jerical > jerical's Quotes

“Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called Communists”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday

“Once one has tasted Marxist criticism, all ideological hogwash becomes repulsive, and one will discard it. The true poetic aura, the only one remaining and possible, imagination without lie, appears all the more distinctly and does not envy any former era of its subjects. Marxism remains as clarity, non-deceptively even poetically.”
― Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan: Complete, annotated new translation

“We name us and then we are lost, tamed
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness”
― Alice Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses

“World history, as the bourgeois revolutionary Ludwig Börne already said, is a house which has more staircases than rooms”
― Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

“The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History

“But philosophy ought not to be a narrative of what happens, but a cognition of what is true in what happens, in order further to comprehend on the basis of this truth what in the narrative appears as a mere happening.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic

“You in the castle of your skin
I the swineherd”
― Derek Walcott, [Sammelband volume Conatining Walcott's first three books]: Self-Published in Barbados: 25 Poems, Epitaph for the Young, and Henri Christophe

“Objectivity does not mean detachment, it means respect; that is, the ability not to falsify things, persons, and oneself.”
― Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics

“At an age when Names, offering us the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other, to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name, it is not only to cities and ruins that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, nor is it only the physical world that they spangle with differences and people with marvels, it is the social world as well: so every historic house, every famous residence or palace, has its lady or its fairy, as forests have their spirits and rivers their deities.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“He thought in other heads, and in his own, others besides himself thought”
― Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

“perhaps genuine reality is also — interruption.”
― Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times

“I have faith that I am,
and that I've been less.

Hey! A good start!”
― César Vallejo, Trilce

“Confianza en el anteojo, nó en el ojo;
en la escalera, nunca en el peldaño;
en el ala, nó en el ave
y en ti sólo, en ti sólo, en ti sólo.

Confianza en la maldad, nó en el malvado;
en el vaso, mas nunca en el licor;
en el cadáver, no en el hombre
y en ti sólo, en ti sólo, en ti sólo.

Confianza en muchos, pero ya no en uno;
en el cauce, jamás en la corriente;
en los calzones, no en las piernas
y en ti sólo, en ti sólo, en ti sólo.

Confianza en la ventana, no en la puerta;
en la madre, mas no en los nueve meses;
en el destino, no en el dado de oro,
y en ti sólo, en ti sólo, en ti sólo.”
― César Vallejo, Poemas en prosa / Poemas humanos / España, aparta de mí este cáliz

“When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“The obsession with what is better remains, even when what is better has been prevented for so long. When what is wished for arrives, it surprises us anyway.”
― Ernst Bloch

“A million years without private property
and only 7000 with private property and
rich and poor”
― Ernesto Cardenal

“If the history of humanity were 24 hours
let's say
private property, classes, division
into rich and poor: these would be the last 10 minutes.
INJUSTICE/ the last 10 minutes.
(The top layer of earth with Mayan pottery and Goodyear tires.)
So all the great subconscious
is Communist”
― Ernesto Cardenal, Zero hour and other documentary poems

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The idea is to try to see the fragments/whole.”
― Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean

“what is lost because it is most precious
what is most precious because it is lost ”
― amiri baraka

“The struggle against the reification of the world, against the conventionalization of the world, where what is ossified or frozen, where something which has arisen historically now appears as if it were something simply given 'in itself,' something binding us once and for all—this is what furnishes the polemical starting point for all dialectical thinking.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics

“John Tchicai's solo on 'Rufus' comes back to me again. It slides away from the proposed.”
― Amiri Baraka, Black Music

“To find it, to find the right thing, for which it is worthy to live, to be organized, and to have time: that is why we go, why we cut new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, and build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears—incipit vita nova.”
― Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia

“Reason, by shedding its rationalistic illusions in the hell it made for the world as domination, may nevertheless withstand that hell and recognize it for what it is.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“It is better to become involved in things than to hover above some lower reality at the cost of refusing to engage with it or to expose ourselves to it.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics 1960-61

“What the earth has returned to me, it will not withhold a second time”
― Johann Peter Hebel, Unverhofftes Wiedersehen Und Andere Geschichten Aus Dem Schatzkästlein Des Rheinischen Hausfreundes

“There is nothing there yet if nothing has vanished but distress.”
― Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia

“So it is outside my own life that my past experience lies: in passengers commuting on the subway in RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galeries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again. In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the lives of others.”
― Annie Ernaux, Exteriors