Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate”
― Julius Evola

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”
― Antonin Artaud

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931

“The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.”
― Karl Kraus

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”
― Georges Bataille

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”
― Marquis de Sade

“...Dasein itself--and this means also its Being-in-the-world--gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters 'within' its world, and from the Being which they possess.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.”
― Gorgias

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”
― Friedrich Hegel