Alex Feinberg

“Among other things, this chapter represents a valiant although self-consciously inadequate attempt to do what Wittgenstein says cannot be done. According to Wittgenstein, one cannot predicate the whole. That is, one cannot say that the totality of things is either large or small if there is nothing beyond it with which to compare.”
― Lao Tzu, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation

“We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as if, during the few minutes after such a sleep has ended, we have ourselves turned into mere figures of lead. Identity has vanished. So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp. What is it that guides us when there has been a genuine interruption (whether it be that we have been totally taken over by sleep, or that our dreams have been utterly different from ourselves)? What has happened really is a death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which older memories cling; or possibly some of them have been lying dormant inside us and we now become conscious of them. The resurrection that takes place when we wake up—after that beneficent attack of mental derangement we call sleep—must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a name, a line of poetry, or a refrain we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practises requital – is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful – is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings

“the American physician George M. Beard introduced the term ‘neurasthenia’ to the medical lexicon, referring to feelings of profound nervous exhaustion and anxiety that were becoming an epidemic in the industrialized cities of Germany, England, and the United States.”
― Kevin Aho, Existentialism: An Introduction