Agnes Nimas

“Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture
in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these
two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Under another aspect the same is true for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their gratuitousness. That game the mind plays with itself according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman universe. There is no purer sensation. These examples are too easy. The absurd man recognizes as his own these harmonies and these forms.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Showing up is the act of bearing witness to people’s joy, pain, and true selves; validating their experiences; easing their load; and communicating that they are not alone in this life.”
― Rachel Wilkerson Miller, The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People