Ben

“Six Lines

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion”
― Aaron Zeitlin

“If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.

And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Unfulfilled Wish

A woman in Atzbach was murdered by her husband because, in his opinion, she had carried the wrong child with her to safety from their burning house. She had not saved their eight-year old son, for whom the man had special plans, but had saved their daughter, who was not loved by the husband. When the husband was asked, in the District Court in Wels, what plans he had had for his son, who had been completely consumed by the fire, the husband replied that he had intended him to be an anarchist and a mass murderer of dictatorships and thus a destroyer of the state.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator

“The bees sit so slothfully on the flowers, and the sunshine lies so lazily on the ground. A horrible idleness prevails. -- Idleness is the root of all vice. -- What people won't do out of boredom! They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry, and multiply out of boredom and finally die out of boredom, and -- and that's the humor in it -- they do everything with the most serious faces, without realizing why and with God knows what intentions. All these heroes, these geniuses, these idiots, these saints, these sinners, these fathers of families are basically nothing but refined idlers. -- Why must I be the one to know this? Why can't I take myself seriously and dress this poor puppet in tails and put an umbrella in its hand so that it will become very proper and very useful and very moral? That man who just left me -- I envied him, I could have beaten him out of envy. Oh, to be someone else for once! Just for a minute. -- How that man runs! If only I knew of one thing under the sun that could still make me run.”
― Georg Büchner, Leonce und Lena