“Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel”
― Drama of Atheistic Humanism
― Drama of Atheistic Humanism
“The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.”
― How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
― How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”
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“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”
― Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us
― Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us
“Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.”
― Agnes Varda: Interviews
― Agnes Varda: Interviews
Michael’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michael’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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