Philippe > Philippe's Quotes

“We have to bring about peace between ourselves to safeguard the world and peace with the world in order to save ourselves.”
― Michel Serres, Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent

“And how does one basically recognize good development? In that a well-developed man does our senses good: that he is carved from wood which is hard, delicate, and sweet-smelling, all at the same time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato)
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.”
― Susan Neiman

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifesytle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante bullshit of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsability of making a choice.”
― Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

“The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.”
― Steve House, Beyond the Mountain

“If you can not grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation?”
― Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

“You can’t coach desire, and no matter how fancy your training plan or how high your stated goals are, it comes down to getting out the door and doing the work day after day.”
― Steve House, Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete

“We may train ourselves to be adaptable as possible, to respond appropriately in each situation, but the ideal of controlling the outcome or steering events as they occur must be relinquished. Chaos rules it all.”
― mark twight, Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

“There is risk, known and unknown, in all aspects of life. We often consider the loss of life the only serious risk. Unless we are genuinely aware, we calculate the danger arising from our own physical and emotional states and from external conditions based on incomplete information. If we believe we can manage those risks, we accept them. Whether these choices are born of delusion or reality comes out in the end.”
― Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

“Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“There was and still is a tremendous fear that poor and working-class Americans might one day come to understand where their political interests reside. Personally, I think the elites worry too much about that. We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only proper medication for our high levels of cholesterol, enough alcohol to keep the sludge moving through our arteries, and a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavours of XXL edible thongs, and you've got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves.”
― Joe Bageant, Rainbow Pie

“Somebody left the American Dream in the toaster too long. It's now burnt to a crisp.”
― Joe Bageant

“There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our government hovers, rippling above us, showering freshly produced national memory spores on the fertile bed of our forgetfulness. Schools of undulating corporate jellyfish pass over, sowing the brands of products and services ... followed by the octopi called media and marketing, issuing milky clouds of sperm to fertilise the seeds with the animating plasma of The Great Dream.”
― Joe Bageant, Rainbow Pie

“A decent human being is ashamed at being somebody's boss!”
― Arno Schmidt, Scenes from the Life of a Faun: A Short Novel

“But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.”
― Arnold Lobel

“In today's world more harm may be done by well-intentioned people trying to do good, who are unaware of the unintended consequences of their actions, than by people actually trying to cause harm.”
― Peter Coleman

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“... There can be no grounding of love and goodness without power (strength). Love that is not founded on inner strength is easily destroyed by power. Caring that is based only on the wish to be nice and to be comfortable in one's relationships blows away as soon as the wolf is at the door. This is true in people's personal lives, and it is paralleled in organizations.”
― Roger Harrison

“Because our attachment to control is either unexamined or addictive, we do not understand that by relinquishing control and providing choice, we increase our influence and impact many times over.”
― Roger Harrison

“I fail to remember ever having made an effort — no trace of struggle is detectable in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To “want” something, to “strive” for something, to have an “end,” a “desire” in mind — I know none of this from my experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future — a broad future! — as upon a smooth sea: no desire ripples upon it.
Not in the least do I want anything to be different from what it is; I myself do not want to be any different ... But thus I have always lived.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.”
― Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

“The bicycle saves my life every day. If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping down bird-like down a long hill, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it's all about the bike.”
― Robert Penn

“The bike does this; it is an apotheosis of self-sufficiency, in which a well-loved machine will unhesitatingly and quietly mediate intentional being into momentum. As you ride a bike and start to ride it well, there are moments when it becomes an affirmation of life devoid of separation and distinction; you ride through the earth unthinkingly rather than across it. There is no need to account for who you are in others’ terms, in language, even. Your characteristics give way to your being. The effort put into the bike can take you out of your socialized, represented self into what Heidegger called ‘disclosing self’, where you simply are ever-shifting endeavour.”
― Robin Holt

“For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven't: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven't read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”
― john durham peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media