Michał > Michał's Quotes

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“A little boy and his friends are being called bastards and bitches by bullies at school. The boy goes home and asks, "Dad, what are bastards and bitches?" And his dad replies, "Bitches are ladies and bastards are gentlemen." Then the boy goes upstairs to see his mom. As he enters the room, he accidentally drops a perfume bottle, and his mom says, "Shit!" "Mom, what is shit?" and she says, "Perfume." So he goes to see his dad (who is carving a chicken), and his dad cuts himself and yells, "Fuck!" The boy asks, "Dad, what does fuck mean?" and dad says "preparing." Then he follows his dad upstairs. A few minutes later his mom and dad are about to have sex when his dad says, "Where are the condoms?" The little boy asks, "What are condoms?" and his father says, "Condoms are coats and jackets." The following night his father invites over some important business clients. The boy opens the door for them and says, "Hello! Please come in, Bastards and bitches. Hang your condoms up here, my mom is upstairs rubbing shit on her face and my dad is downstairs fucking the chicken.”
― Various, 101 Dirty Jokes - sexual and adult's jokes

“TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“As soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image. It cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual iteration of the Will to Power, the Will to 'creation of the world anew', the Will to the causa prima. As Philosophies emerge from the cave of shadows & symbols, they insist this world too is the work of symbol & shadow; a mystery to be solved. But we cannot know our world in any empirical sense; the five we have been given, allow us to see a minute fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, & our senses of smell, taste, & hearing leave us no better off than the three blind English scholars, confronted with an African Elephant, something their learning has failed to acquaint them with. As they each report from their stations around the beast, one of them gropes the tail, certain he holds a vine. Another wrestles with the powerful trunk, equally certain it must be a python, or some other breed of tree-dwelling snake, just as their third peer has examined the strange bark of the animal's leg. Together they conclude that even without their eyes, tactility & logic have revealed a jungle tree, it's branches dangling vines and a powerful snake. In passing, he had even cheated, feeling one of its great, broad ears, which could only logically a great, broad, leaf, swaying in the breeze. Two of the three scholars declared the 'truth' a prank to discredit them. We are those blind men, blind to the realities that science has often flawed & misleading methods of 'seeing' the whole elephant. But science remains a tool; the most powerful tool we possess in freeing ourselves from the willful blindness of religion & political faith, but a tool nonetheless. It will have to evolve, & avoid the dogmatic attitudes which already corrupt it. The name of science is given to the pseudo-science of psychology & psychotherapy, which certainly promise to be useful down the road, but are incapable of producing repeatable results, and fails even to produce identical variables. Everything about Psychology & the social 'sciences' belong in the realm of Philosophy, but weakness & corruption, followed by the call of greed, power, & control have allowed this intellectual toxin to exert a dangerous influence; next to Religious cults, Psychology-based cults like NXIM are growing rapidly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche & EisNinE, Nietzsche and the Death of God: Selected Writings

“This man did not know cold. Possibly, all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold 107 degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“Any man who was a man could travel alone.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their significances.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” - Jack London”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“That the work of a drinker who had no intention of stopping drinking should become a major propaganda piece in the campaign for Prohibition is surely one of the ironies in the history of alcohol.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“Man always gets less than he demands from life.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“Strength is an empty shell. One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. Show me a man with a tattoo, and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.”
― Jack London, To Build a Fire

“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”
― Jack London

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
― Jack London

“Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.”
― Jack London

“Uświadamia sobie, że męka towarzyszyła mu od urodzenia jako dar świata przekazany poecie. To fizyczne wspomnienie bólu, który daremnie usiłował uporządkować w strofy, ubrać w słowa przez te wszystkie zmarnowane lata życia. To coś gorszego niż ból. To poczucie nieszczęścia, bo świat każdemu oferuje ból.”
― Anonymous

“... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.”
― Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."

If you knew Time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."

I don't know what you mean," said Alice.

Of course you don't!" the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. "I dare say you never even spoke to Time!"

Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied: "but I know I have to beat time when I learn music."

Ah! That accounts for it," said the Hatter. "He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock.

For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”
― Lewis Caroll

“To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion