tomaszke > tomaszke's Quotes

“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“While there's life there's hope.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education

“The sea is not a surface. It is, from top to bottom, an abyss. “If you want to cross the sea, sink.”
― Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

“Primo Levi laid bare the oldest function assigned to music. Music, he writes, was felt to be a “malediction.” It was a “hypnosis of continuous rhythm that annihilates thought and numbs pain.”
― Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

“Dance is an image. As painting is a song. Simulacra simulate. A rite repeats a metaphora (a voyage). Moving trucks in modern-day Greece still have the word METAPHORA on their sides. A myth is the danced image of the rite itself, which is expected to attract the world.”
― Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

“Nothing human has ever mattered to this world. Nothing human has ever excited the interest of rivers or flowers. Everything fades away in the specks of this blurred haze that the fire of the sun has added to the heat of the light.”
― Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

“The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet; between them you could just glimpse the Last Judgement, finding each of us guilty of nothing.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Inside, a mother superior, ethereal, delicate, who took me under her wing. She caressed me with her slender, soft hands, she sat next to me as if I were a friend. One day she disappeared. In her place arrived a buxom Swiss from Canton Uri. It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“[H]ere was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint bottle, and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach.”
― Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ”
― Roberto Calasso

“Maybe I’m inclined to what Nietzsche called “impure thought,” that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were.”
― Roberto Calasso

“Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.”
― Roberto Calasso

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.”
― Peter Ackroyd, English Music

“I find myself only by losing myself.”
― Paul Ricoeur

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints…”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”
― Basho

“Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.”
― Ben Jonson

“Winter solitude-
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind.”
― Basho Matsuo

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
― Matsuo Bashô

“How I long to see
among dawn flowers,
the face of God.”
― Basho, Haiku

“The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
― Basho