misc

• ‘Philosophical research remains atheism, which is why philosophy can allow itself “the arrogance of thinking”’. [Heidegger]
• A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.” [Brecht]
• "Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to earth-yes, back to body and life:that it may give the earth its meaning, a human meaning! May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth...Man and man's earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered." [Nietzsche]
• "Co(g)ito ergo sum"
• "The greek word gnosis, meaning 'knowledge' is used in three ways: (1) knowledge in general terms; (2) as mystical communion; (3) as sexual intercourse. Gnosis is knowledge by participation." [Paul Tillich]
• "Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger." [Diogenes]
• "The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros. He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death. His seven so-called Phallic Poems...openly announce that fucking is its own justification." [Hitchens]
• "the child's first erotic object is the mother's breast...for however long it is fed at its mother's breast, it will always be left with a conviction after it has bean weaned that its feeding was too short and too little." [freud]
• 'There are many excellent inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasant; the earth is to be loved for their sake...And there are many things so well devised that they are like women's breasts; at the same time useful and pleasant." [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke, Bk 3, Sec. 17]
• "I am the breast" [Freud]
• "Melanie Klein is right with her idea that there is a good breast and a bad breast, corresponding-broadly speaking-to the breast when it is present or absent." [Castoriadis] [Translation: The only bad breast is an absent breast!]

• '... Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be. ' [George Will]
• 'Why do we recognize ourselves as subjects of desire, and not agents of pleasure'? [-Foucault]
• "if there is any one who finds nothing pleasant and nothing more attractive than anything else, he must be something quite different from a man..."[Aristotle, NE, BkIII, Ch11]
• "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen." Adorno: Minima Moralia
• "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." [Marx, Capital]
• "Wo es war, soll ich werden." -Freud
• "Yet the absence of imagination had itself to be imagined" -W.Stevens
• "Radicalism is humanism or it is nothing; the proper study of mankind is man (and the ability to laugh is one of the faculties that defines the human and distinguishes the species from other animals.) [-Christopher Hitchens]
• "It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference" [Aristotle, NE, BKII, Ch. 1]
• Was macht bei dir die Geschichte jedes Tages? Siehe deine Gewohnheiten an, aus denen sie besteht: sind sie das Erzeugniss zahlloser kleiner Feigheiten und Faulheiten oder das deiner Tapferkeit und erfinderischen Vernunft? [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 308]
• " Selbstbeherrschung...Denn man muss sich auf Zeiten verlieren können, wenn man den Dingen, die wir nicht selber sind, Etwas ablernen will." [-Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 305]
• The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful. -- Harold Pinter [on Beckett]