Alex Tripp > Alex's Quotes

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.”
― Mary Ruefle

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It's very much like you're trying to reach Infinity. You know it's there, but you just don't know where--but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.”
― Norman Juster