Josh > Josh's Quotes

“I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”
― William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.”
― William H. Gass

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”
― William Gass

“And I am in retirement from love. ”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

“So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them”
― William Gass

“To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.”
― Karl Jaspers

“Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.”
― Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age

“What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.”
― Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Vol. 1

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
― Robert Frost

“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
― Robert Frost

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost

“Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting.”
― Robert Frost

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
― Robert Frost

“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”
― Robert Frost

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”
― Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor Adorno

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime”
― Theodor Adorno

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
― Theodor Adorno

“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Dissonance is the truth about harmony.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row