Michael Allen

“[The philistine] sternly segregates the ‘serious things in life’ – that is to say profession, business, wife and child — from its pleasures: and to the latter belongs more or less everything that has to do with culture. Therefore woe to an art that starts to take itself seriously and makes demands that touch upon his livelihood, his business and his habits, his philistine ‘serious things in life’ — he averts his eyes from such an art as though from something indecent, and with the air of a duenna he warns every defenceless virtue not to look.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

“Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

“Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self…for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations