posted April 03, 2008 07:25 PM              

Your perspective is often a welcome counter-balance to my own.

posted April 03, 2008 10:09 PM              

~ Sigmund Freud, on Nietzsche

posted April 04, 2008 07:50 PM            

Hebrews 4:12

------------------
~
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world is immortal"~

posted April 05, 2008 04:01 PM              

THERE are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached.

Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"!

"The yellow ones": so are called the preachers of death, or "the black ones." But I will show them unto you in other colours besides.

There are the terrible ones who carry about in themselves the beast of prey, and have no choice except lusts or self-laceration. And even their lusts are self-laceration.

They have not yet become men, those terrible ones: may they preach desistance from life, and pass away themselves!

There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation.

They would fain be dead, and we should approve of their wish! Let us beware of awakening those dead ones, and of damaging those living coffins!

They meet an invalid, or an old man, or a corpse- and immediately they say: "Life is refuted!"

But they only are refuted, and their eye, which seeth only one aspect of existence.

Shrouded in thick melancholy, and eager for the little casualties that bring death: thus do they wait, and clench their teeth.

Or else, they grasp at sweetmeats, and mock at their childishness thereby: they cling to their straw of life, and mock at their still clinging to it.

Their wisdom speaketh thus: "A fool, he who remaineth alive; but so far are we fools! And that is the foolishest thing in life!"

"Life is only suffering": so say others, and lie not. Then see to it that ye cease! See to it that the life ceaseth which is only suffering!

And let this be the teaching of your virtue: "Thou shalt slay thyself! Thou shalt steal away from thyself!"-

"Lust is sin,"- so say some who preach death- "let us go apart and beget no children!"

"Giving birth is troublesome,"- say others- "why still give birth? One beareth only the unfortunate!" And they also are preachers of death.

"Pity is necessary,"- so saith a third party. "Take what I have! Take what I am! So much less doth life bind me!"

Were they consistently pitiful, then would they make their neighbours sick of life. To be wicked- that would be their true goodness.

But they want to be rid of life; what care they if they bind others still faster with their chains and gifts!-

And ye also, to whom life is rough labour and disquiet, are ye not very tired of life? Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death?

All ye to whom rough labour is dear, and the rapid, new, and strange- ye put up with yourselves badly; your diligence is flight, and the will to self-forgetfulness.

If ye believed more in life, then would ye devote yourselves less to the momentary. But for waiting, ye have not enough of capacity in you- nor even for idling!

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.

Or "life eternal"; it is all the same to me- if only they pass away quickly!-

posted April 07, 2008 07:26 PM              

"The squirrel that you mourn in earnest, lives in jest." ~ Valerian

"Comedy is serious business." ~ anonymous

posted April 20, 2008 11:21 AM              

~ Lord Krishna

posted April 21, 2008 11:45 PM              

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
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-George Eliot

"But Oh! The blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearless on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."

Friendships are different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, friendship is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by the law. But friendships are freely entered into, freely given, freely exercised.
-Stephen Ambrose

A memory lasts forever.
Never does it die.
True friends stay together.
And never say goodbye.
Anon.

posted May 01, 2008 11:08 PM              

The Holy Longing
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

posted May 04, 2008 06:27 PM              

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

posted May 06, 2008 01:59 PM              

"There is something in me which might have been great,
but due to the unfavorable market, I am only worth a little."

"When, in a generation, a thunderstorm begins to threaten, individuals like me appear."

posted May 06, 2008 02:15 PM              

"This exceptionality, which was as excruciating to them as it was the unique requirement of their problem,
they characterized -- and here again they agree -- as pure mentality, as though they were deprived of any authentic life.
Kierkegaard said that he was 'in almost every physical respect deprived of the conditions for being a whole man.'
He had never lived except as mind. He had never been a man: at very most, child and youth. He lacked 'the animal side of humanity'.
His melancholy carried him almost to the 'edge of imbecility' and was 'something that he could conceal as long as he was independent,
but made him useless for any service where he could not himself determine everything'."

"Nietzsche experienced his own pure mentality as 'through excess of light, through his radiance, condemned to be, not to love,'.
He expressed it convulsively in the 'Nightsong' of Zarathustra: 'Light I am; ah! would that I were NIGHT!... I live in my own light...'"

"Nietzsche compared himself to a fir tree on the heights overlooking an abyss:
'Lonely! Who dares to be a guest here? Perhaps a bird of prey, gloating in the hair of the branches....'.
And Kierkegaard: 'Like a lonely fir tree, egotistically isolated, looking toward something higher,
I stand alone, throwing no shadow, only the wood dove building its nest in my branches.'"

"Nietzsche compared himself to the 'scratchings which an unknown power makes on paper, in order to test a new pen'.
The positive value of his illness is his standing problem.
Kierkegaard thought he indeed 'would be erased by God's mighty hand, extinguished as an unsuccessful experiment.'
... He felt like an 'interjection in speaking, without influence upon the sentence.'"

~ Karl Jaspers
Kierkegaard And Nietzsche

posted May 06, 2008 02:44 PM              

Nietzsche called it Chance. And he was concerned to use chance. For him 'sublime chance' ruled existence. 'The man of highest spirituality and power feels himself grown for every chance, but also inside a snowfall of contingencies,'. But this contingency increasingly took on, for Nietzsche, a remarkable meaning: 'What you call chance -- you yourself are that which befalls and astonishes you,'. Throughout his life, he found intimations of how chance events which were of the greatest importance to him carried a secret meaning, and in the end he wrote: 'There is no more chance,'."

posted May 06, 2008 02:45 PM              

~ Karl Jaspers

posted May 07, 2008 06:52 PM              

“All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.” ~ Willa Cather

“A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.” ~ Tennessee Wiliams

posted May 16, 2008 07:55 PM            

"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working - and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves."

- St. Francis de Sales

posted May 18, 2008 05:32 PM              

~ Aeschylus