
I am the unbounded unity of seasons, an endless desert of the real, and all worlds are but a single moment—that is, one grain of sand—in my infinitude.
My personal version of philosophy gravitates towards that grave pitch and intense constancy of thinking which amounts to a sustained and self-administered kind of therapy.
The ultimate aim of literature is to liberate a certain mature playfulness from gloomy paralysis, to reconcile the subject with the world, in short, to become absorbed in questions of higher possibility.
The human psyche doesn’t exhibit health by adapting to reality so much as by manipulating it into a cunningly witty or self-glorifying perspective.
Man’s desire, the essence of his being, is thoroughly ridden with the problem of a suitable object.
The rankest disorder, cruelty, and injustice take the reins wherever worthiness is not recognised as such.
Away, away, dull sense of my powerlessness! For perhaps man’s deepest truth is his disinclination to suffer subjective lack of any kind; so that—guilty of not being God—he inevitably becomes a petulant ocean wave lashing out against the stern and immovable rock face of reality.
The truly powerful man is rarely in a position for friendship.
The element of creative showmanship in culture is the crucial forge of all warranted pride and contentment.
That being as such provokes love cannot be denied.
Suffering is the deepest commonality.
Women do what men want if only because they fail to grasp what they want themselves.
Philosophy proper begins with the realisation that a great deal of insight lurks just around the corner from a well-posed question.
The impossibility of absolute truth is the condition of joy in language.
If man were to suffer an infinite dream, then, half-sated by illusions, he would—through the oceanic mirage—at best behold divinatory wisps of a smile. And at worst he would be condemned by his own terrible conjurations, lost in an endless necromancy of shadowy hallucinations.
Honestly admitting to oneself that one harbours murderous intentions is the first step to mastering those intentions. Of course the next step is actually murdering someone, but then that’s hardly going to be recommended by any self-respecting sane man, especially not one who is himself ravaged by disavowed bloodlust!
Disagreement often entails an element of wilful misunderstanding. For inasmuch as a true idea is formulated well enough to allow of perfect comprehension, the latter is also a kind of concordance.
The opposite of a life-giving illusion is not pure and sobering truth, or spirit-crushing factuality, but rather a certain nameless terror.
I can redeem every wickedness but that of my own mind, which looks upon mortality with the jesting blaze of absurdity, and marshals cheerfulness as it would an army of kings.
The highest form of reason often stands beyond all performance in the world, and just as often operates solely by the imperative to trammel the virgin soil of pure insight.
The advantage of cultural beauty is that it is available to everyone and represents an end in itself. Anyone can read a great book or visit an art gallery. By contrast, money is merely a means to an end, and cannot rationally be pursued as an end in itself.
Clear and distinct ideas are like planets, stars or black holes in virtual space, massive condensations of conceptual matter that pull minds into orbit. Every conception that generates them is like a minor Big Bang.
If there were more dimensions of time, there would be more dimensions of thought.
The highest language models interaction with a complex inner world.
Intelligence is the computational speed, accuracy, and processing power of a dense piloting core of personality, whose real decisions we experience but do not consciously mediate.
Because language covers almost anything and everything, those who are best at it are the best overall.
The essence of unhappiness and dissatisfaction is not knowing who or what you are.
The only thing that makes people innocent is a certain cowardice that prevents them from acting upon their innermost urges.
The first task that faces an aspiring writer is securing his solitude. The ultimate task that faces him is in a sense to never die.
The man who aspires to philosophical kingship should not allow himself to become embroiled in the passing affairs of the day, which are mostly beneath him, but rather should endeavour to guide by reckonings that reflect the shimmering aspect of eternity.
When the inferior man becomes reconciled to his inferiority, he departs from it.
The man who pursues mastery of knowledge must remain in the concrete realm of generality. For if he descends too far into particulars, he becomes rootless and untraceable, lost in abstraction, floating, adrift, in a lake of black ink. Esotericism is a form of illicit narcissism.
My being able to see my students more accurately than they see themselves is the condition of my being able to teach them.
Theological insight advances exactly to the extent that God wills it to advance.
Arrogance is not only the greatest impediment to learning, but also, and ironically, a quality which the unlearned perceive in the superior man.
The man who is honest about the corruption of his soul is infinitely preferable as a figure of authority to the coward who waits until he is in the shadows before he reveals his own equal depravity.
It is painful that almost nobody cares for my work, and stirs in me a black melancholy, but the resentment I feel makes me productive, driving me further and ever further away from the objective social tendency, whereby so many peasants of the spirit are blind to the smoking sword of superior wit, and stare agape into that grey void of feeling called “entertainment.”
All it takes to be worthy of redemption is the stirring of curiosity.
Most people lack the courage more than the pure and simple insightfulness that is required for self-awareness. For a great many things revealed to the self-aware are dark and monstrous.
Teaching is the highest form of the exercise of love, and learning should be the highest form of the experience of being loved.
I am perfectly happy to admit that I am a parody of myself, but only from the perspective of an inferior person.
And if you be a true philosopher, then in tender fabulations of life exalted, unthink for all the gravity of suffering.
I felt my conscience an odd clamour in the darkness, as if it were an animate principle of gloom, a vampire upon the frenzy of my nightly search for comfort.
A mind, famished in its own language. In the language of others it grows.
The whole wide world is but a machine for generating complaints.
Desire creates a multitude of imperfections.
Mute calmness is of no artistic use, but then useless things are of great use in art.
Abundance is the grace of creation.
We flatter ourselves that goodness is impossible.
Where on earth are we going to find a solution to this raging catastrophe, this perilous calamity of heaven, the bare imagination of a feast?
A truly wise man feels a violent wonder to bethink wherein lies his wisdom.
There are books which are really excellent, provided, of course, that one doesn’t read them, and sticks to recirculating their second-hand impressions that masquerade as criticism in the book clubs of the suburbs.
Pomposity is a featherless peacock who also happens to have far too many feathers.
Life is to me a circus of riddles, a violent show of wonders that merely by force take on the appearance of solidity.
It is a great relief, that in any single civilised game, aside from matters of strategy, there is no question of why.
It is invariably the splendid and otherworldly formulations, phantasmic outlines of azure salience, ruptures in the ominous day, deviations that open new causes, each hijacked in the name of some animate desolation, before which we stand so pop-eyed with wonder.
What is life but a source of stubbornly fretful angst, a complex surge of joy and woe, ten thousand voices of howling fear?
To invoke normality as a positive category of ethical judgement is like trying to lock up a storm because it departs from the usual weather.
A great deal of strong-mindedness goes into not caring about having a weak mind.
The perfection and purpose of existence is that it should feel itself alive, conscious of its own inherently active force, its infinite plenitude of self-positing power, its effulgence of natural energy. A perfect man is thus one who is fully aware of his power. In this way a certain path of evolution, namely, the path towards the self-consciousness of human beings, tends towards the realisation of the inherent nature of nature.
The one who is unwittingly cast out of society for not abiding by its standards is wretched. Whereas, the one who voluntarily casts himself out of society because it does not meet his own standards is exalted. Such a man as this last slinks amid the crowd as a mere shadow of himself, aping the outward customs of a decadent order while inwardly he is similarly repelled by the odious circus of its credulous innocence as the like poles of two magnets, clinging to the zeal of his autonomous judgements like a sailor clinging to the mast in a storm. The blessed self-approval that attends his conscience, which everywhere outwits the spirit-crushing and suffocating atmosphere of the vulgar herd, is enough to outweigh and defend against the social disapproval that he meets with in rejecting this same herd’s customs. Occasionally such an independent-spirited man meets with a fellow traveler along the lonesome path of virtue, whereupon he relishes the unforgiving severity of an interaction whose higher rivalry affirms to each party, without it necessarily being admitted, that they are exceptions to the rule of glib disregard for any worthy challenge. This independent-spirited man increasingly becomes a star that illuminates orbiting bodies, setting the terms of all interactivity autonomously. The soundness and validity of his judgements are confirmed by the fact that they nourish the life with which they come into contact, providing superior perspectives that only require interlocutors to set aside their deluded sense of injured innocence in order to gain from them. He is nebulous, untouchable, for nobody can perceive the endless contours of the depth and breadth of his subjectivity; at the merest touch, he is forever retracting in leaps and bounds into some terrible and majestic cave of inner life. Therefore, nobody is close to him; nobody truly knows him. He is an imperceptible sliver of torrential wind, tossed in the lofty surge of invisible inklings…
All my life I have dwelt leagues beneath the surface of social interactions, inhabiting a submerged zone of cosy disregard for facile insults, sentimental irony, and insufferably snide insinuations, all of which have always been nothing to me, much as I’d tend to miss “social cues” (which are invariably eclipsed by foundational misunderstandings anyway) due to my subterranean social dwelling. This terrible profundity of alienation, which remains to me unnatural and troublesome, I now recognise as the germ of a later melancholy, a sad detachment from the general preoccupations of my social milieu, which was to blossom into yearning existential malaise, addiction, and peak states of annihilating ecstasy that still to this day leave me longing for their impossible constancy. The particular kind of irony, the aloof playfulness of meaning and intention, that began to come most naturally to me was a kind of oscillating ignorance. Contradictions and tensions among ultimate meanings still haunt me to my very depths. That I recognise my own human, all-too-human incapabilities from perspectives beyond my capabilities is not only the basis of my wisdom, but also a source of invigorating despair. Mine is the consciousness of the experiential escapee, the spiritual asylum seeker who relegates the sham immediacy of most human interaction, with all of its credulous impressionability and beguiling deceit, into a thousand impressions that I refract through my overtaxed muse. High culture is its own reward; I do not require any external reason to pursue the blissful, confirming alienation that most notably characterises its embodiment. To realise oneself in art is to sublimate anxiety into a thing of certainty. Derangement was for me merely a phase in life, like a certain season in fashion. For now I am transfixed by the shimmering of ancient wonders, and pick flowers from the foot of a black abyss…
Nothing is more fleeting and transient than a proclamation about love that attempts to codify and regulate its attendant behaviours and attitudes. The edification afforded by romantic edicts that hope to enact a general rule about terms of engagement is exactly nil, for each story of romantic entanglement is its own unique and independent proceeding, which must be honoured through the particular depth and moving power with which that story might one day be retold. Establishing proper courtship rituals for prospective lovers is thus about enriching the gestures that each party shows to the other, rather than setting up rigid expectations of what constitutes “appropriate behaviour.” Indeed, there should be room for surprise and spontaneity within the dynamic of a particular relationship, not merely stultifying decorum. Ideally the available social forms should match up to the full range and complexity of emotional states which desire to be expressed. This allows for a smooth interchange between and constant update about the inner worlds of each party; so that not even the slightest unacknowledged qualm may trouble the relationship. For conflict is nothing but a failure of communication, and the more expressivity of underlying passion there is, the more one fails to require rules that merely try hopelessly to steer one through the fundamental problem of an absence of connection, which can only be resolved through communication. Art and literature therefore have a role to play in expanding the imaginations of lovers, and in helping them to get through to each other in increasingly creative ways. Something like this is at least what I mean by “proper courtship,” which is not about propriety and correct conduct so much as about depth and intimacy of connection.
Suffering is nothing other than the total absence of ideation. We are never more without good ideas than when we are in pain. Therefore, lifeforms more intelligent than present day humans, at full potential, would not experience so much suffering as we do. Stupidity that has learnt to cope with life is the intrusion of counterfeit thinking into one’s conceptions. But then what we perceive as stupid is a complex function of what is most salient to us, in which we are psychologically invested, such that any perceived affront to our carefully nurtured opinions is quickly contested. This is largely done to stave off the encroachment of the dull, ceaseless, nagging ache of psychic life, which is a product of mental inactivity, the dim sluggish void of non-conception. Most of life is miserable in the same way that most of the universe is, at least from an unaided human perspective, empty and devoid of activity. Upon closer inspection, however, the vacuum of space does indeed teem with subatomic movement, much as even our most idle thoughts contain a great deal of useful impressions which, upon careful analysis, allow of being manipulated into compelling expressions. Joy is the self-awareness of active forcefulness, effective agency, the successful overcoming of obstacles and inertia. In the life of the mind, it is a kind of detection of salient interconnections among internally perceived phenomena, a surfacing into consciousness of the fruits of cognition, whose fallow roots we lay in periods of leisurely absorption. A great many people seek to find fulfilment through connection with others when what is wanted first of all is connection within oneself. Self-affirmation precedes reciprocity. Crude and vulgar egotism is thus the incurious self-satisfaction with typically illusory perceptions of why others should value us, in the absence of any demonstrably convincing self-impression of why we should in fact be valued. It is essentially a defence mechanism reflecting our fundamental drive to escape sad passions. Any sense of our inherent and inviolable dignity, worth, and value, is felt most acutely through the conceptions we hold. Truth is the satisfaction of reflecting our inherent worth within what is perhaps an inherently meaningless world, which is why it is allied to justice. The creation and uncovering of meaning within a naturally devoid state of its hiddenness is the proper task of life, and the highest meaning is artistic. The tortured artist is merely one who has ascended to the heights of creation and feels a mortified pang at the prospect of returning to its valleys and troughs. This is the message of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: once we have tasted of the paradoxical possibilities for pleasure afforded by the tragedy of fallenness, we are unable to return to a state of not wishing for their continual attainment. The latter is the essential curse of the human condition long recognised by traditional religion, and one that thought itself, even with all its potentiality and power, may never transcend.
Selfishness is to be permitted insofar as it pertains to the spirit, that is, to the gentle dismissal of those who are weak and ill-constituted; whereas, in the hoarding of resources it is to be abhorred. For spiritual growth is only possible with a sufficient amount of material underpinning, and we do not want to perpetually disregard those who are initially wretched. Rather, we ideally want to provide them with the means to ascend beyond themselves, and this is done not so much by showing them pity as by providing them with opportunities, encouragement, and a good example.
Only through the dissolution of the ego into sheer receptivity of soul, openness to informative culture in the early stages of one’s education, are the heights of a truer and more noble egotism at length achieved.
The discipline of the scholar is his adherence to truth; the insightfulness of the genius is at once a function of invention and discovery.
Contrary to the popular conception, speech is very much indeed the highest form of action.
What to do with all this pent-up spiritual supremacy? Our world alone is not enough for me to exert my will upon; I need boundless resistance that is yet mere shapeable clay. My deepest certainty is that the very mountains are but dust in the path of my howling winds. A regiment of lords turns to ash in my palms, as I dream of my vigilant empire enduring for a thousand eternities…
Neurosis dissipates in proportion as desire is fulfilled.
There is only one infinite question, and it is the whole of existence itself.
Imitation is to artistry as soil is to trees.
Any boost or stimulation of one’s ego that doesn’t derive purely from oneself is inevitably going to increase rather than decrease the sense of a void in one’s heart.
Through all the thick clouds of dull qualms in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, waking the sky with a rapturous beam, and sundering the walls of a cognitive slum.
Consciousness reads the whole wide world through itself, and so is a world within the world.
Man is a lacking animal. He has evolved to feel scarcity in his soul more profoundly than any other creature. It is only death that ends this bitter state, entering us into a sweeter absence of all sad passions, and uniting us with the absolute positivity of nothingness.
Opinions are to be trusted in the degree that they are novel.
Egalitarianism is the triumph of all humanity over the vicissitudes of evolution. It is the declaration of a higher element in man, one that is not betrothed to all that is superficially attractive in the random outcomes of fortune, circumstance, and nature.
The calmly certain exaltation of true self-confidence and the inherent goodness of refined character are achieved by improving the quality of one’s thinking, by raising the concentration of nutrient gases in the baseline atmosphere of one’s mind, which is to cultivate an oasis of inner life. The more one forms clear and distinct ideas about both oneself and the world, the sharper are one’s wits and the more one is rewarded by a sense of self-possessed fortification. The way to form clear and distinct ideas is to reflect on everything that is presented in and to one’s conscious awareness, constantly whittling raw impressions and rudimentary intuitions into full-bodied conceptions that are able to be communicated effectively. The crude and dim elements of thought, vague senses of preliminary ideation, wisps and building blocks of wit, are to be plumbed and harnessed for expression. Essentially this is a process of maximising the intensity of one’s lived experience, of paying attention to oneself and the world, of seizing the reins and breaking the horse into a gallop. For the more one can adequately express an expansive theory of one’s subject position, the more that subject position feels itself bloom into a clearly comprehensible entity, fully able to be recognised for what it is instantly, which in the end is the aim of all desire. And thus it is the fulfilment of such humanly essential desire which equals self-fulfilment, even if one is only recognised by oneself as fully deserving recognition. For the mechanisms of social determination are all of them internalised and introjected through the long process of acculturation. Mastery and knowledge of how one’s manifest thought should be perceived is mastery of the self, which is the aim of philosophy.
A weak mind is enslaved by the ideas it receives; a strong mind plays with them as though upon a theme.
Education begins with a willingness to absorb and emulate.
Every anti-communist suffers from a boundless lack of imagination. They are like parents who refuse to love their children out of irrational attachment to the cruelties of nature.
The difference between a wise man and an academic is that the latter pores over the details of and endlessly commentates on what he finds intellectually compelling; whereas, the wise man feels that he must turn the same thing into a living and breathing form, retransmitting its message through the natural genius of his character. The wise man understands the message and knows that others should like to as well; the academic hears the message and so commits himself to a career of debating what it means.
The process of formulating a thought into some polished aphorism or other is more like fishing or whale watching than art or science. It is not that the thinker takes the marble of his raw impressions and carefully sculpts it with the finesse of the practiced artist, or methodically applies the routine of measurement and analysis of his conjectures, but rather that he is simply patient enough to observe the rolling ocean of the fathomless unconscious, capturing and pleasingly relating those moments when a dolphin leaps out of the water. Rather than a fishing rod with which he catches ideas, however, he uses a kind of conductor that we all share: speech. He reveals that the ocean need not be a dreaded place in which we are constantly at risk of drowning, blank and threatening unto the ends of the horizon, but rather a pleasant refuge in which we are free to swim and rejoice.
The capacity to create great art begins with the recognition that flashes of its embryonic cells are frequently exhibited even in the most average person. The great artist is highly attuned to the possible causes of inspiration, just as the skilled dialectician can arrive at the widest and most profound conclusions from just a threadbare premise. The latter uses the process of inference as a conduit to the wellspring and huge storehouse of his deepest intuitions, which not by accident are universal in meaning. Similarly, the great artist is constantly churning over ideas for new creations, and anything at all may provide the spark by which he leaps into a roaring blaze. Education in art or dialectics is thus about waking a student up from his appalling and otherwise perpetual zombie-like stupor, attuning him to infinite variety, and letting the latter be rendered into startling moments of memorable expression. The faith that all men are capable of great things, however fleetingly, is one of the profoundest sources of inspiration and courage to act with fidelity to the numinous wonder sparked by the improbable riddle of existence, to which we are all indeed wedded, and by which we are sometimes charmed.
The gaining of wisdom is a process of learning how to handle hatred in oneself, even a process of cultivating it, harnessing its productive energy and directing it away from people who aren’t, say, politicians, and towards sources of life-reducing enervation.
Matter is the origin of spirit in natural and evolutionary time; whereas, spirit may be the origin of matter in unthinkable and abstract space. Political-philosophical materialism is thus the province of those who are conscious of lacking higher spirit and wish to have it, who want to change the brutal conditions of life into those that provide more flourishing of the soul; whereas, the spiritual idealism of for instance art and high culture is the province of those who in one way or another are either refugees from the godless war zone of the world or have been blessed with an escape route from its ravages. Liberation of the spirit may be achieved by refusing to become infatuated with and enslaved by the commodity form, and the proletariat is naturally the best positioned class to realise this goal, since they cannot afford to buy endless material goods, or become overly attached to hyper-differentiated niche markets, in the same degree as the bourgeoisie. The shiny appeal of the commodity is a trap and an illusion, and that the value produced by labour is principally embodied in it signals a failure in morality. Capitalism is the routinisation of cruelty and coercion, which is why advertising is such an affront to the senses: buy into the subtle torture of your fellows, the forced and mindless drudgery of the masses, it shouts, as it wraps a thousand appallingly inartistic attempts to brainwash the people in so many glossy petitions. The kind of mindfulness that sees through bullshit has nowadays become the pretension of intelligence, and the illusion that hard work affords one the right to arrogantly lord it over one’s fellows has become the dominant ethos of society. The commodity form is the principle whereby one is able to exhibit one’s success in the vulgar and joyless game of competition in mindless and barbaric exertion, almost in competition for competition’s sake, which is no game at all, but rather the perfect absence of play. It is only after one has killed one’s enthralled sense of the appeal of the material world and its gaudy toys that one can find anything at all that is aristocratic of spirit.
Thinking for oneself is the foundation of fascinating character.
Wit is essentially mathematical; it works by equation.
Nothing makes me want to rule over people more than seeing them try and fail to rule over themselves.
At a certain height of wisdom a person no longer possesses any opinions.
The best teaching conquers the student, and presses the image of its wisdom into his soul.
Love is the first of universal charms.
Egotism is only repellant in those who are unworthy of its magnetic charm, the wonderful confidence that it may inspire in another who—at its message of perfect self-assurance—feels their own power stir and awaken through identification with such self-approval.
Condescension irritates us because the superior man who relates to us in such a way of downward-gazing belittlement neglects the proper task assigned to him by his giftedness, which is to nurture and help the growth of those beneath him. On the other hand, the condescension of an inferior man is even more frustrating, obviously because it implies an absurd assumption that one who cannot offer us anything should like nonetheless to enjoy the rewarding sensation of being a guide and a teacher.
***
1) “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” – Nietzsche
2) “We do not even know that of which a body is capable.” – Spinoza
3) “The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness depends as little as possible on external things.” – Epictetus
1) + 2) + 3) = There is more untapped and unknown wisdom in your body than will ever be needed for your happiness.
1) + 2) = We never explicitly know the deepest wisdom, even though it is locked away and so potentially discoverable within us.
2) + 3) = Happiness that arises autonomously of its own internal volition through the body is a primordial mystery, and yet its cultivation is the essence of philosophy.
***
Absolute neutrality is nothing other than the absence of conception. To love and favour something is the beginning of all creation.
An opportunity to achieve, such as life itself, should not be squandered on competing in the acquisition of material goods.
The great risk and at once the special glory of engaging in irony is that, in many cases, given the unsure reception of meaning, one should be forced to amuse oneself, and oneself alone.
It is absurd to think that suitably well-delivered and tender expressions of love should cause any serious degree of embarrassment. Steer by a warm heart through the rough torrent of occasion and you will always arrive truly.
Unconscious desire is inherently amoral. Morality is merely a code that solidifies when unconscious desire meets the world and begins to judge its value. This is why a great deal of moralism is objectionable; we do not really want its restrictive measures.
The satirist holds a mirror up to society, and the people it reflects are not especially flattered by what they see. On the other hand, the philosopher holds a mirror up to the mind, revealing another world that indeed exists in this world, but which we cannot see without wisdom.
Scientific theory is modelled on death, the ultimate conclusion. Every finding kills its subject matter.
It is a profound tragedy that for the greatest men, the recognition towards which all desire tends is only achieved after one kind of death or another.
The knack of insight is to preserve and sublimate either objectionable or noteworthy experiences, transmitting them through wit. The knack of wit is to happen upon a dense node in chains of association. The knack of knack is unspeakable, except that it is a function of exposure.
As one approaches truth, the detection of error comes more and more readily.
Belief is the last refuge of the unintuitive.
An ideal state of wakefulness, intense and perfect energy, a charged readiness to take flight across the glimmering planes of imagination, is nothing other than the ability to read one’s own mind.
The problem with philosophy that is highly sophisticated and deeply abstract to most people is that it is too divorced from ignorance to be wise.
Everyone is to varying degrees in error; dialecticians are at least aware of their error.
To judge an intellect by what it has read is to judge a man by the contents of his stomach.
A teacher offers more through the kindness he shows than in all the subject matter of his lessons.
Dialectic is the logical reconstruction of history in language. It is a metonymic procession that both reflects and creates cognitive power. The mind is the sheet music; dialectic is the orchestra.
True education often stimulates generative resistance, much as it is common for a child to rebel against his parents.
Everything that we call human is determined by the activity of the mind.
The incapacity to judge adequately is at the root of all ethical problems.
In my attempts to reach the very peaks of conception, and stare out over the valleys of otherwise forgotten truths, I frequently oscillate between lofty surges of energising hope and haunting notes of world-weary despair. Adequate ideas subdue neurosis, but like water down a slope neurosis finds a path nonetheless, and may even be engendered by thinking. Thinking is the most complex joy. Despite the fact that its typical objects, the self or the world, may be sources of morbid reflection, its inherent happiness is always the dominant passion in any of its sustained undertakings. This is, however, only the case where one is the sovereign commander of an intellectual task, where the journey of thought is self-directed. A subtle mind treats its various sadnesses as a disinterested scientist might, as abstract curiosities, fascinating specimens, things to be examined with protective equipment. Such sadnesses are disallowed to contaminate all that lends to us a creative spark, like, for instance, the grip we have on our passions. The complexity of the joy of thinking is essentially a mixed emotion, a sensation of counteractive drives, a conflict of self-derived impressions. The tensions herein give life to thought, just as a surge of wind is the product of different air temperatures coming into collision. The true thinker takes a great deal of liberty in formulating his emotions. For in the end, we seek freedom from the sinking pull of emotion, if only so that our thoughts may reach to heaven.
Theoretical systematisers are in truth benevolent enslavers.
Nothing is more trustworthy than wisdom.
Thinking is the highest practicality. For it makes the best use of the fewest material resources.
Bad conscience is to poor wit closely allied.
All memories are scars caused by the knife of experience, but only some were first wounds.
A great many people invest huge amounts of time and effort in keeping up to speed with an endless procession of latest developments, when these developments should perhaps not need so much attention if only people weren’t so bravely and even furiously avoidant of eternity.
The advantage of the shapeless soul, which is every soul, is that it is inscrutable, as if its bearer were a walking riddle in an endless quest to be recognised, joyously touting the shrouded mystery of being, and the fathomless path of self-discovery.
The processes governing who is born as whom remain to us an awesome mystery, which is perhaps one of the reasons we should treat others with respect, as a way of also treating this mystery with respect as well.
We are the broken underlings of chaos.
The most satisfying answers are the ones that can be made up. The most satisfying question is the one that comes into being at the moment of its answering.
Crude egotism is the very opposite of culture; whereas, noble egotism is its product and soul.
Flourishing good health belongs to the love of justice.
The child is scolded; the grown man is faced with his conscience.
Anyone can be disliked, but it takes hard work to be rightfully hated.
Dialectics isn’t just the conceptual movement of plain old binary opposition. Rather, it is more like an ascending pendulum swing that leaves wonderfully intricate trace patterns, spiralling visual echoes in the air.
Power is the ability to marshal resentment, and absolute power is the ability to dispel it absolutely.
Nothing is so haunting than the echo of possibility.
Existence is an anvil against which we hammer the fine steel of our incurable hope.
The charm of psychoanalysis is that it has spread like a gangrene across the surfaces of literature and philosophy. The charm of a gangrene, on the other hand, is that it is perfectly immune to psychoanalysis.
His roar for mercy endeared him to the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world, shaking it to its very frame and huge foundation, assembling vital hope and sentencing the wolfish terrors to a mute calm.
Human experience of time is wavelike: wakefulness is a kind of crest; sleep, a trough. Moreover, our timelines are punctuated by alternating peak states and depressive episodes in mood, attention, and energy, the returning pangs of hunger and then satiety, and the ever-rolling tide of backdropping memory. Time itself, however, is sheer one-dimensionality. The future and the past are essentially hallucinations; time proper allows of nothing but the continual unfolding of events within the simultaneously fixed and moving frame of an eternal present. A speculative theologian might insist that the tripartite structure of spatial dimensionality and the singularity of temporal dimensionality together reflect the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: God is both three and one. So too the universe, then. Are there universes with a huge proliferation of dimensions, where reality folds into itself and tucks away into sequestered nooks in its own fabric at seemingly impossible degrees of self-remove? Or are time and space the only possible dimensions? That seems unlikely, given that they were produced from nothing at all. Is nothingness itself, then, the mother of all dimensionality? Despite the sheer, bedrock fact of existence, absolute nothingness is still possible at the level of meaning if the universe is not connected to anything beyond itself, if it is an eternal tautology, reflexively pointing to itself as the grounding context for any kind of judgement about itself. This is manifestly inadequate, for if the universe is connected to absolutely nothing at all, then it means absolutely nothing at all. And this is called “idealistic!”
He who favours justice receives just favour.
The benefit of tears is that they lubricate the eyes—so that we may see our joys.
Sheer power is not beautiful, but sheer beauty is indeed powerful.
Real depth of perception swims where it can see the bait—at the surface.
I gradually acquired a secret debt to the miracle I couldn’t translate. And in my failure it lingered on: pristine, whole, unassailable. Without validation, it lacked substance; was it heedless of its wants? What opulent sorcery possessed its motives? And so I invented a new science exclusively to deal with miracles. A chemistry of wonders! Imagine: the first miracle sent back to heaven—not out of ingratitude, but rather out of the healthy pride of self-reliance, the joy of a child losing his training wheels! We have our own now! Imagine, still more: that for this God should truly be proud of us for the first time! Miracle of miracles!
How much perspective it takes to realise that they fail to follow the thread of your enchanted mood!
It is a terrible and unfortunate curse that forbids a man from going mad.
One of the signal and characteristic functions of philosophy is to transform human bullshit into fertiliser for blooming flowers, which we offer one another in tacit mourning over our innate inability to please the senses so much as such flowers.
Wit is the nexus at which the unknowable mysticism of deep inner life corresponds with a comparatively limited, dense piloting core of the mind to announce its unrivalled mastery. Such an awesome abyss of complex automatic cognition radiates a quiet supremacy over our belief that a merely superficial sense of selfhood is indeed in control. Wit is the ultimate expressivity of nature magnified, a spiritual reflection and all-dancing summation of hyper-rapid neural connectivity evolved over millennia. At its height, in wonderfully surprising determinations that light up the dark and blank canvas of the imagination, it sees the hidden order of existence and draws out subtle predications that flicker with resonant scintillation above the desolate planes of conscious perception, hinting at the secrets of and revealing the possibilities circumscribed by all-pervasive copulation, ubiquitous relativity, fundamental connectivity, the ground of the essence of being. Indeed, an unbounded expansiveness a little larger than the whole universe is literally accessible from the confines of the most complex and sophisticated thing known to man, the human mind, and limitless imagination itself indeed corresponds to this all-enticing infinitude. Knowledge is particular, but the imagination is universal. The latter is a microcosm of the whole that contains even more than the whole, given our capacity to “err” and go astray from the matter at hand in imagining, while the former is a microcosm that must needs confirm itself relative to neighbouring microcosms in order to gain traction. The physical impossibility of traversing the whole universe in a single lifetime is perfectly reflected in the boundless immensity of the potential inherent to imaginative thought. In the imagination, the laws of nature are reflected. The literal gravity especially of dense nodes in chains of association, massive condensations of content, pull the various spiralling unconscious operations into their orbit, until they settle upon the threshold of consciousness, free to be articulated in an instantaneous flash of perception, in pure energy that transmits without bearing the load of meaning. The particular mind is thus a fractal-like reiteration of the whole of being as such, and its abyssal depths contain all the most intrinsic codes of nature. This does not mean, however, that we explicitly know such codes, that we possess in useful form the answers to perplexing enigmas, which are nothing but forges for creative interpretation and inventive answers. All of the world’s distracting and irrelevant judgements are as dust in the palms of the man whose allotted task from the high gods is to wander the peaks and valleys of the mind. Until they are captured in some expression or other, nobody can perceive his explorations of infinity. In such adventures as he undertakes through the groves of thought, he is an undercover guest to the grandeur of replete abstraction, making manifest the fruits of an aimless mental stroll. As he penetrates layer upon layer of spiralling meaning, the external world, with its pressures of imposition and demands upon one’s time, vanishes, consumed by the invisible aether of abstract interconnection. Truth becomes a function of recognition, and because all desire tends towards the latter, all desire then tends towards truth. That is, anyway, the inner hope of such a typically neglected treasure as the mind.
There have been times in my life, during peak states of lucidity and awakenings to existential purpose, when I have felt absolutely certain that I myself am God. And yet I remain convinced that I am totally insignificant in this universe. Although my story is the greatest of all—greater than the conquest of final frontiers—it is nonetheless a grain of sand tossed into the pit of blistering doom. Swept towards some hectic and black oblivion, I slink past the slaughterhouse of bourgeois marriage, and rise through the celestial hierarchy of angels. For I am the apex of all creation, even if the footsteps of an ant could crush me. What then is ultimate for me, when I am both everything and nothing in such perfect synchronicity?
The certain prospect of death is the one saving grace in my life, the only thing that keeps me moving ever onwards. And as I quietly long for the termination of all this painful absurdity, I turn my gaze to the lingering eve of a mercifully finite wretchedness.
