“... in a time such as ours when everything but what is noteworthy, everything but what is truly original as well as most brilliantly scientific is edited and published, when every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products, at such a time it is simply one’s duty to bring out a work of art as unassuming and unadorned as the art of Roithamer's prose...”
— Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Going, Going
“Amid two seas, on one small point of land, wearied, uncertain, and amazed we stand.” — M. Prior
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014
Friday, July 25, 2014
“The more I travel the world of living men and study the recorded experience of dead ones, the more I am convinced that mystical powers, religious devotion, intellectual capacity, and ascetic hardihood do not possess anything like the value of noble character.
“I no longer admire a man because he has spent twenty years in the practice of yoga or the study of metaphysics; I admire him because he has brought compassion, tolerance, rectitude, and dependability into his conduct.”
— Paul Brunton
“I no longer admire a man because he has spent twenty years in the practice of yoga or the study of metaphysics; I admire him because he has brought compassion, tolerance, rectitude, and dependability into his conduct.”
— Paul Brunton
Saturday, June 28, 2014
“One thing, however is certain: I have been walking about the city on the Vltava for centuries; I mingle with the crowd, I trudge, I wander, I smell its beer, train smoke and river mud; you can see me where, as Kolár puts it, ‘invisible hands knead the dough of pedestrians on the pavement’s pastry boards’; where, to quote Holan, ‘the croutons of streets spread / with the garlic of the crowd reek a bit.’”
— Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague
— Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague
Friday, June 27, 2014
I Knew I Was Doing Something Wrong
Advice from French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy: “At 65 years old, when most people are tinkering with their pension plans, he is as kinetic as a man half, even a third, his age. ‘Retire?’ he ripostes when I broach the topic. ‘I am your age!’ Responding to a recent query from a Parisian newspaper about the secret of his perpetual youth, his advice was, ‘Don’t spend time with boring people.’”
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