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IF the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and
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“And there, sir, lies the entire problem,
to have within oneself the inseparable
reality and the material clarity of feeling, to have it in such a degree that
the feeling cannot but express itself, to
have a wealth of words and of formal
constructions which can join in the
dance, serve one's purpose—and at the
very moment when the soul is about to
organize its wealth, its discoveries, this
revelation, at the unconscious moment
when the thing is about to emanate, a
higher and evil will attacks the soul like
vitriol, attacks the word and image mass,
attacks the mass of feeling and leaves me
panting at the very door of life.”
― Collected Works: Volume One
to have within oneself the inseparable
reality and the material clarity of feeling, to have it in such a degree that
the feeling cannot but express itself, to
have a wealth of words and of formal
constructions which can join in the
dance, serve one's purpose—and at the
very moment when the soul is about to
organize its wealth, its discoveries, this
revelation, at the unconscious moment
when the thing is about to emanate, a
higher and evil will attacks the soul like
vitriol, attacks the word and image mass,
attacks the mass of feeling and leaves me
panting at the very door of life.”
― Collected Works: Volume One
“Doubt crashes down upon us like a calamity; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to wrest ourselves from it, to conjure it away, doubt never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that doubt crashes down upon us, doubt was within us, and we were foredoomed to it. No one chooses the lack of choice nor strives to opt for the absence of option, for nothing that affects us deeply is willed.”
― The Fall into Time
― The Fall into Time
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“self-contentment is as little a standard for that to which it relates as it's absence is an argument against the value of a thing.”
― The Will to Power
― The Will to Power
“In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification — and so belongs to different symbols — or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; 'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the proposition, 'Green is green'— where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective — these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.)”
― Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
― Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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Matthew’s 2025 Year in Books
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