Ben Gardner

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Human Action: Sch...
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El principito
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Wen-Tzu
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by Lao Tzu
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Jean-Paul Sartre
“In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“Once the arrow has left the bowstring, it has no power to come back. The moon's brightness shines, revealing the night traveller.”
Yuanwu Keqin, The Blue Cliff Record

Umberto Eco
“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
Umberto Eco

Rainer Maria Rilke
“But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...

And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?

And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Walter Benjamin
“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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