Quotes

[mortalveneer]

Fair point, especially if enactment/enforcement costs are minimal. I could foresee legal challenges to the legislation if it seems to be impacting beverage industry profits significantly (my guess is that it won't, but there are economic arguments either way).

[Faust]

The French griped about banning smoking in bars and cafes, which is in their DNA, and they seem to have survived that insufferable ordeal.

[Acéphale]

back to f. kafka

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

-- Franz Kafka

[trentk]

Violent mathematics:

Across a line a collection of blades may come down simultaneously, and so long as the collection of blades is not so great that they merge into one another, owing to their supermultitude, they will cut the line up into as great a collection of pieces each of which will be a line, –just as completely a line as was the whole. This I say is the intuitional idea of a line with which the synthetic geometer really works, –his virtual hypothesis, whether he recognizes it or not; and I appeal to the scholars of this institution where geometry flourishes as all the world knows, to cast aside all analytical theories about lines, and looking at the matter from a synthetical point of view to make the mental experiment and say whether it is not true that the line refuses to be cut up into points by any discrete multitude of knives, however great.

[333]

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

[MJRH]

in keeping with zen, kafka and current events, the eminently quotable krishnamurti.

The student said, "You people have made a terrible world of blood and tears. you have had every chance to make a different world. You are highly educated, hold an important position--and you can't do anything. You really support the established order with its brutalities, inequalities, and all the ugly mess of the present social world. We, the younger generation, despise all this, we're in revolt against it. We know that you're all hypocrites. We are not of any group or of any political or religious body. We have no race, we have no gods, for you have deprived us of what might have been a reality. You have divided the world into nationalities. We are against all this, but we don't know what we want. We don't know where we're going, but we know very well that what you offer us, we don't want. And the gap between you and us is very wide indeed; and probably it can never be bridged. We are new, and we are wary of falling into the trap of the old."

"You will fall into it," he said, "only it will be a new trap. You may not kill each other physically, and I hope you won't, but you'll kill each other at a different level, intellectually, with words, cynicism, and bitterness. This has been the age-old cry against the older generation, but now it is more articulate, more effective. You may call me a bourgeois, and I am. I have worked hard to bring about a better world, helped to allay antagonism and opposition, but it isn't easy; when two opposing beliefs, ideologies, meet, there is bound to be hatred, war, and concentration camps. We're also against it, and we think we can do something but there really is very little we can do."
[....]
This is one of the common factors of the relationship between the old and the young--the slow contagion of time and sorrow, the anxieties, and the bitter pill of self-pity. What makes the mind dull--the mind, which is so extraordinarily capable of inventing new things, of going to the moon, of building computers, of so many things that are really extraordinary, almost magical? Of course, it is the collective mind that has produced the computer or composed a sonata. The collective, the group, is a common thought which is both in the many and in the one. Therefore there is not the collective or the one--only thought. The individual fights the collective and the collective fights the individual, but what is common to both is thought. And it is thought that makes the mind dull, whether the thought be in the interests of the one or of the many, the thought of self-improvement or the social upheaval. Thought is always in search of the secure--the security that is in the house, in the family, in the belief, or the security that denies all this. Thought is security, and the security is not only in the past from which the future security is built, but also the security that it tries to establish beyond time.

---

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

[lazyguru]

Everyday it accumulates…the constant challenge of not giving up because you think that something is not possible, or that you can’t do it anymore. There is no respite in this. Noticing social trends, looking at what other designers are doing, analyzing markets, thinking commercially, worrying about journalists, all serves no purpose for me in the work of making new things. And so I can concern myself only in the search for new things. It is, in a way, extremely simple. It is the only weapon I have. But of course it is also extremely difficult. Simple in the thinking but different in the realization.

I feel things have changed a little for the better since the ’80s when I first came to Paris. There are more people now who think conceptually, whose ideas come from feelings.

It is true to say that the very big enterprises rule the fashion world. This is especially true in Japan and that is a sad situation. I worry sometimes that creation will lose out to media overkill and market driven enterprises. But I have to believe that what will ultimately be significant, what will win in the end, what will last, is true creation.

- Rei Kawakubo, Spring 2000

[Faust]

Now that's a good 100th post!
You should also post this in the quotes about fashion thread.

[333]

"You have to pull your stomach up high in order to turn your solar plexus into a terrorist." That line is from a letter I sent to Ms. Elian Margaret, a woman with psychic powers who wrote a commentary last summer about my anal art. This woman was a good collaborator (and the person who gave me my annual tonsure), but owing to intense conflicts in my daily life I was in a state of secretly hiring someone in civilian clothes and continuing to choreograph. It is she who recommended that I write an essay on impotence and told me, too, in a letter written with invisible ink, that the anuses of Greek youth were utterly ruined. There is no way to remove ignorance and misery from my dances, but I do not want people to draw a lesson about hereditary diseases from them, as Ms. Margaret did. I have never been visited by genius and my appearance is far from that of a certified incompetent. Not a devotee of ghost aesthetics, I am a mere virgin. My semen should bring a good price.

- extracted from Inner Material/Material by Hijitaka Tatsumi
translated by Nanako Kurihara

[interest1]

.

. The paradox: vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me and the first thing I look for in you.

- Brene Brown

[Pumpfish]

Originally, the function of songs was devotional. Then in the balladeering centuries, songs became a vehicle for the spreading of information, stories and opinions. Now in the 20th century, they have become a way of making money and achieving fame. I think that the other two purposes were better..

- Mike Scott - 1985

[interest1]

[333]

^Nice one. Simple and no nonsense kind of vampire killer :-)

[Fade to Black]

dammit i came in here to make a vampire killer joke and you beat me to it. sucker punch

[333]

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus, he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus, he believes that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy (1908)