Thus Quotes - page 57
Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.
Salvador Dalí
It is these double standards that have and are still keeping the ordinary Fijian shackled to a now outdated system of feudal control, thus contributing to their poverty and misery, whilst certain chiefs and a large number of Fijian elites continue to substantially increase their wealth at the expense of their poorer subjects.
Mahendra Chaudhry
Like me, for instance, who can count so many years in my life when I completely lost all inclination to laugh, leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault, I for one need above all just to have a good laugh. I found that in Guy de Maupassant and there are others here, Rabelais among the old writers, Henri Rochefort among today's, where one can find that - Voltaire in 'Candide'. On the contrary, if one wants truth, life as it is, De Goncourt, for example, in 'Germinie Lacerteux', 'La fille Elisa', Zola in 'La joie de vivre' and 'L'assommoir' and so many other masterpieces paint life as we feel it ourselves and thus satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth. The work of the French naturalists Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, De Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans is magnificent and one can scarcely be said to belong to one's time if one isn't familiar with them.
Vincent van Gogh
Nowadays everyone lives selfishly and seeks only the leisure in which to indulge his own desires. They look on all the beauties of nature-the rivers and mountains, the breeze and the moon-as their own to enjoy, forgetting what the shrine of the Sun Goddess stands for. The common man thinks of his life as his own and refuses to perform his duty to his lord. The samurai regards his household as his own private possession and refuses to sacrifice his life for his state. The feudal lords regard their domains as their own and refuse to serve King and Country. Unwilling to serve King and Country, at home they cherish only the objects of desire and abroad they willingly yield to the foreign barbarian, inviting defeat and destruction. Thus the scenic beauties they enjoy will not long remain in their possession.
Yoshida Shoin
Thus, in a crucial way, the Kansas hearings repeat the pattern set by the Scopes Trial, which has been repeated many times since, namely, evolutionists escaped critical scrutiny by not having to undergo cross-examination. In this case, they accomplished the feat by boycotting the hearings. I therefore await the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas that compel evolutionists to be deposed and interrogated at length on their views.
William A. Dembski
A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely is all bound up in sixteenth-century musical culture, not as a living doctrine of the music of the church and a heritage fomr the Middle Ages but also as a musical construct being expirimented with by members of the culture, from both humanistic and traditional points of view; it is thoroughly 'emic' and requires study on its own terms....
Harold Powers
To be thus-
Grey-hair'd with anguish, like these blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root,
Which but supplies a feeling to decay-
And to be thus, eternally but thus,
Having been otherwise! Now furrow'd o'er
With wrinkles, plough'd by moments, not by years
And hours-all tortured into ages-hours
Which I outlive!-Ye toppling crags of ice!
Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down
In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
I hear ye momently above, beneath,
Crash with a frequent conflict; but ye pass,
And only fall on things that still would live.
Lord Byron
Part of your work feels as clear, it gives you a sense of liberation or beauty and you recognize it as necessary pavements. You are thus in a sense ready. In the other part of your work this is not the case. Therein is the hidden development, which is the true essence of art... the higher purpose, the pursuit forward that art automatically calls. The unclear part of your work needs to progress (stopping is no option, is no life, no art) and it is clear when by working with head and heart, the real step forward has been achieved.
Bram van Velde
If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm
Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self. In spending his energy productively he increases his powers, he "burns without being consumed."
Erich Fromm
That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
Erich Fromm
We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh. The inner wealth of brotherhood will be the same ephemeral spectre, rotting into tree bark like the spurious treasure of Rübezahl, the German mountain spirit, unless it shows it has the strength to withstand even death, and conquer death; and thus not only to undergo it but to be strongly above it as an essential part of eternal life.
Ernst Bloch
The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all reduction has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it.
Peter Kropotkin
We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.
Peter Kropotkin
Education still remains the privilege of a small minority, for it is idle to talk of education when the workman's child is forced at the age of thirteen, to go down in to the mine or to help his father on the farm. It is idle to talk of studies to the worker, who comes home in the evening crushed by excessive toil with its brutalizing atmosphere. Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions, freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees the at breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and government by the sword.
Peter Kropotkin
