Domas > Domas's Quotes

“Real negativity splits the logos from within, while from without it splits signification from reality.”
― Ray Brassier

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void.”
― Democritus

“In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.”
― Karl Marx

“The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“One place is as good as another, in the valley without exit...”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“Time, which sees to everything, has provided the solution,
despite yourself.
Time, that knows the answer, has continued to flow.
It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier,
that everything starts again,
that everything starts,
that everything continues”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Man is a self-conscious Nothing,”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Light had its allotted time; but timeless and infinite is the reign of the night − the duration of sleep eternal.”
― Novalis, Hymns to the Night

“This is what our essential being-in-the-world is – nihilistic annihilation.”
― Arvydas Šliogeris, Names Of Nihil

“There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Everything tears away at everything else … forever.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

“Being is antecedent to thinking precisely because if it were not, not only would there be nothing to think, but neither could there be any thinking.”
― Iain Hamilton Grant

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?”
― Diogenes of Sinope

“All life is founded upon something independent from itself.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The fact that there is a limit to capital does not mean that capital collapses. Rather the limit is an asymptotic curve, you get closer and closer to an absolute limit but you never reach it.”
― Moishe Postone

“God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not - insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

“It’s as though a cabbage tried to investigate the causes and effects of its existence,”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Time of Contempt

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles

“Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.”
― Lucretius