Guilherme Erhardt > Guilherme's Quotes

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
― William Blake

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
― William Blake

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”
― William Blake

“Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.”
― William Blake

“If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

“What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”
― immanuel kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”
― Immanuel Kant

“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“History is written by the victors.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.”
― Walter Benjamin

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections