10h ·
/ Stanley Kubrick /
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"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure."
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"Stanley Kubrick, (born July 26, 1928, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died March 7, 1999, Childwickbury Manor, near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, Eng.), U.S. film director. He began his career as a photographer for Look magazine (1945–50). He directed two documentary films before directing his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953). He won fame with Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and the internationally acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which earned an Academy Award for special visual effects. His later movies include A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). His films are characterized by a cool visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic pessimism." (Britannica)
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Biography/Personal Quotes imdb
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1d ·
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. ~James Baldwin
(Book: Nothing Personal [ad] https://amzn.to/49YmRDH)
(Art: Photograph of Baldwin by Mark Gerson)
9h ·
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”--Rebecca Solnit (Photo by Jim Herrington)
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“Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, in the eye of the storm… Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”--Saul Bellow, 1966
Photograph of Saul Bellow, from 1984, by Marisa Rastellini/Mondadori.
Suggested for you · 2d ·
"To awaken means to realize one's nothingness, that is, to realize one's complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one's complete and absolute helplessness... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself."
-- Gurdjieff
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
3d ·
/ Jean-Paul Sartre /
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"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."
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"Jean-Paul Sartre, (born June 21, 1905, Paris, France—died April 15, 1980, Paris), French philosopher, novelist, and playwright, the foremost exponent of existentialism. He studied at the Sorbonne, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion and intellectual collaborator. His first novel, Nausea (1938), narrates the feeling of revulsion that a young man experiences when confronted with the contingency of existence. Sartre used the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl (see phenomenology) with great skill in three successive publications: Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), and The Psychology of Imagination (1940). In Being and Nothingness (1943), he places human consciousness, or nothingness (néant), in opposition to being, or thingness (être); consciousness is nonmatter and thus escapes all determinism. In his postwar treatise Existentialism and Humanism (1946) he depicts this radical freedom as carrying with it a responsibility for the welfare of others. In the 1940s and ’50s he wrote many critically acclaimed plays—including The Flies (1943), No Exit (1946), and The Condemned of Altona (1959)—the study Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), and numerous articles for Les Temps Modernes, the monthly review that he and de Beauvoir founded and edited. A central figure of the French left after the war, he was an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union—though not a member of the French Communist Party—until the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, which he condemned. His Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) faults Marxism for failing to adapt itself to the concrete circumstances of particular societies and for not respecting individual freedom. His final works include an autobiography, The Words (1963), and Flaubert (4 vol., 1971–72), a lengthy study of the author. He declined the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature." (Britannica)
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Jean-Paul Sartre (1966). “Words”
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6h ·
/ Thomas Hobbes /
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"Hell is truth seen too late."
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"Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general."
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Born: April 5, 1588, Westport, Wiltshire, England
Died: December 4, 1679, Derbyshire, England
Education: Magdalen Hall, Oxford, St John's College, Cambridge (B.A, 1608)
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Leviathan
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1d ·
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental, since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love. But if people are not intelligent, they will be content to believe what they have been told, and may do harm in spite of the most genuine benevolence.“
— Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925), Ch. II: The Good Life, p. 27
1d ·
/ Aldous Huxley /
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"Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid."
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"Aldous Huxley, (born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, Eng.—died Nov. 22, 1963, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), British novelist and critic. Grandson of T.H. Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, he was partially blind from childhood. He is known for works of elegant, witty, pessimistic satire, including Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), which established him as a major novelist, and Point Counter Point (1928). The celebrated Brave New World (1932) is a nightmarish vision of a future society that expresses his distrust of trends in politics and technology. Beginning with Eyeless in Gaza (1936), his works reveal a growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism. Later works include the nonfiction The Devils of Loudun (1952) and The Doors of Perception (1954)." (Britannica)
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Aldous Huxley (2003). “Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience”, Crossroad 8 Avenue
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." —James Baldwin
#blackhistorymonth #jamesbaldwin #literature #authorquotes
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light Fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break Faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. ~James Baldwin
(Book: The Price of the Ticket [ad] https://amzn.to/49dFmEa)
(Art: Photograph by Carl Van Vechten)
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. ~James Baldwin
(Book: The Fire Next Time [ad] https://amzn.to/3TcCyl5)
(Art: Photograph of Baldwin by Ulf Andersen)
Why do we read? “A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her beautiful meditation on why we read and write. For Kafka, reading was “the axe for the frozen sea within us”; for James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny. “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy,” E.B. White wrote in contemplating the future of reading in 1951. “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic,” Carl Sagan asserted in his iconic Cosmos series, admiring the “funny dark squiggles” that have the uncanny power to transport us, across time and space, into the mind of another.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/14/galileo-reading/
1d ·
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. ~Noam Chomsky
(Book: How the World Works https://amzn.to/3KjErHQ )
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth. ~Doris Lessing
3d ·
/ Annie Besant /
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"A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows."
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"Annie Besant (born Oct. 1, 1847, London, Eng.—died Sept. 20, 1933, Adyar, Madras [now in Tamil Nādu, India]) British social reformer, sometime Fabian socialist, theosophist, and Indian independence leader.
Besant had been the wife of an Anglican clergyman. They separated in 1873, and Besant became associated for many years with the atheist and social reformer Charles Bradlaugh. She was an early advocate of birth control, and in the late 1880s she became a prominent Fabian socialist under the influence of George Bernard Shaw. Finally, in 1889, she was converted to the doctrines of the Russian-born religious mystic Helena Blavatsky, a cofounder of the Theosophical Society. The teachings of the society emphasized human service, a spiritual evolutionism drawn from both Eastern and Western esoteric philosophy, and the role of suprahuman masters of wisdom. Besant plunged vigorously into theosophical work, lecturing and writing widely. Her numerous books and articles are still considered among the best expositions of theosophical belief. She was international president of the Theosophical Society from 1907 until her death, residing principally at its headquarters in Madras. She was active in educational and humanitarian work in India and became involved in the Indian independence movement, establishing the Indian Home Rule League in 1916. She promoted her protégé, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she believed to be a potential world teacher, in the years before his renunciation of formal theosophy in 1929." (Britannica)
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Annie Besant (2016). “Esoteric Christianity”, p.92, BookRix
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