Zweifel > Zweifel's Quotes

“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Schmerzen, die in mir sind und was weiß ich von den Deinen. Und wenn ich mich vor Dir niederwerfen würde und weinen und erzählen, was wüsstest Du von mir mehr als von der Hölle, wenn Dir jemand erzählt, sie ist heiß und fürchterlich. Schon darum sollten wir Menschen voreinander so ehrfürchtig, so nachdenklich, so liebend stehn wie vor dem Eingang zur Hölle.”
― Franz Kafka

“There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
― Nick Land

“According to Hegel -- to use the Marxist terminology -- Religion is only an ideological superstructure that is born and exists solely in relation to a real substructure. This substructure, which supports both religion and philosophy, is nothing but the totality of human actions realized during the course of universal history, that history in and by which man has created a series of specifically human worlds, essentially different from the natural world. It is these social worlds that are reflected in the religious and philosophical ideologies, and therefore-- to come to the point at once -- absolute knowledge, which reveals the totality of Being, can be realized only at the end of history, in the last world created by man.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now.”
― Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

“Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.”
― Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

“Sometimes - history needs a push.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“The greater the void, the greater the divine influx.”
― John Tauler

“Wir leben in einem Haus, das ständig zusammenzubrechen droht, und können nicht viel mehr unternehmen, als hier einen Balken abzustützen und dort das Dach zu flicken, damit es nicht hineinregnet. Wenn du dann morgens durch die Stube gehst, brichst du schon wieder durch die Dielen.”
― Hans Bemmann, The Stone and the Flute

“Müdigkeit spürte er keine, nur war es ihm manchmal unangenehm, dass er nicht auf dem Kopf gehen konnte.”
― Georg Büchner, Lenz

“All my life I have been trying to improve my German.
At last my German is better
—but now I am old and ill and don’t have long to live.
Soon I will be dead,
with better German.”
― Lydia Davis

“The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.”
― Paul Celan

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man