Alexander

“I’m talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it arises?”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“A perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”
― Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House

“In the good old days of ‘actually existing Socialism,’ every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: ‘Learn, learn, and learn!’ ... Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked which they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered ‘A wife’; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, ‘A mistress’; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered ‘Both, wife and mistress!’ Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: ‘This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress…’ ‘And what do you actually do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies