557 books
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Stephen Rowland
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Reading for the 2nd time
read in April 2020
Stephen Rowland said:
"
Absolutely essential for all profoundly unhappy thinking people. I will be quoting Pessoa to the end of my days, I'm sure of it.
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“It was enough for one Hindu prince to see a cripple, an old old man, and a corpse to understand everything; we see them and understand nothing, for nothing changes in our life. We cannot renounce anything; yet the evidences of vanity are in our reach. Invalids of hope, we are still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting. We wait for everything – even Nothingness – rather than be reduced to an eternal suspension, to a condition of neutral divinity, of a corpse. Thus the heart, which has made the Irreparable into an axiom, still hopes for surprises from it. Humanity lives in love with the events which deny it…”
― A Short History of Decay
― A Short History of Decay
“The sages of antiquity, who put themselves to death as proof of their maturity, had created a discipline of suicide which the moderns have unlearned. Doomed to an uninspired agony, we are neither authors of our extremities nor arbiters of our adieux; the end is no longer our end: we lack the excellence of a unique initiative – by which we might ransom an insipid and talentless life, as we like the sublime cynicism, the ancient splendour of an art of dying. Habitués of despair, complacent corpses, we all outlive ourselves and die only to fulfil a futile formality. It is as if our life were attached to itself only to postpone the moment when we could get rid of it.”
― A Short History of Decay
― A Short History of Decay
“When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured.”
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“A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable... Everyone trying to remedy everyone's life. Society- an inferno of saviors!”
― A Short History of Decay
― A Short History of Decay
Stone Bridge Press
— 60 members
— last activity Dec 03, 2025 08:00AM
Stone Bridge Press was established in Berkeley, California, in 1989. We now have some 150 titles in print, covering such Japan-related areas as langua ...more
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