Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me,
and I have followed the source of rivers towards their
source or plunged into forests, always making for other
cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and
I could never turn back any more than a record can spin
in reverse. And all that was leading me where ?
To this very moment...”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Sky is not a limit for me; because I have no limit for myself in life. Because life is a world full of risk taking and possibilities. No matter how hard or easy life is; I will always find a way to enjoy myself; even in the mist of circumstances; because problems is a sense of adventure in sheep's clothing.”
― Temitope Owosela

“You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“All that is transitory is but a metaphor.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution, heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me-the sense of being lit by starlight- and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions- the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call “structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.
It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting on me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality.) Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“Anything which is just born, which has just come into existence, has no past behind it. Birth, in other words, is the condition of having no past. And likewise, anything which now dies, which has just ceased to be, has no future left in front of it. Death is the condition of having no future. But we have already seen that this present moment has both no past and no future simultaneously. That is, birth and death are one in this present moment. This moment is just now being born—you can never find a past to this present moment, you can never find something before it. Yet also, this moment is just now dying — you can never find a future to this moment, never find something after it. This present, then, is a coincidence of opposites, a unity of birth and death, being and non-being, living and dying. As Ippen put it, "Every moment is the last moment and every moment is a rebirth.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

“Because we demand a future, we live each moment in expectation and unfulfillment. We live each moment in passing. In just this way the real nunc stans, the timeless present, is reduced to the nunc fluens, the fleeting present, the passing present of a mere one or two seconds. We expect each moment to pass on to a future moment, for in this fashion we pretend to avoid death by always rushing toward an imagined future. We want to meet ourselves in the future. We don’t want just now—we want another now, and another, and another, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thus, paradoxically, our impoverished present is fleeting precisely because we demand that it end! We want it to end so that it can thereby pass on to yet another moment, a future moment, which will in turn live only to pass.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

“Hating L.A. was in my Northern California DNA. We even had a burl plaque that hung on our living room wall that read, “We Don’t Give a Damn How it’s Done in L.A.”
― Antonia Crane, Spent

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings

“Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.”
― Melville Herman

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
― Guy Debord

“I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
― Guy Debord

“The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Never work.”
― Guy Debord

“Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.”
― Marija Gimbutas

“Shared sorrow is lessened, shared joy is increased”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“He smiled like a sun lamp.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us. What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.”
― Symmachus

“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition