Monaca Nemu > Monaca's Quotes

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.”
― Robert Pirsig

“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
― Immanuel Kant

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

“In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. ”
― William Ralph Inge

“Although affiliated with materialist philosophy and particularly the historical materialism of Marx, Laruelle’s conception of the real is not simply reducible to a kind of primary matter or empirical reality. He has no interest in debating whether or not the real world exists outside our ability to observe it, or whether or not the real world is constructed out of countless small material atoms. These are the squabbles of philosophy, after all. The real, as non-philosophical, is defined precisely and axiomatically by Laruelle. The real is the unilateral duality specific to an immanent one.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“the end is the beginning and the beginning the end. The content is thus a circle; it is the discovery of the self in the other extreme, now recognized as the self’s very essence.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
― Georg Hegel

“I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.”
― Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but
what in each case is given. Thus hell is not
something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists: And Other Essays

“Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
― Louis Althusser

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
― Pravin Lal