Arsh > Arsh's Quotes

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“The words you speak become the house you live in.”
― Hafiz

“Man is that which has still much before it. He is repeatedly transformed in his work and by it. [...] The authentic in man and in the world is potential, waiting, living in fear of being frustrated, living in hope of succeeding.”
― Ernst Bloch

“We cannot live outside our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same time, we are bursting out of this situation. The question which poses itself then is one of the conditions which allow the acceptance of the other, the acceptance of a subjective pluralism. It is a matter not only of tolerating another group, another ethnicity, another sex, but also of a desire for dissensus, otherness, difference. Accepting otherness is a question not so much of right as of desire. This acceptance is possible precisely on the condition of assuming the multiplicity within oneself.”
― Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

”
― Jacques Lacan

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

“We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Not in vain does it [the proletariat] go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.”
― Karl Marx, The Holy Family

“The mystery of this courage of Bauer’s is Hegel’s Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a “pure category,” a mere “thought” which I can consequently also abolish in “pure” thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel’s Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a “thing of thought” a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the “ether of pure thought.” Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by “Absolute Knowledge”—Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore dissolve in the head all the limitations which naturally remain in existence for evil sensuousness, for real man. Besides, everything which betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness—all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world—necessarily rates for him as a limit. The whole of Phenomenology is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.”
― Karl Marx, The Holy Family

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Craik

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.”
― William Blake

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus:

"Not the man who denies the gods worshiped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious"

Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:

"In simple words, I hate the pack of gods"

is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”
― Karl Marx

“Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.”
― Jacques Lacan

“If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.”
― Socrates

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche