Joshua

“Be virtuous' says the copy-book, 'and you will be happy.' Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this respect it is only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice brings no very serious mischief on a man's later years it is not so bad a vice as it is said to be.”
― Samuel Butler

“To play, to love, to bask in the sun, to profit from time's passage, all that comprises the existential adventure, by an effect of specific structure, inscribes itself in the order of the measurement, of the economy. But can the effervescent social desire to live be economized?”
― Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy

“Nor should you forget that although it's easy to distinguish between what is said in jest and what in earnest, when it comes to people who mean so much to us that our lives depend on them, then it isn't so easy after all, the risk is so great it turns our eyes into microscopes, and once equipped with those it's impossible to distinguish anything.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“The countable measure always brings about an even greater excessiveness. And like a sorcerer's apprentice, a society that does not know how to play upon the coincidentia oppositorum exposes itself to the catastrophic explosion of the element that it has denied, and consequently was not able to master. The productive phantasm, full-blown positivism, and unidimensionality are the armor that, through its very rigidity, engenders explosion.”
― Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy