Δnd > Δnd's Quotes

“The opposite of war, the true war, is poetry”
― Norman O. Brown, Love's Body

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Worldly Wisdom

Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
Is from a medium height.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

“[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“To be evenminded
is the greatest virtue.
Wisdom is to speak
the truth and act
in keeping with its nature.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Much learning does not teach understanding.”
― Heraclitus

“All peoples and nations are of one family, the children of one Father, and should be to one another as brothers and sisters.”
― Bahá'u'lláh

“The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“What labels me, negates me.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“And now we celebrate, in victory bound,
The feast of feasts:
Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
Now laughs the world, the ancient curtain's torn,
And light and darkness wedded are as one...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The Olympian vice.--In defiance of that philosopher who as true Englishman tried to give any thinking person's laughter a bad reputation ('Laughter is a nasty infirmity of human nature that any thinking person will endeavour to overcome'---Hobbes), I would actually go as far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter---right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that gods, too, are able to philosophize, as various of my conclusions force me to believe, then I do not doubt when they do so, they know how to laugh in a new and superhuman fashion---and at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to jeer: it seems that even at religious observances they cannot keep from laughing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Psychotherapy East and West

“One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Psychotherapy East and West

“There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture.--- Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks.
This contradictory creature has in his nature, however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons, he raises himself to justice---to comprehension beyond esteeming things good and evil.
The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
― Leonard Bernstein

“Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”
― John Cage

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
― kurt vonnegut

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck
passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
― Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary