowly transforms the hearts of men and renders them capable of this renunciation. By the Spirit we are able to understand that we have transferred our violence onto Christ when we were still blind (and we continue to do this to the extent that we remain blind). Therefore the cross is the source of life in a double sense. (1) Christ remained faithful to the message of the Father, even when the whole of humanity projected its violence onto him. He bore this violence and did not react against it with counterviolence. (2) The Father reacted against the violence by sending the Spirit. Here I add another theme that I don’t find in your text: prayer. This is a very important theme in all the NT writings. In the final analysis, prayer is always a prayer about the coming of the Spirit. And the Spirit is the Spirit of liberty, love and peace, as Paul very often tells us. Peace between men finally becomes possible through the gift of the Spirit.”
― Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974-1991

“And with this, there is something that I have not formulated clearly enough up to now: Christ is our scapegoat, but—and here I am in complete agreement with you—the positive effect doesn’t come any more from the fact that once more we have found a scapegoat; the positive effect only comes from the fact that Christ transforms violence and hatred and falsehood into love, and that he sends us the Spirit of Truth and Love. The sacrificial mechanism, as such, no longer has any positive effect! But the overcoming of sacrifice does not begin outside of the sacred. For a start, Christ completely accepts [Le Christ accepte d’abord totalement] “the old game,” in an acceptance that is not merely a game, but very real. The death of Christ has a salvific effect only in the sense that it transforms and reverses the sacrificial mechanism, but by entering totally into this mechanism, or by allowing himself to be captured by the mechanism!”
― Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974-1991

“Now that your eyes are open, make the sun jealous with your burning passion to start the day. Make the sun jealous or stay in bed.”
― Malak El Halabi

“He who expects little is rarely disappointed.”
― Edmund Cooper, Seed of Light

“It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Believe me, the world won't give you any gifts. If you want to have a life, steal it.”
― Lou Andreas- Salome

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“I went down like a drunken cowgirl trying to line dance to Metallica.”
― Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right