Peter Fettner > Peter's Quotes

“when i was a boy
a god often rescued me
from the shouts and the rods of men
and i played among trees and flowers
secure in their kindness
and the breezes of heaven
were playing there too.

and as you delight
the hearts of plants
when they stretch towards you
with little strength

so you delighted the heart in me
father Helios, and like Endymion
i was your favourite,
Moon. o all

you friendly
and faithful gods
i wish you could know
how my soul has loved you.

even though when i called to you then
it was not yet with names, and you
never named me as people do
as though they knew one another

i knew you better
than i have ever known them.
i understood the stillness above the sky
but never the words of men.

trees were my teachers
melodious trees
and i learned to love
among flowers.

i grew up in the arms of the gods.”
― Friedrich Holderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments

“We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect... Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”
― Michel Foucault

“I have a burden on my soul. During my long life, I did not make anyone happy, neither my friends, nor my family, nor even myself. I have done many evil things...I was the cause of the beginning of three big wars. About 800,000 people were killed because of me on the battlefields., and their mothers, brothers, and widows cried for them. And now this stands between me and God.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. We are back in the Byzantine situation, where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal from itself the fact that God no longer exists. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”
― Blaise Pascal

“From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire (Seminar 7, 319)”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.”
― Noam Chomsky

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“All good things are wild and free.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”
― George Carlin

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

“You will manage to keep a woman in love with you, only for as long as you can keep her in love with the person she becomes when she is with you.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me,

Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….”
― Sappho

“Some say an army of horsemen, or infantry,
A fleet of ships is the fairest thing
On the face of the black earth, but I say
It's what one loves.”
― Sappho

“It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on tire spot and be done with it. And that's how I was-except that I didn't have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn't do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even; something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed.”
― Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi