Redwan Salman > Redwan's Quotes

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Russia was a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge. Unmodern in principle, let alone in practice, the autocracy died a deserving death in the maelstrom of the Anglo-German antagonism, the bedlam of Serbian nationalism, the hemophilia bequeathed by Queen Victoria, the pathology of the Romanov court, the mismanagement by the Russian government of its wartime food supply, the determination of women and men marching for bread and justice, the mutiny of the capital garrison, and the defection of the Russian high command.

But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I find myself only by losing myself.”
― Paul Ricoeur

“But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.”
― Paul Ricoeur

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If you think you are enlightened; go home for Thanksgiving.”
― Ram Dass

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”
― Rumi

“The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Out of the shell of the broken heart emerges the newborn soul.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan