Emma Nebelung > Emma's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Nameless City

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“But at the bottom, the immanent philosopher sees in the entire universe only the deepest longing for absolute annihilation, and it is as if he clearly hears the call that permeates all spheres of heaven: Redemption! Redemption! Death to our life! and the comforting answer: you will all find annihilation and be redeemed!”
― Philipp Mainländer, Die Philosophie der Erlösung

“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”
— “Supernatural Horror in Literature”
― Lovecraft H P

“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“My favourite outdoor activity is going back inside.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.”
― Giordano Bruno

“There is no top or bottom, no absolute
positioning in space. There are only positions that are relative to the others.
There is an incessant change in the relative positions throughout the universe
and the observer is always at the centre".”
― Giordano Bruno

“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.”
― Thomas Ligott, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Man is a self-conscious Nothing,”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go
There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know”
― Thomas Ligotti

“the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.”
― Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars”
― Seneca

“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The earth is not our home. We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia
should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive a pardon, let alone the sacrifice of human lives, for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse (very much in the same way that reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual’s death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we still doing in this horrible place?”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Transhumanism encapsulates a long-lived error among the headliners of science: in a world without a destination, we cannot even break ground on our Tower of Babel, and no amount of rush and hurry on our part will change that. That we are going nowhere is not a curable condition; that we must go nowhere at the fastest possible velocity just might be curable, though probably not. And what difference would it make to retard our progress to nowhere?”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice... That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”
― Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude towards them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, hopes, ends, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seems, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognises it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of 'Why?' 'To what end?' a man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain