Reid Satter > Reid's Quotes

“I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.”
― Erich Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. [...] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”
― Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature

“!لك شيء في هذا العالم.. فقم”
― غسان كنفاني

“تسقُطُ الأجسادُ... لا الفِكرة”
― غسان كنفاني

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Frightened of my futureless life, scared by my foolish anxieties, unable to see ahead and aiming nowhere, I continued ceaselessly living my ridiculously idiotic life.”
― Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”
― Meister Eckhart

“One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Nobody at any time is cut off from God.”
― Meister Eckhart

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“I refer to the view that we have no alternatives to the models of corporate capitalism, social democratic or Soviet socialism, or technocratic “fascism with a smiling face.” The popularity of this view is largely due to the fact that little effort has been made to study the feasibility of entirely new social models and to experiment with them.”
― Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche

“That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: 'This is the way we should go.' And you don't have to follow them but if
you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they've looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the
spin doctors. And I've no time for Weathercocks, I'm a Signpost man. And in fairness, although I disagreed with everything she did, Mrs Thatcher was a Signpost. She said what she meant. Meant what she said. Did what she said she’d do if you voted for her. So everybody who voted for her shared responsibility for what happened. And I think that we do need a few more Signposts and few fewer Weathercocks.”
― Tony Benn

“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself