CON/TEXT:


Since a proposition can only be proved by other propositions, it is obvious that not all propositions can be proved, for proofs can only begin by assuming something. The consequences have no more certainty than the premises.

Every possible thought has been doubted at some time or another, except the thought which can only be expressed by a note of interrogation, since to doubt that thought asserts it.

It is indubitably true that something exists. Upon considering the possibility that nothing exists, the following recognition is made: The consideration of the possibility that nothing exists is itself something that exists. Does any other information or proposition follow from this realization?

Every object of consciousness implies a disturbance that must be reacted to. So long as the mind exists, there will always be an object and the disturbance it engenders.

The manner in which spirit is united to the body cannot be understood by man, and yet it is man.

When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or another, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

I may venture to infer from myself to the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity…The mind is a kind of theater upon which several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notions of the place where these scenes are represented or of the materials of which it is composed.

The brain, in fact, is no less a part of the external world than is the constellation of the centaur.

How do I know that a god able to do anything did not bring it about that there be no earth at all, no heavens, no extended thing, no figure, no size, no place, and yet all these things should be seen to exist precisely as they are now?

The atheist assumes no theology at all. The deist concedes that there is a cause of the world, but he leaves it indefinite whether the cause is a freely acting being. Theism consists in believing not merely in a God, but in a living God who has produced the world through knowledge and by means of his free will.

Assume an intelligence which at a given moment knows all the forces that animate nature as well as the situations of all the bodies that compose it, and further that it is vast enough to perform a calculation based upon this data. It would then include in that same formulation the numbers of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atom. For it nothing would be uncertain and the future like the past, would be present before its eyes.

Do you think that a mind which is grandiose to contemplate all time and all existence would consider human life to be of great importance?

There is no danger in confounding the ideas perceived by sense with the visions of a dream. The latter are easily perceived different by not being connected, and of a piece with the preceding and subsequent transactions of out lives.

And if someone traced a continuous line which is sometimes straight, sometimes circular, and sometimes of another nature, it is possible to find a notion, or rule, or equation common to all points of this line, in virtue of which these changes must occur…But when a rule is extremely complex, what is in conformity with it passes for irregular.

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made to accord with the rule.

Change implies something which changes. It implies, that is, a subject that has preserved its identity while altering its qualities.

What causes inconstancy is the realization that present pleasures are false, together with the failure to realize that absent pleasures are vain.

The more the internal contrasts within a thing fade into insignificance by comparison with the contrasts between it and its environment, and the more the internal connection among its elements overshadow its connections with its environment, the more natural it becomes for us to regard it as a distinct object.

The notion of oneself is necessarily that of a possessor of history. I can judge that this is how it was with me now, only if I can also judge that this is how it was with me then. Self-consciousness can coexist with amnesia- but there could not be a self-conscious person suffering from perpetually renewed amnesia such that he could at no time make judgments about he was at an earlier time.

Strange how make believe, when engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.

In every walk of life, each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought. In fact, you might say that society subsists entirely of assumed personalities.

Soldiers are the only ones who do not disguise themselves; they establish themselves by force, the others by masquerade.

The man of culture is as far from the artist as the historian is from the man of action.

When an actor acts, he simplifies himself, being false both to the character and the audience. We are complex. What the actor projects is not complex.

A scholar, whose mind is set of truth, and who is ashamed of bad clothes and bad food, is not fit to be discoursed with.

Philosophers, the world has no age; humanity simply changes place.

You must allow yourself to create characters which are a danger to you in every way, even physically. A writer must not be tempted into not writing the truth because he knows it might come back to haunt him.

A song has to take a character, shape, body, or influence people to an extent that they use it to their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song but as a lifestyle.

Those who actively seek to become or allow themselves to be marketed as “star” figures are simply aggrandizing the pathetic deception of an “ego” or exploiting the same weakness of an “audience.” More than likely they are doing both. Ultimately, this shows contempt for the unmitigated performance of a chosen discipline. Capitulating to an unfortunate situation whereby we are all expected to reject or identify with some role model or another. Whether they are admirably noble or notoriously anti-social. There is absolutely no qualitative difference between a so-called “commercial” artist or an “independent” one in this respect.

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn’t the revolutionaries work become official, once the state takes it over?

People confuse rebels with revolutionaries. A rebel is one who is suspicious of every authority, right or left. A revolutionary is a politician who is out of office.

It is not though the dissemination of ideas that television wins the battle for our minds. What we have here is a sequence of gestures, particular facial expressions or motions of the hand, that supply thousands with a supposedly adequate range of expression. Our most personal tics and idiosyncrasies have become the means by which power choreographs us into the system.

A bigoted believer in nihilism blasphemes against the sutras on the ground that literature (i.e. the scriptures) is unnecessary, or even misleading. If that were so, then neither would it be right for us to speak, since speech forms the substance of literature. He may argue that in revelation, or the direct method, literature is discarded. But does he appreciate that the words “is discarded” are also literature?

It seemed clear that from this point life and the world were dependent upon me, as it were. I can even say that the world had been created by me alone: I’ll shoot myself and the world will exist no longer, at least as far as I’m concerned. To say nothing of the possibility that, perhaps, nothing really would exist for anyone after me and that as soon as my own consciousness was extinguished, the whole world would be extinguished with it, like a mirage, like a produce of my own consciousness alone; and it would be done away with because this entire world and all these people were, perhaps, nothing but myself.

However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them. However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them. However immeasurable the dharmas are, I vow to encompass them. However incomparable perfection is, I vow to attain it.

Each person’s growth is governed by unconscious needs to placate, please, oppose, or terminate images of authority.

Pride plays a greater part than kindness in the reprimands we address to wrong doers; we reprove them not so much as to reform them as to make them believe that we are free from their faults.

If we had no faults we should not find so much enjoyment in seeing faults in others.

We dislike praising and never praise anyone except out of self interest. Praise is a subtle, concealed, and delicate form of flattery which gratifies giver and receiver in different ways: the latter accepts it as the due reward of his own merit, the former bestow so as to draw attention to his own fairness and discrimination.

The virtues lose themselves in self-interest like rivers in the sea.

Suppose, I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, for he is another and not I.-

The pretext of those who make others happy is that they wish them well.

We cannot love anything except in terms of ourselves and when we put our friends above ourselves, we are only concerned with our own taste and pleasure. Yet it is only through such preference that friendship can be true and perfect.

Verily, I may have done this or that for suffers; but always I seemed to have done better when I learned to feel better joys. As long as there have been men, men has felt too little joy: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin. And learning better to feel joy, we learn best not to hurt others or plan hurt for them.

The weak cannot be sincere.

All men have an equal share of pride, the only difference is in their ways and means of showing it.

The question has been raised what two men who have grown up entirely alone in the desert would do when they have met one another for the first time. X Y and Z have given quite different answers. X believes that they would approach each other affectionately. Y that they would be hostile. Z that they would pass one another in silence. That our dispositions differ so fundamentally on such a cardinal point is a great mystery.

In order for a relation between a man and a woman to amount to anything, they must share pleasure, memory, or desire.

It is difficult to define love: what can be said is that in the soul it is the passion to dominate another, in the mind it is a mutual understanding, whilst in the body it is simply a delicately veiled desire to possess the beloved after many rites and mysteries.

As love waxes, prudence wanes.

Eroticism is the extreme embodiment of an absence.

Constancy is love is perpetual inconstancy, inasmuch as the heart is drawn to one quality in the beloved, now preferring this now that. Constancy is therefore inconstancy held in check and confined to the same object.

And, then again, perhaps love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.

Love is the desire to live in possible loss. To invest the loved object with such value that its absence becomes painful. The fear demands that the object of desire be experienced to the point of exhaustion.

The real expression of need and desire which amounts to confession, which is another word for submission.

Hope and fear are inseparable, and there is no fear without hope nor hope without fear.

I do not know any other way of association with great tasks other than play. The least compulsion, a gloomy mien, or any harsh tone of the throat are all objections to a man; how much more so against his work.

Ascending souls congratulate one another on the admirable harmonies of the world.

All the best ones, when you thought about it, were cheerful. It was much better to be cheerful and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive.

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, the voice of a single person, “the author” is confiding in us.

To give in so many articulate words one’s innermost thoughts and feelings is taken as a sign that they are neither profound nor very sincere.

The most successful agents elude depiction, when they do not exceed its resources.

You have nothing to do before dying.

When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.

Music neither goads nor defends, neither seeks nor explain. Music is the manifestation of action without activity.

It is only obscurely and with no other proofs than the certainty of achieving saintliness that I make the gestures leading to it. Possibly it might be won by a mathematical discipline, but I fear that would be a facile, well-mannered saintliness with familiar features, a mere semblance. Starting from the elementary principles of morality and religion, the saint arrives at his goal as he sheds then. Like beauty and poetry, with which I merge it- saintliness is individual. Its expression is individual. Its sole basis is renunciation. I also associate it with freedom. But I wish to be a saint chiefly because the word indicates the loftiest human attitude, and I shall do everything to succeed. I shall use my pride and sacrifice it therein.

People have been canceled out. Imagination has been annihilated at every turn. Film…stories…songs…exhausted. Nothing is left. No one is left. The soul has dissipated- a sick vestige fading away about the most wretched and insane. There is no love… no hate…for all bodies are sated, all consciousness resigned. Even anxiety is gone, passed to the pit of the stomach, where it throbs in time with the ticking of the city clock. There is nothing left but an immense continuum of invalids, putrefying in their vast complacency…sluggards, cow-like souls, slaves of an imbecility that oppresses them and with which they do not cease to copulate day and night. Slaves as dull as this farcical outburst in which I am trying to express the excruciation of a reality governed by a pack of nonentities…phantoms who have chosen to impose on everybody a blindness to legitimate experience, all in pursuit of their own negation, parasitic upon a world flooded with empty formulas: terrorism, drug abuse, the economy, the middle class, the third world, teenage pregnancy, celebrity scandals, political corruption, televised violence…the world outlives itself every day.

The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.

If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.

There is nothing on earth that does not contain the seed of a possible hell: a face, a word, a compass, a cigarette advertisement, are each capable of driving a person mad if he is unable to forget them.

He that keepth his mouth keepth his life, but he that openeth his mouth shall have destruction.

Indeed, if you knew the truth with certainty, you would see the fire of hell; you would see it with your very eyes. Then, on that day, you will be questioned about your joys.

For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

None of us knows anything; not even whether we know or do not know, nor do we know whether or not knowing and not knowing exist, nor in general whether there is any thing or not.

There are various forms of curiosity: one, based on self-interest makes us want to know what may be useful, another, based in pride, comes from a desire to know what others do not..

“But!” you will say, “What is the object in all this?” Just so that he can boast to his friends that he played better than someone else?” I relish no pleasure, said X, unless I can share it; a sign of how man esteems man.

Through inertia and by force of habit the mind only concerns itself with what it find easy and pleasant, and this tendency constantly sets limits to our knowledge. Nobody has ever made the effort to stretch the mind to the limits of its power.

All the accomplishments of mankind, his finery, are only perversions of his desire, made possible by his weakness.

Literature is a game for invalids.

It is extremely unlikely that anything relating to the human species will exist forever. There are no symbols that justify this intuition, yet its correctness is obvious. Every conceivable human action will eventually run out of repercussions. They will be irrelevant in the sense that, sooner or later, the universe will evolve to a state that is no different from one in which they never occurred at all.

If you cannot have both reason and strength, always choose reason, and leave strength to the enemy. In many battles, it is force that makes it possible to win a victory, but the struggle as a whole can only be won by reason. The strong man will never be able to draw reason from his strength, whereas we can always draw strength from our reason.

The only indubitable human expression is a scream of agony.

Truth is more than a matter of agreement among people.

Politics is complete so long as the physiology of the human species is fixed.

Art criticism is second-degree spectacle. The critic is someone who makes a spectacle out of his very condition as spectator- a specialist and therefore ideal spectator, expressing his ideals and feelings about a work in which he does not really participate. He re-presents, restages, his own nonintervention in the spectacle. The weakness of random and largely fragmentary judgments concerning spectacles that do not really concern us is imposed upon all of us in many banal discussions in private life. But the art critic makes a show of this kind of weakness, presenting it as exemplary.

You should always aim to be as skillful as the most professional of government agencies. The way you live, conceive and market what you do should be as well thought out as a government coup. It's a campaign, it has nothing to do with art.

I want to be a force for real good. I want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start immediately to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he’ll be cured. When he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’ll get all the money he needed. But what these pieces are and what is the road to attain the knowledge of them… that I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown, to be able to control them must be, I believe, the power of every musician.

Reality has properties that are independent from the content of man’s desire.

A man cannot search for what he knows; if he knows it, what need is there to search? Equally, a man cannot search for what he does not know at all; if he does not know it, how would he recognize it?

All who undertake the process of meditation should cherish one thought only: when I attain perfect wisdom, I will liberate all beings in all of their forms. So long as any form of being is conceived, I must allow it to pass into the eternal peace of Nirvana, into that realm of Nirvana which leaves nothing behind, and to attain final liberation.

And yet although immeasurable, innumerable, and unlimited beings have been liberated, truly, nothing has been liberated at all. Why? Because no bodhisattva who is a true bodhisattva entertains such concepts as a self, a person, a being, or a living soul. Thus, there are no sentient beings to be liberated and no self to attain perfect wisdom.

No one should misunderstand me when I write: “Betrayal is beautiful.” Or be so cowardly to think- or pretend to think- that I am talking of cases in which it is necessary and noble, when it makes for the realization of good. I was talking of low betrayal. The kind that cannot be justified by any heroic excuse. The sneaky, cringing kind…It is enough that the betrayer be aware of his betrayal, that he will it, that he be able to break the bonds of uniting him with mankind. Love is indispensable for creating beauty. And a cruelty that shatters that love.

We can imagine a sort of suicide in which one uses up and destroys all that they possess. This agent is one whose intelligence has developed to its furthest capacity. The existence of the world is a premise. And the conclusion? That expectations are inevitably replaced by other expectations. No condition of satisfaction can ever exist. Things which reject this are defined by ignorance, self-deception, and dishonesty.

Only in the most apocalyptic potlatch imaginable does a real and distinct self appear, real and distinct from all that was put to the flames.

If a man in the morning hear in the right way he can die in the evening without regret.

Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone. The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.

Any word, any image, is defined, that is, precisely shaped, like wax, by what it is not. I am the mould. I am precisely what you are not. So every movement every thought every word every picture must have my shape.

Most, if not everything we think, is presented and arranged by a being whose aim is to suppress and enslave us.

They must obey the lord of their land in all his words and commands; and if they do so, he, who has power over all living gods will give them the joys of paradise.

It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

What causes inconstancy is the realization that absent pleasures are false, together with the failure to realize that present pleasures are vain.

Instead of saying that each complete and consistent state description describes, or defines, a possible state of the universe, and that one of the set of state descriptions defines the actual state of the universe, we might equally well say that the set of state descriptions describes a set of possible universes, rather than a set of possible states of the same universe.

Each myth, like the aphorism or the maxim, is a poetic world unto itself; a “momentary deity” or revelation.

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect, is unknown to any but God.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which will be done: and there is no new thing under the sun…Is there anything of which it may be said, see this is new? It hath been already of old time which was before us.

The source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other according to the assessment of time.