Nets are for catching fish; after one gets the fish, one forgets the net. Traps are for catching rabbits; after one gets the rabbit, one forgets the trap. Words are for getting meaning; after one gets the meaning, one forgets the words. Where can I find people who have forgotten words, and have a word with them?   — Zhuangzi, Ch. 26

If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past. If you lie, it becomes a part of your future. John Spence.

You did not wish to see the face of the Unknown; you will see its mask. —Victor Hugo, Préface de mes œuvres et post-scriptum de ma vie.

Only as Creators! It has caused me the greatest trouble, and still causes me the greatest trouble, to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are.  Nietzsche, Gay Science, #58

“From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”   ― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

"To religion would belong the task of consolation, not of demonstration." Levinas

How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it. Wittgenstein: in Zettel 255

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” Calvin Coolidge

Whatever has come into existence, must also pass away with necessity. Is it true to say, then, that there is nothing infinite in this world? Anaximander

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. Walter Benjamin

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. Revelation 3, 15-17

'Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.' -Calvin Coolidge

The aesthetics of truth forms alliances, profoundly elective affinities, that the intellect stripped of feeling inclines to reject…. Intellection must address the matter of its feeling. Phillip Rieff

In face of the metaphysical, even if you should have no other word for it than simply death, all political concerns dwindle into nothingness. Huizinga: 'Conditions for a recovery of civilization.'

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Aung San Suu Kyi

It must have required many ages to discover that a pair of birds and a couple of days were both instances of the number 2: the degree of abstraction involved is far from easy. Bertrand Russell

In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—'Perspectivism.' It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. Friedrich Nietzsche; The Will to Power, §481

'In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: We are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.' Žižek, Slavoj. 'A soft focus on war: How Hollywood hides the horrors of war.' in: In These Times. Vol. 34, No. 5, p. 30-32, May 2010. (English).

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world. James Joyce, Ulysses.

I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one must begin to talk about it. In such a case the truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm. Robert Musil: Das hilflose Europa—oder Reise vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste (1922)

O mortals, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Life has come down to you, and are you reluctant to ascend and live? But what room is there for you to ascend, you with your high-flown ways and lofty talk? Come down, that you may ascend, ascend even to God...” Augustine, Confessions.

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve....[T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from 'impossible' to 'obvious.' Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious. —ELIEZER S. YUDNOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996

When I say I trust you, I mean I've considered that you could betray me, which means I know you will, that we'll have between us at last that understanding which is a safer thing  than trust, not a worse,  not a better thing ...  Carl Phillips: Blizzard.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. Anatole France

'The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . . Clifford Geertz, 1917

But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep. — William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure