Igor > Igor's Quotes

“But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”
― Gilles Deleuze

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

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“D.H. Lawrence had the impression – that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as a production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a ‘dirty little secret’, a dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

“La realidad no suele coincidir con las previsiones; con lógica perversa, prever un detalle circunstancial es impedir que este suceda”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“A well-read man will yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new "good book," as he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books he has read, whereas a good book is something special, unforeseeable, made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“I saw that what had appeared to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in the house of ill fame, where it was then for me simply a woman desirous of earning twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than one's family, more than all the most coveted positions in life if one had begun by imagining her to embody a strange creature, interesting to know, difficult to seize and to hold.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“It is certain that she had represented something quite different for me in Balbec. But even when we consider it insufficient at the time, our intimacy with the woman we love creates between her and us, despite its painful shortcomings, social ties that outlast our love and even the memory of that love. Then, in the woman who is now no more to us than a means, a path toward others, we are just as astonished and amused to discover in our memory the original special appeal of her name for the other being we once were, as if, after giving a cabman an address on the Boulevard des Capucines or on the rue du Bac, thinking only of the person we are going to see there, we were to remind ourselves that these names were once those of the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood there and of the ferry across the Seine.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“A person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information — a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays