Quincunx > Quincunx's Quotes

“What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering. ”
― Harold Bloom

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”
― Harold Bloom

“Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.”
― Émile Durkheim

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“Only describe, don't explain.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: ‘Now I want to go this way.’ I say: ‘Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.’ That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Philosophy hasn't made any progress? - If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching itching? And can't this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape & Embers

“The only sin is the sin of being born”
― Samuel Beckett

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. ”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“Habit is a great deadener.”
― Samuel Beckett