Saturday, May 03, 2008

The Thinking Person's Icarus




Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840) - Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, 1818


The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Replay III

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): At The Crossroads of Art and Philosophy




A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35


We have art in order not to die of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

Gilles Deleuze

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Addendum IX

If Books Could Kill




Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Basel, c. 1875


All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.

Ambrose Bierce

Palimpsest IV




Anselm Kiefer (b. 1845) - Book With Wings, 1992-1994


Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Coda III

The Creep of Reason Produces Cynics




René Magritte (1898-1967) - Golconde, 1953


After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, "I want to see the manager."

William Burroughs

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

William Faulkner

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

G. C. Lichtenberg

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Michel de Montaigne

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself . . . The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Ayn Rand

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Mark Twain

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Orson Welles