rhenvar > rhenvar's Quotes

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“Never work.”
― Guy Debord

“This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
― Aristotle

“But formulas are holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. And so my ammonium chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the short of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons