Steve Nunn > Steve's Quotes

“How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

“The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.”
― Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges

“The snow kept on falling, and penetrated so deeply into her prone body that she had no other feeling than that of wanting to die, buried under these adorable snow kisses, to be embalmed in the snow - and then to be swept off, in a final gust, to the land of eternal snow, to the fabled infinite mountains where the darling little adultresses lie in a perpetual swoon, ceaselessly and firmly caressed by all the perverse angels.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Angels of Perversity

“How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. ”
― Alfred de Musset

“You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep”
― Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,

For thou must die.”
― George Herbert, The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”
― Dante Alighieri

“As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

“I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.”
― August Strindberg

“Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Do not give up hope entirely in spite of the horror of your situation. I am mobilising all my mental capacities to obtain your unconditional freedom.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.

The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world’s
silence in a circle dance”
― Robert Walser, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

“Houses, gardens, and people were transfigured into musical sounds, all that was solid seemed to be transfigured into soul and into gentleness. Sweet veils of silver and soul-haze swam through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and all grief, all human disappointment, all evil, all pain seemed to vanish, from now on never to appear again. Earlier walks came before my eyes; but the wonderful image of the humble present became a feeling which overpowered all others. The future paled, and the past dissolved. I glowed and flowered myself in the glowing, flowering present. From near and far, great things and small things emerged bright silver with marvelous gestures, joys, and enrichments, and in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself. All other fantasies sank and vanished in meaninglessness. I had the whole rich earth immediately before me, and I still looked only at what was most small and most humble. With gestures of love the heavens rose and fell. I had become an inward being, and walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. In the sweet light of love I realized, or believe I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“Often I walked in the neighboring forest of fir and pine, whose beauties, wonderful winter solitudes, seemed to protect me from the onset of despair. Ineffably kind voices spoke down to me from the trees: 'You must not come to the hard conclusion that everything in the world is hard, false, and wicked. But come often to us; the forest likes you. In its company you will find health and good spirits again, and entertain more lofty and beautiful thoughts.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal

“I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.”
― Rousseau Jean - Jacques

“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man”
― Jean-Jaques Rousseau

“What if the point of life has nothing to do with the creation of an ever-expanding region of control? What if the point is not to keep at bay all those people, beings, objects and emotions that we so needlessly fear? What if the point instead is to let go of that control? What if the point of life, the primary reason for existence, is to lie naked with your lover in a shady grove of trees? What if the point is to taste each other's sweat and feel the delicate pressure of finger on chest, thigh on thigh, lip on cheek? What if the point is to stop, then, in your slow movements together, and listen to the birdsong, to watch the dragonflies hover, to look at your lover's face, then up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family and in so doing abandon any attempt to control them? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, to experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?”
― Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

“Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is the sun: in the subterranean and mineral world, it is the purest and most perfect gold. Hence the search after the Great Work is called the Search for the Absolute, and this work itself is termed the operation of the sun.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Everything lives by movement, everything is maintained by equilibrium, and harmony results from the analogy of contraries; this law is the form of forms.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“All is Number”
― Pythagoras

“Number rules the universe.”
― Pythagoras

“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“Brother,you who have the light, tell me mine.
I am like a blind man. I go without direction and fumble along.
I go under tempests and storms,
blind with fantasy and crazy with harmony.

That is my malady. Dreaming. Poetry
is the iron jacket with a thousand bloody points
I wear upon my soul. The bloodstained thorns
spill the drops of my melancholy.

And so I go, blind and crazy, through this bitter world;
at times it seems to me that the path is very long,
and at times that it's very short...

And in this back-and-forth between eagerness and agony,
I am full of woes I can hardly bear.
Don't you hear the drops of my melancholy falling?”
― Rubén Darío, Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza

“Buscad en la naturaleza el secreto de la poesía. Ella os dará los elementos inertes y los elementos vivos de los afectos. Ella es cielo, aire y tierra: ella es hombre y mujer, luz y amor, ciencia y virtud, color y armonía… escala misteriosa que remata en Dios.”
― Rubén Darío, Azul...