Quotes

[Catfood]

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
-Oscar Wilde

[laika]

Sometimes it's more important to be human,
than to have good taste.
Bertolt Brecht

[DRRRK]

Much too often Sartre's "Hell is other people" comes to my mind.

[Fade to Black]

Sometimes it's more important to be human,
than to have good taste.
Bertolt Brecht

indeed it is.

[Faust]

/\ That was very fitting right after a quote by Wilde.

[mrbeuys]

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

- Kurt Vonnegut

[mrbeuys]

Oh and this:

We act as if comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about

[Fade to Black]

"He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law." - Pablo Picasso

[STEALTH]

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

WB YEATS

[laika]

Bergotte, looking at View of Delft

He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.

Proust, The Captive

[Faust]

It wasn't right to think everyone else had more power of being. Why, look now, it was clear as anything that it wasn't so but merely imagination, exaggerating how you're regarded, misunerstanding how you're liked for what you're not, disliked for what you're not, both from error and laziness. The way must be not to care, but in that case you must know how really to care and understand what's pleasing or displeasing in yourself. But do you think every newcomer is concerned and is watching? No. And do you care that anyone should care in return? Not by a long shot. Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can't care while preoccupied whit this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but beleives abnormally in the strenght of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what's real. And that's disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind - mere humanity.

But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong and handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the worlds itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world - with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies - becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version.

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

[dontbecruel]

It's lovely how the fabric of your life is infiltrated by the rhythms of a Saul Bellow novel, while you read it at least. Everything is so vivid and I have always felt infused by his love (the only true Bellow emotion, as hatred is the only emotion for the other notable writers of his generation and this is why he will outlive them all).
But removed from the context of the book the Augie quotations are almost unreadable. Like a theorem from a dream you write down immediately on waking but can't follow the significance of when you read it back a few hours later.

A related point about the little patch of yellow wall... It seems to me the weight of this passage is lost if you don't already know the story of Marcel's relationship with Elstir. Proust imagined his work in one paragraph on one endless strip of paper. An endless circular strip I think, where the yellow patch of wall recurs and amplifies to the point where weighing your life against it really means something. This is Proust's special kind of mimesis.

I suppose what I'm saying is just that a compendium of quotations should be kept private. Once we share it with others it becomes a scoresheet.

"Quotes" is a verb in the third person singular, by the way people, not a plural noun.

[Faust]

That maybe so, but I don't want to forget these insightful lines. So far he has probably been the most insightful author I have ever read.

If I change the title to Quotations, will you contribute one?

[dontbecruel]

It's a shame that we've lost the knack of learning by heart.

During the Japanese occupation, William Empson taught exiled Chinese students Shakespeare in the mountains. They had no books but he produced an entire typescript of Othello from memory.

[Faust]

Yeah, but would he be able to do it if he had Facebook?