Quotes thread

Ix Tuesday 25 Jun 2013

All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. . . . See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere musical, if you can only reach it.

Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

Ix Tuesday 25 Jun 2013

I am my own first cause, both of my eternal being and of my temporal being. To this end I was born, and by virtue of my birth being eternal, I shall never die. It is of the nature of this eternal birth that I have been eternally, that I am now, and shall be forever. What I am as a temporal creature is to die and come to nothingness, for it came with time and so with time it will pass away. In my eternal birth, however, everything was begotten. I was my own first cause as well as the first cause of everything else. If I had willed it, neither I nor the world would have come to be! If I had not been, there would have been no god. Meister Eckhart.

Ix Tuesday 25 Jun 2013

The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and eternal, which exists always, unseen by most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares it abroad, by act or speech as it may be, in declaring himself abroad. His life . . . is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,--but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them.

Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

rust Thursday 27 Jun 2013

Another Carlyle quote (Characteristics, 1837) and entirely coincidental, as this is something @Johnson shared with me a couple of weeks ago.

"For men, in whom the old perennial principle of Hunger (be it Hunger of the poor Day-drudge who stills it with eighteenpence a-day, or of the ambitious Placehunter who can nowise still it with so little) suffices to fill-up existence, the case is bad; but not the worst. These men have an aim, such as it is; and can steer towards it, with chagrin enough truly; yet, as their hands are kept full, without desperation. Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom. "

Stubby Saturday 29 Jun 2013

Kierkegaard

In the case of the philistine-bourgeois mentality, or triviality, which also lacks possibility, the
situation is somewhat different. Philistinism is spiritlessness, in the
literal sense of the word; determinism and fatalism are spiritual despair;
but such spiritlessness is also despair. Philistinism lacks every
determinant of spirit and terminates in probability, within which the
possible finds its insignificant place. Thus it lacks sufficient possibility
to take notice of God.
Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always
is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things
go, what is possible, what usually occurs. Thus the Philistine has lost
his self and God. For in order to be aware of oneself and God
imagination must enable a man to soar higher than the misty precinct
of the probable, it must wrench one out of this and, by making
possible that which transcends the "Quantum Satis" (sufficient standard)
of every experience, it must teach him to hope and fear, or to fear and hope.
But imagination the Philistine does not possess, he does not want to have
it, he abhors it. So here there is no help. And if sometimes reality helps
by tenors which transcend the parrot-wisdom of trivial experience, then
philistinism despairs -- that is, it becomes manifest that it was in
despair. It lacks the possibility of faith in order by God’s help to be able
to deliver itself from certain destruction.
Fatalism and determinism, however, have enough imagination to
despair of possibility, and have possibility enough to discover
impossibility. Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial, being equally
in despair whether things go well or ill. Fatalism or determinism lacks
the possibility of relaxing and soothing, of tempering necessity, and so
it lacks possibility as assuagement. Philistinism lacks possibility as
revival from spiritlessness.
For philistinism thinks it is in control of
possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity
into the field of probability or into the mad-house it holds it a
prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the
probable, shows it off, imagines itself to be the master, does not take
note that precisely thereby it has taken itself captive to be the slave of
spiritlessness and to be the most pitiful of all things. For with the
audacity of despair that man soared aloft who ran wild in possibility;
but crushed down by despair that man strains himself against existence
to whom everything has become necessary. But philistinism spiritlessly
celebrates its triumph.

Cornelio Sunday 30 Jun 2013

Stubby , please, this is a Carlyle thread .

Ix Tuesday 2 Jul 2013

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that something incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

Emerson, 'The Over-soul'

Bob Dylan Roof Wednesday 3 Jul 2013

In the lands of the black, what better can one expect than what is found prevailing, namely the feminine sex in the deepest slavery? A despairing man is always a strict master over anyone weaker, just as with us that man is always a tyrant in the kitchen who outside his own house hardly dares to look anyone in the face. Of course, Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whome he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: "You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad." And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid

- Kant

Niccolo and Donkey Saturday 6 Jul 2013

Roland CriticalLooksTheory Baltasar Cornelius Thomas777 Ix

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Ix Saturday 6 Jul 2013

"One of the greatest successes of the devil was to create around man surroundings in which God and immortality appear unbelievable." Schuon, The Essential Schuon, p. 91.

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