Jonnyh

“These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’
The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound.
Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.”
― John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on Cassavetes

“i will always be the person who went to the grocery store
in cigarette-burned pajamas every day for five months

i will always be the person who wanted to die and didn’t

i will always be the person who lost twenty pounds
in one month and i will always be the person who gained it back

i will always be the person who decided, while crying
in the passenger seat of your car, to be better

i will always be the person who paused
when you first said “i love you”
just to take the moment in

i will always be the person who survived the unsurvivable

i will always be the person who fought like hell for it”
― Joshua Espinoza

“That any society ought to have philosophers in its midst seems to us an axiom of any possible social philosophy. Probably any society will have some reflective people in it, some Socrates or Mandeville or Wollstonecraft to ask awkward questions, but even if this is to be welcomed, it does not follow that any society should have professional philosophers in its midst, nor, if it does have them, that their activities should the take the form ours assume. The very professionalization of philosophy makes the likelihood more remote that those awkward questions, necessary for a healthy social consciousness, should come from philosophers. It may make for better philosophy and a better society if they come from a social misfit like Diogenes, or from an anathemetized lense-grinder like Spinoza, or from a man of affairs, an unsuccessful aspirant to two chairs of philosophy, like Hume. (Even more conventionally acceptable moral philosophers like Aquinas and Butler earned their living as clerics, not as philosophers.)

The questions we need to ask occasionally are, first, why anyone should be a philosopher (in our sense); second, why anyone else should pay one to be a philosopher; third, how many should be paid philosophers; and fourth, what exact form the activity of paid philosophers should take.”
― Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals

“Everything becomes questionable as soon as I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East