School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is —Ivan Illich
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Dictionary of Imploded Meanings

WHERE EVERYTHING BECOMES NOTHING
(word bondage – packages of knots)

AS BOUNDARIES MERGE
– in awe of the big silence – to escape the inferno of words –
When the meaning of words and concepts dissolve into a unified vagueness (corresponding ultimately to physical sensations).
–––
Some would-be portmanteau (Mots-Valise) concepts
[without trying to be clever]
— a list of words imploding —
AS I WROTE ABOVE, I CALL THESE “WORD PACKAGES.”


RELATED TO
The Void and its Pressure   Beyond Belief   —  The Foundational References


Five fingers! Why Five? Why Life? Why Death? Why the Life We Live? Why Him? And Not Me? Why Obey? ///And Why These Threads? To Wonder Is To Become Free.///As Long As It Does Not Become Another Word-Sign. Man Curious About Everything. Everything (the book)” – from the great GÉBÉ

“Reality” should always be in quotes.  — Buckminster Fuller
‘That things just go on’ is the catastrophe..— Walter Benjamin
Substance is what remains when everything you can think of has gone.— Eli Siegel
All we ever do is to cross-reference everything – Nous ne faisons que nous entre-gloser.
— Montaigne
The medium is the message. — Marshall McLuhan

What you accept as knowledge is your very own blind spot.— Pier Marton
The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
— G.K. Chesterton
Tell them there is nothing to understand.
— U.G.
Let the infinite enter! 
— Louis Aragon
Propaganda is an art form. Propaganda has just one objective, and that objective is to conquer the masses.
Alluring people into an idea so in the end they are captivated by it, and can no longer free themselves from it. — Joseph Goebbels (the enemy can reveal what is at stake)


Within the tautological (self-referential) universe we create for ourselves, most of us are aware that, like form and content, fear and excitement are absolutely inseparable… yet we compartmentalize and separate (Either/Or) until we are utterly confused.
Could there be actually one just word or one verb or, as I write elsewhere, considering words as our central credo, can we actually move beyond them all?


[CLICK ON ORANGE BARS BELOW (or +) TO VIEW QUOTES]

  • Arrogance—Belief—Culture—Doxa—Lies—Stupidity—Truth—Worship—cf. Difficulty & Independence & Images & Knowledge & Reality & Thinking & Society
    • Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards… — Nelson Algren
    • The praise he gives to what he professes is only praise to himself. — Ibn ‘Arabi
    • We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things… An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés. — Hannah Arendt
    • Never before, when it is life that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize life. … This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea which is first of all a protest. — Antonin Artaud
    • And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell. — James Baldwin
    • The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items but always the same meaning. — Roland Barthes
    • A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. — Saul Bellow
    • I only believe in what is costly to me. — Georges Bernanos
    • One must forget. — Robert Bresson
    • If you are not living on the edge, you’re taking too much room. — Bob Brozman
    • Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. — William Burroughs
    • Stupidity is always stubborn. — Albert Camus
    • The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind. — Albert Camus
    • The reason they call it The American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe. — George Carlin
    •  I cannot help the one who has no question. — Confucius
    • The end result is that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the currently visible universe, the vast majority of which cannot be observed with present day technology as they are too faint. — Christopher J. Conselice
    • Let me state once & for all: I do not wish to be civilized. — Arthur Cravan
    • The day humans will understand that animals can think without having recourse to language, we will die of shame for having locked them into zoos and for having humiliated them with our laughter… — Boris Cyrulnik
    • Man is truly the king of all animals; his cruelty surpasses that of all other animals. — Leonardo da Vinci
    • When they inform you, they tell you what you are supposed to believe.  — Gilles Deleuze
    • We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    • The intellectual is for me someone who challenges the principles and the cultured person someone who never does that. — Marguerite Duras
    • We see only the surface of things, we can interpret what lies below anyway we see fit. – Bob Dylan
    •  All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. — Bob Dylan
    • Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. — Frantz Fanon
    • Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. — William Faulkner
    • The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
    • Every one is right from his own standpoint, but it is not impossible that every one is wrong. — Mahatma Gandhi
    • We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • Take your road and f.ck yourself. — Paul Goodman
    • The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.  — David Graeber
    • What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to a method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg
    • Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness. — Werner Herzog
    • In listening to the nightingale, how is it possible not to feel that one is lying? — Alejandro Jodorowsky
    • Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
    • A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. — Franz Kafka
    • In a world of lies, the lie is not eliminated by its opposite; only a world of truth can do that. — Franz Kafka
    • If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so. — Jacques Lacan
    • Repetition is a way of changing people’s brains. — George Lakoff
    • Thought is mostly unconscious. — George Lakoff
    • Principles, systems... weapons to fight against life. — j.m.g. le clézio
    • It is.. well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated. — Primo Levi
    • The world began without man and it will end without him. — Claude Lévi-Strauss
    • The hoax (and arrogance) of centrality and normalcy. — Pier Marton
    • Polarization is one of the ways we can think we are right; one of humanity's deadliest disease. — Pier Marton
    • At its worse, culture is the glue that reaffirms, again and again, that we are united by what we venerate; an ensemble of fetishes, rituals and temples, a totalitarian cult endlessly celebrating itself. — Pier Marton
    • Culture validating itself: keep reading and watching. – Pier Marton
    • Words, along with images, conceal much more than they reveal. — Pier Marton
    • We are held hostage by our own words, deadly myths and clichés that they are. — Pier Marton
    • We are much longer dead than alive. — Pier Marton
    • Until I believe it, I can't see it. — Marshall McLuhan
    • Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions. — Terence McKenna
    • The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. — Michel de Montaigne
    • It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature. — John von Neumann
    • What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
      We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all… —
      Friedrich Nietzsche
    • There are no facts, only interpretations.  Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Neither is contradiction a proof of falsehood, nor is the lack of contradiction a form of certitude.  — Blaise Pascal
    • To like something, you have to see it or hear it for a long time, you bunch of idiots. — Francis Picabia
    • The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. — Harold Pinter
    • The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity and independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed. — Neil Postman
    • ... wisdom is a lie
      only the dead
      can see through
      & reject ... — Jerome Rothenberg
    • Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open? — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion? — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • There is a stark joy in the unflinching perception of our true place in the world, and a more vivid drama than any that is possible to those who hide behind the enclosing walls of myth. — Bertrand Russell

    • It is as deadly for the mind to have a system as it is not to have one. One must decide to combine both. — Friedrich von Schlegel
    • The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. — Elvin Semrad
    • All great truths begin as blasphemies. — George Bernard Shaw
    • Nothing proves that humans are any more important than a butterfly or a cow… Personally, I don’t believe that there could be peace in this world as long as animals are treated the way they are today. — Isaac Bashevis Singer
    • The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are. — Thomas Szasz
    • It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. — Mark Twain
    • We, civilizations, now know that we are mortal. — Paul Valéry
    • We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. — Kurt Vonnegut
    • A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority. ― Booker T. Washington
    • The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater — Frank Zappa
  • Awe—Immediacy—Nothing—Emptiness—Silence—Surprise—cf. Knowledge & Reality & Thinking
    • Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence. — Arab Proverb
    • I prefer when there is silence behind the words. — Aharon Appelfeld
    • Nothing is more real than nothing. – Samuel Beckett
    • Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. ― Samuel Beckett,
    • The mind that is not baffled is not employed. — Wendell Berry
    • Energy is eternal delight. — William Blake
    • We’re nothing and nothing can help us. — David Bowie
    • To create is first of all to prune. — Robert Bresson
    • Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence. — Robert Bresson
    •  It's always the first time. — Peter Brook
    • We rush full speed on this Earth with one single thought, all of us: fight the giant wall, you know, the wall of nothingness with a limitless height, width and power, this wall which entraps us, whence we come, where we go. We would like to pierce through it, scale it, see through it, we set up our flimsy ladders, we throw our cannon balls, our hooks. No use… We throw ourselves, often weapon in hand, into invisible vertigoes and ghostly vortices. Lost in advance. Nothingness is nothingness. — Luis Buñuel (through Jean-Claude Carrière)
    • Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. — William Burroughs
    • Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it. — John Cage
    • Long live nothing since it is the only thing that exists! — Albert Camus
    • Nothing left to do. It is always too late. — Jean-Claude Carrière
    • A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary, a painter too many colors on his palette, a musician too many notes on his keyboard. — Jean Cocteau
    • The night of truth cut off our speech. — René Daumal
    • Deep down, he’s shallow. — Peter De Vries
    • Everywhere there will be nothing, read that I love you. — Denis Diderot in a letter.
    • He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing. — Epicurus
    • Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. — Epicurus
    • No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others. ― Gorgias
    • The miracle is to walk on the earth.  — Thich Nhat Hahn
    • Today having power means knowing what to ignore.  — Yuval Noah Harari
    • Putting something into context so it is not news anymore. — Alan Kay
    • Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. —Milan Kundera
    • To become full, become hollow. — Laozi/Lao Tse
    • If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. — Laozi/Lao Tse
    • At the very moment when everything is lost, everything is possible. ― Emmanuel Lévinas
    • Before saying anything, one must sure that silence would not be more important. — Marcel Marceau
    • Against oblivion, the present is our present. — Pier Marton
    • Nothing else to give: kindness - the highest form of intelligence - and presence. — Pier Marton
    • There is not a big difference between everything and nothing. — Pier Marton
    • How good it is to remember one's insignificance. — Pier Marton (transforming Tolstoy’s question into an affirmation)
    • Once fullness has been taught, emptiness has to be untaught… and animals will do that with you. — Pier Marton
    • After weeks in an intensive care unit, I finally came back to life when, from the deepest place in my body, I found myself shouting “No!” — Pier Marton
    • We can speak... or not. — Pier Marton
    • I would prefer not to. — Herman Melville
    • All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence. — Herman Melville
    • In silence the world which our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.— Thomas Merton
    • It’s always what illuminates that remains in the shadows. — Edgar Morin
    • The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth. — Thích Nhất Hạnh
    • For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language; let's stop for one second, and not move our arms so much... What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. — Pablo Neruda
    • When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • The greatness of mankind resides in its capacity to know how wretched it is. — Blaise Pascal
    • All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. — Blaise Pascal
    • There is more silence in a human being than can be used in a lifetime. — Max Picard
    • There is no other primary phenomenon that is more present with each instant than silence. — Max Picard
    • The more technique there is, the less there is. — Pablo Picasso
    • One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. — Harold Pinter
    • For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrifying… — Rainer Maria Rilke
    • True life is absent. We have not been born. — Arthur Rimbaud
    • Let silence take you to the core of life. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    • One must always say “no,” one must always oppose what is there; the “no,” to have a perfect conscience of one’s “no,” or of the necessity of the moment when one must say “yes.” But careful, one starts by saying “no,” “no” it’s revolution, it’s change, its “no!” But it seems that it’s the destiny of the “ no,” that it is going to change into a “yes.” And when that happens, one must say one more time, “no.” — José Saramago
    • Substance is what remains when everything you can think of has gone. — Eli Siegel
    • Wisdom starts in wonder. — Socrates
    • It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. ― Gertrude Stein
    • After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs. — Wallace Stevens
    • Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. — Wallace Stevens
    • Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. — Thomas Szasz
    • Abandon, abandon everything, abandon everything you know. Abandon, abandon, abandon, and do not fear to be left with nothing, for ultimately it is that nothing that sustains you. – Tiziano Terzani
    • To the Creator: high time to return my ticket. [...] To your senseless world/I only say: rejection. — Marina Tsvetaïeva
    • When we see what we were on this earth and what we leave behind
      Only silence is grand; everything else is weakness. — Alfred de Vigny
    • May you be praised, o silence that surrounds thoughts…  — Ilarie Voronca
    • I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen... ― Walt Whitman
    • Do anything, but let it produce joy. ― Walt Whitman
    • I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about. ― Oscar Wilde
    • Life is a long preparation for something that never happens. ― W.B. Yeats
    • One Measures the Richness of a Human Being Through What He/She Can Live Without. — Zen Saying
  • Difficulty—Struggle—Adversity—Kindness—Experience—cf. Implosions & Independence & Reality
    • One must always conjugate the verb to resist in the present tense. — Lucie Aubrac
    • To become someone one must have problems, and conquer them. — Tania Balachova
    • Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. — Charlotte Joko Beck
    • Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett
    • Serenity can only be reached through complete despair. — Blaise Cendrars
    • I am smiling but I am quite worried. — Marc Chagall
    • If you are having a difficulty, what you must do is face it. — Ajahn Chah
    • People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one. When nature finally calls, they have no idea where to go and are in a mess. — Ajahn Chah
    • If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground. — Frederick Douglass
    • Always look further down, not higher. — Janina Dyamant Kurland
    • For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • True wisdom, true superiority is not won through fighting but by letting things happen. Plants that resist the wind break while those that bend survive the biggest storms. — Epicurus
    • You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity. — Epicurus
    • What is to give light must endure burning. — Victor Frankl
    • When we are no longer able to change our situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. – Victor Frankl
    • The best way out is always through. — Robert Frost
    • No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. — Robert Frost
    • In such condition (life in the state of nature), there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — Thomas Hobbes
    • Those that live, those are the ones that fight. — Victor Hugo
    • What makes night within us may leave stars within us. — Victor Hugo
    • This stumbling block is in your hand. You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble upon them. — Nehunya ben HaKanah, Sepher Ha-Bahir
    • Away from moldy molds, opposition fosters life. An egg needs to be broken... Be against where/what/who you are. — Pier Marton
    • What does not kill you may wound you. — Pier Marton
    • Weakness is a source of strength. — Pier Marton
    • What does not fit and challenges everything will apparently remain unheard. — Pier Marton
    • Seek the center of conflict, and treat opponents with the utmost respect. — Arne Naess
    • Find joy in simple things. — Arne Naess
    • Before you know what kindness really is – You must lose things... — Naomi Shehab Nye
    • I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. — Georgia O’Keefe
    • Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt. — José Ortega y Gasset
    • Who is with me is against me. — Francis Picabia.
    • It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it. — Rainer Maria Rilke
    • Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. — Rainer Maria Rilke
    • The cure for pain is in the pain. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • If you can do it, then why do it? — Gertrude Stein
    • Rabbi Tarfon taught: The day is short, the work is great…it is not your task to finish the work but neither are you free to exempt yourself from it. — The Talmud/Ethics of the Fathers
    • Jacob's name become "Yisrael" after a most disturbing dream/struggling all night with his conscience/an angel (Hebrew for "God Wrestler" - לִשְׂרות & אֵל) //ezer kenegdo (Hebrew for "Helper Against"- עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ) — Torah
    • My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. — U.G.
    • The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. — Kurt Vonnegut
    • The dead-alive write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. —Yevginy Zamyatin
  • Images—Shortcuts—Media—Art—Beauty—Ideals—Sight—Lies—cf. Arrogance & Reality & Thinking
    • Why should we want to estheticize “anything”? — Allan Kaprow

    • The medias consist of decisions made in advance. — Günther Anders
    • Even though the images show everything, nevertheless there is nothing to see. — Jean Baudrillard
    • It is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and most perverse. — Jean Baudrillard
    • ... when you take a photograph, you stop looking at what you’ve shot.  — John Berger
    • The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. — Henri Bergson
    • Cinema is the art of showing nothing. — Robert Bresson
    • The viewer must abandon the idea of the image. — Robert Bresson
    • Photography is at the very heart of lying.— Robert Bresson
    • Beauty is only beauty if it is new. — Robert Bresson
    • I look at things and people but I do not think of giving myself a title. — Robert Bresson
    • Smash the control images. Smash the control machine. — William Burroughs
    • (In "The Film You Don't See") How do you create a visible image? — Jean-Claude Carrière
    • We live in a rainbow of chaos. — Paul Cézanne
    • Mirrors should reflect twice before sending images back to us. — Jean Cocteau
    • The media asks those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimize it. — Serge Daney
    • Commercial filmmaking can be very clever, but rarely intelligent. — Marguerite Duras
    • The only thing you can control, and you must therefore control, is the imagery in your own mind. — Epictetus
    • One must be as wary of images as of words. Images and words are woven into discourses, networks of meanings.  — Harun Farocki
    • For something to become interesting, all one needs to do is look at it long enough. — Gustave Flaubert
    • We declare ourselves irreconcilable with Art since it is intrinsically linked with theology, metaphysics, and mysticism… Death to ART. — Aleksei Gan
    • The true artist is paradoxically also the true personal misfit.  — Eva Hesse
    • It is impossible to express the beauty in words. The art of painting is dead for this is life itself or something higher, if we could find a word for it – Constantin Huygens after seeing an image in a camera obscura (1622)
    • Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.  Robert Irwin
    • If I have a musical idea, I say no to it. — Keith Jarrett
    • Those who think they are spectators are in fact the spectacle. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
    • Kafka
    • Franz Kafka
    • I've often noticed we are not able to look at what is in front of us unless it is inside a frame. — Abbas Kiarostami
    • The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. — Dorothea Lange
    • By being a consumer, one gives up on being a producer. Claude Lévy-Strauss
    • There is nothing as beautiful as a key, so long as one does not know what it opens. — Maurice Maeterlinck
    • You may not make images for yourself or for others to worship or for any other purpose. — Moses Maimonides
    • The piano is an instrument that politically needs to be destroyed… One must destroy anything one may have learned. — Bachar Mar-Khalifé
    • Why call it art? Why call it anything!— Pier Marton
    • Henri Michaux

      Henri Michaux

    • The world, essentially, is not what we call “real.”  The arts are attempting to approach that world.  — Arthur Miller
    • I prefer for form to do its own thinking.  Matter thinks quite well. I try to put myself inside the form and to feel what it intends to do. If it is I who wants, it becomes clumsy. There is thought in form, but it is not mine. Form moves forward as long as I don’t think. — Bernard Noël
    • I always do the same thing, and it is always different, just like life. — Roman Opalka
    • Fool, the shadow you perceive is only the reflection of your image. What you search for is nowhere … It has come with you and will stay with you. With you it will leave, if you could only leave! … When I smile, you smile back. And I have often seen your tears when I weep tears… I am burning with love for myself… My riches make me poor. — Ovid
    • Nobody asks what the new technologies will undo. — Neil Postman
    • Good art can never be understood. — Robert Rauschenberg
    • Photography lies. — Auguste Rodin
    • An artist is always attentive to what s/he does not know. — Pierre Soulages
    • They have eyes but cannot see. — Tehilim
    • One evening, I sat down Beauty onto my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I insulted her. (Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère. – Et je l’ai injuriée.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Only with the heart does one see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    • In order to experience the ground of being, you need to be free from images. That is to say you need to suspend the activity of thinking. — Alan Watts
    • And your very flesh shall be a great poem. ― Walt Whitman
    • The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. — Oscar Wilde
    • The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too. —Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Implosions—Rationality—Understanding—Vocabulary—cf. Difficulty & Independence & Knowledge
    If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. — Antonin Artaud
    Intelligence is characterized by a natural misunderstanding of life. — Henri Bergson
    • Energy is eternal delight. — William Blake
    Sometimes a little brain damage can help. — George Carlin
    The only knowledge which is really alive is the one that expresses itself at its kindling point, bringing about its own destruction. — Fyodor Dostoevsky
    … the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. — F. Scott Fitzgerald 
    Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. — Robert Frost
    Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense. — Robert Frost
    If you understand me, it is that I did not express myself well. — Jean-Luc Godard
    We are and we are not. — Heraclitus
    God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance. ― Abraham Joshua Heschel
    I usually solve problems by letting them devour me. — Franz Kafka
    Truth is what consumes me, I write that. — Imre Kertész
    The fire that burns me is the one that provides me light.  — Étienne de La Boétie
    If you have understood, surely you are wrong. — Jacques Lacan
    The arrogance of normalcy, and of that which has not yet imploded. — Pier Marton
    L'avenir de l'architecture n'est plus architectural. — Jean Nouvel
    The source of all the heresies is not to be able to conceive the accordance of opposite truths. — Blaise Pascal
    To poke fun of philosophy is to be a true philosophizer. — Blaise Pascal
    Who is with me is against me. — Francis Picabia
    Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. — Pablo Picasso
    The poet becomes a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all of the senses.  (Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field - I'll meet you there. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time. — Arthur Schopenhauer
    My paintings function as questioning and meditation spaces where the senses and meanings may come together to become undone. (Ma peinture est un espace de questionnement et de méditation où les sens qu’on lui prête peuvent venir se faire et se défaire.) — Pierre Soulages (artist of the “outrenoir” – ultrablack)
    The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
    My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. — U.G.
    • Just tell them, there is nothing to understand. — U.G.
    We go to the movies

    To blow up the movies
    
In order to see the movies. — Dziga Vertov
    Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes. ― Walt Whitman
    Integral art is only such that at the moment when it involves all the senses, it thus explodes itself. — Gil J Wolman
    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold… ― W.B. Yeats
  • Independence—Interdependence—Self—Ego—cf. Arrogance & Difficulty & Implosions & Reality & Society
    • Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. — Lord Acton/John Dalberg-Acton
    • The main purpose of the illusion of me is to keep you at all costs from realizing your own nothingness. — Adyashanti
    • Freedom is the capacity to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which, therefore, strictly speaking could not be known. — Hannah Arendt
    • We need more far more disturbed followers than we need active followers. — Antonin Artaud
    • Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. — Samuel Beckett
    • To know oneself is an imbecile's itch. — George Bernanos
    • One does not truly know oneself until one is confronted with obstacles. — Albert Camus
    • Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. — John Donne
    • We think of the key, each in his prison
      Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
      — T.S. Eliot
    • Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. ― R. Buckminster Fuller
    • “I,”that’s the end of possibilities. — Romain Gary
    • Life I never can divide, … Inner and outer together you see. … Whole to all I must abide. — Goethe
    • The impostor is the one that sells his appearance and imposes himself onto someone else by using that person’s "funds“ to take care of his own needs.   L’imposteur, c’est celui qui vend ses apparences, qui impose (cf. impôt) à l’autre et donc prélève dans la bourse d’autrui pour pouvoir répondre à ses propres besoins. — Roland Gori
    • The real enemy of men is not men, it is ignorance, discrimination,fear,craving,and violence. — Thich Nhat Hahn
    • None of us has the honor of having a life that belongs to us. — Victor Hugo
    • If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? — Hillel the Elder
    • That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah/teaching; the rest is the explanation; go and learn. — Hillel the Elder
    • Do not imitate anything nor anyone. A lion that imitates a lion becomes a monkey. — Victor Hugo
    • You got to burn to shine. — John Giorno
    • It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.
      To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?
      I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
    • I have hardly anything in common with myself. – Franz Kafka
    • My People! My People! If only I had one. — Kafka
    • To become a warrior, every Cohiuano man must leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey, he has to discover, in solitude and silence, who he really is. — Karamakate
    • The poet has no identity. — John Keats
    • It is very hard to remain what I am not. — Imre Kertész
    • A decision is a folly because it is a jump into the unknown and into novelty. One goes from the past into the future through a decision, that is by abandoning the infantile dream of keeping everything. — Soren Kierkegaard 
    • You are nobody and yet everything depends on you. — Pier Marton
    • From the get-go, the ego is so self-serving, we gotta to let it go! — Pier Marton
    • Idolatry starts with “I.” — Pier Marton
    • I have no more produced this book than this book has produced me. — Michel de Montaigne
    • There is not one self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. — Henri Michaux
    • We tend to confuse self with the narrow ego. — Arne Naess
    • 1. All living beings have intrinsic value.
      2. The richness and diversity of life has intrisic value.
      3. Except to satisfy vital needs humans do not have the right to reduce this diversity and richness.
      4. It would be better for humans if there were fewer of them, and much better for other living creatures.

      5. Today the extent and nature of of human interference in the various systems is not sustainable, and the the lack of sustainability is rising.
      6. Decisive improvement requires considerable considerable changes: social, economic, technological, and ideological.
      7. An ideological change would essentially entail seeking a better quality of life rather than a raised standard of living.
      8. Those who accept the aforementioned points are responsible for trying to contribute directly or indirectly to the necessary changes.
      — Arne Naess
    • Following is as odious to me, as acting as a guide is. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Become what you are. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • « I » is such a common word that its meaning only stems from its frequency. —Bernard Noël
    • Identity is relationship; it is not an essence. — Mona Ozouf
    • Nothing can be done without solitude. — Pablo Picasso
    • We are the others.  — Yasmina Reza
    • To be an adult is to be alone. — Jean Rostand
    • You want to heal? Forget you are a human being, become an animal. You would like to feel better? Forget your thoughts, forget you have a will at your disposal and, very simply, accept your status of being a living organism. — François Roustang
    • You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That’s how I hold your voice. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • We are all one – and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way. — Bayard Rustin
    • I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself. — Max Stirner
    • Don’t take your life personally.  — Ajahn Sumedho
    • Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with himself. — Andrei Tarkovsky
    • There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself. — Henri David Thoreau.
    • Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be. — Alan Watts
    • A verb without a subject… — Alan Watts
    • I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person. ― Walt Whitman
    • Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
    • The concept of identity is the devil incarnate. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
    • It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is. ― W.B. Yeats
  • Knowledge—Education—Illusions—Unlearning—cf. Arrogance & Awe & Implosions & Thinking
    • Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black. — James Baldwin
    • There is an age when one teaches what one knows: but thereafter comes another age when one teaches what one does not know: we call it the search. Now comes maybe the age of another experience: that of unlearning, to let the unpredictable reshuffling that forgetfulness imposes onto the layering of knowledges, of cultures and beliefs that one passed through. This experience has, I believe, the illustrious and obsolete name that I will dare uphold, at the crossroads of its etymology: Sapientia.  — Roland Barthes
    • So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed…
Give your approval to all you cannot understand…
Ask the questions that have no answers. — Wendell Berry
    • It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
 we have begun our real journey. — Wendell Berry
    • The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel Boorstein
    • When something seems “the most obvious thing in the world,” it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up. — Bertolt Brecht
    • Sometimes a little brain damage can help. — George Carlin
    • The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. — G.K. Chesterton
    • To know—that is the best way to put a stop to the movement of meaning. — Jacques Derrida
    • In order to reach truth one has to, once in one’s life, undo all the opinions one has received, and rebuild again one’s entire system knowledge. — René Descartes
    • It's always in the regions where I don't understand anything anymore that I go. Do you understand death? A bird? Laughter? — Marguerite Duras
    • Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • Nobody gives a damn... At the poetry school, one does not learn. One fights! — Léo Ferré
    • The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion. — Richard Feynman
    • The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity’s most pernicious and sterile manias. — Gustave Flaubert
    • To find something that is not part of knowledge but that should be part of it. — Michel Foucault
    • I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true. — Buckminster Fuller
    • Dear Teachers: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.  So I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.  — Haim G. Ginott
    • Doubt grows with knowledge. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • Nothing is more dreadful than active ignorance. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life. — John Holt
    • School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. — Ivan Illich
    • Pataphysics: The Science of Imaginary Solutions. — Alfred Jarry
    • School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. — Alan Kay
    • The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. ― John F. Kennedy
    • We cannot reach the unknown as we pursue the known. — Jean Klein
    • Beware of understanding. — Jacques Lacan
    • Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. — Lao Tzu
    • The scientist is not the one who furnishes the right answers. It is the one who asks the right questions. — Claude Lévi-Strauss
    • Kindness is the highest form of intelligence. — Pier Marton
    • KnowLEDGE: the educational movement that bring us to that vertiginous precipice where we need to stand, lost. — Pier Marton
    • The useless is most useful to what is useful: it allows it to feel superior as “what is useful” but what is useless goes so much further. — Pier Marton
    • To understand means to stand under - to be overwhelmed by reality. — Pier Marton
    • Only what is impossible to know (in reality, everything) is worth our time. — Pier Marton
    • All we ever do is to cross-reference everything. — Michel de Montaigne
    • A whole life is not enough to unlearn, what you, naive subject, you allowed yourself to get stuffed in your head, innocent! – without weighing the consequences. — Henri Michaux
    • Complexity, not complication. — Arne Naess
    • From the mountains, we learn modesty; their size makes us feel small and humble, and so we participate in their greatness. — Arne Naess
    • There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • The generalization of torture is tied to the cult of information. When the subject is knowing, and only knowing, who cares about the means used since the end justifies the means. — Bernard Noël
    • A knowledgeable ignorance that knows itself. (Une ignorance savante qui se connaît.) — Blaise Pascal
    • Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.  — John Allen Paulos
    • If one knows exactly what is about to do, why do it at all? — Pablo Picasso
    • Make for yourself a teacher. — Pirkei Avot/Talmud
    • I hold up what I know with what I do not know. — Antonio Porchia
    • The moment you know what you’re up to in a profession, you are lost.  — Jean Renoir
    • Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention. — Howard Rheingold
    • It is to be expected for human beings to go astray; only the insane persist in their error. (C´est le propre de l´homme de se tromper ; seul l´insensé persiste dans son erreur.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Universities are a small, enclosed world, where people have quite tight constraints on what they can think; it's a kind of culture of a rather narrow, old-fashioned kind, where lots of thoughts are not allowed. — Rupert Sheldrake
    • The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing. — Socrates
    • An artist is always attentive to what s/he does not know. — Pierre Soulages
    • One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset. — Wallace Stevens
    • It is impossible to pass on experience or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say: use your father’s experience! Too easy: each of us must get its own. But once we’ve got it, we no longer have time to use it.  And the new generations rightfully refuse to listen to it: they want to live it, but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning:  we cannot impose our experience on other people or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience we understand life.  — Andrei Tarkovsky
    • Tear off all of the masks, with the skin and the flesh if that is what it takes. — Marina Tsvetaïeva
    • Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. — Mark Twain
    • Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion. — U.G.
    • Tell them there is nothing to understand. — U.G.
    • A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of X%#@! tries to unlearn something daily. — Alan Watts
    • One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. — Alan Watts
    • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde
    • Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ― W.B. Yeats
    • A path is made by walking on it. ― Zhuangzi
  • Reality—Living—What Is—No Wishful Thinking—No Hope—cf. Awe & Difficulty & Images & Implosions & Thinking
    • What it is. (shortened from: What it is, what it was, and what it shall be.) — African-American idiom
    • A dream becomes a dream only when you wake up; only then do you tell others that the life you lived in the dream was just a dream. Good or bad, happy or unhappy, in reality the dream is then recognized as having been absolutely nothing. — Meher Baba
    • The essence of normalcy is the refusal of reality. — Ernst Becker
    • His writing is not about something, his writing is that something itself. — Samuel Beckett
    • There comes a longing… never to travel again except on foot. — Wendell Berry
    • We accept reality so readily, perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. — Jorge Luis Borges
    • To have a free head: to be present. — Georges Braque
    • Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet. — Bertolt Brecht
    • Give time to time. — Miguel de Cervantes
    • human kind/Cannot bear very much reality — TS Eliot
    • Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. — Max Frisch
    • "Reality" should always be in quotes. — Buckminster Fuller
    • When I use the word "body," I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside. — Eugene Gendlin
    • The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated, reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle this confusion, we ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good. And because we unplugged ourselves from reality, we elected a president who insists that reality is whatever he claims it to be. — Chris Hedges
    • Once we have revolutionized the kingdom of ideas, reality can no longer resist. — Georg W. F. Hegel
    • What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg
    • And in the how, there lies the whole difference. — Hugo von Hoffmansthal
    • Shitr (Merdre in French) updated today to "Twitr"— Alfred Jarry
    • Is there life before death? — Jon Kabat-Zinn
    • True reality is always unrealistic. — Franz Kafka
    • In the fight between you and the world, back the world. — Franz Kafka
    • Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. — John Keats
    • Whatever you say it is, it isn’t. — Alfred Korzybski
    • Is there life after birth? — Tuli Kupferberg
    • The real is when we bruise. – Jacques Lacan
    • The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of. — George Lakoff
    • What there is is all there is (and to demand more is ludicrous). — J.M.G. Le Clézio
    • Through myths, wishful thinking, transference, projections and entropy, we wander... will kindness lessen the damage? — Pier Marton
    • Life demands to be lived. — Pier Marton
    • Our spontaneous experience is far richer than any abstractions about it. — Arne Naess
    • Every event has many descriptions and aspects. — Arne Naess
    • We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. — Anaïs Nin
    • While unable to heal death, misery and ignorance, human beings decided in order to be happy not to think about any of this. — Blaise Pascal
    • I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly. — Sylvia Plath
    • I am what I am, and that's all that I am. — Popeye
    • When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in state of unconsciousness. — Porchia (with his own page)
    • Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art. — Robert Rauschenberg
    • Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. — Rainer Maria Rilke
    • Action is not life, but just a way to waste some energy, a nervous irritation. (L’action n’est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • One does not leave. – Let’s take the local roads again. (On ne part pas. – Reprenons les chemins d’ici.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • The irrepressible vigor of that seed that says “I am alive." — François Roustang
    • There is no domain to add. When one is human, one has everything, spirituality, religion… and it’s not worth speaking about it. Everything works together. — François Roustang
    • You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • We have three choices in life: to kill ourselves, go crazy, or learn to live with what we have in life.  — Elvin Semrad
    • True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. ― Seneca
    • The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. — Susan Sontag.
    • Reality is a cliché. — Wallace Stevens
    • As for the iceberg, what makes itself known to us in the universe is but an insignificant part of reality.— Laurent Terzieff
    • I Am that I Am (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶהehyeh asher ehyeh) — Torah (Jewish Bible)
    • The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. ― Alan Watts
    • Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot. — Alan Watts
    • I exist as I am, that is enough. ― Walt Whitman
  • Society—Normalcy—Consensus—Politics—cf. Arrogance & Independence
    • It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.  — Theodor Adorno
    • If you have come here to help me, then don’t waste your time. But if you have come here, because your liberation is bound up with mine, then come, let us join in the struggle together. — Australian Aborigine Activists
    • You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it. — Wendell Berry
    • I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. — William Blake
    • Sound, it’s spoken words, and the appearance of being intelligent. — Alain Cavalier
    • Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T.S. Eliot
    • The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • I want my brutal voice, I don’t want it pretty, I don’t want it pure, I don’t want it all sizes. 
      I want it torn throughout, I don’t want it to have fun for in the end, I speak of man and of his refusal, of the daily rot of man, of his horrific giving up. — Frantz Fanon
    • I took the one less traveled by.  And that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost
    • Do the undone. — John Giorno
    • It is very easy to bow to the wish of big power, it is another matter to resist.  — Dag Hammarskjöld
    • We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. — Stephen Hawking
    • The politicians, the priests, the teachers, the readers of the soul  have created that language through which they could steal my story and my experience away from me. — Imre Kertész
    • There are some things in our society and some things in our world for which I am proud to be maladjusted, and I call for all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things… I believe firmly that our world is in dire need of a new organization – the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. — Martin Luther King, Jr
    • Tyrants only appear to be tall because we are on our knees. — Étienne de La Boétie
    • Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. To submit it to the individual discussion is to destroy it; it is given life only through the national mind, that is to say, by political faith, which is a creed. — Joseph de Maistre
    • More wishful thinking: to appreciate, a verb that needs to be conjugated in the present tense.  — Pier Marton
    • I declare a state of permanent happiness 
      And the right for everyone to all the privileges. 
      I say that suffering is a sacrilege 
      When there are roses and rich bread for everyone. 
      I contest the legitimacy of wars, 
      Justice that kills and death that punishes. — Georges Moustaki
    • The quality of our experience depends on our choice of norms. — Arne Naess
    • Do you want an easy life? Remain always close to the herd, and forget yourself in it. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed, all in the name of public utility and the general good. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
    • Regardless of how stupid their existence may be, human beings remain attached to it. (Si stupide que soit son existence, l’homme s’y rattache toujours.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • It is false to say: I think. One should say: “I am being thought. (C’est faux de dire : Je pense. On devrait dire : On me pense.) — Arthur Rimbaud
    • It's your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Freedom can only be all freedom; a bit of freedom is not freedom. — Max Stirner
    • Every institution is inherently demonic. — Paul Tillich
    • Nature is busy creating unique individuals whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque. — U.G.
    • Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding. — Paul Valéry
    • Crush the infamy. — Voltaire
    • Resist much, obey little. ― Walt Whitman
    • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. — Oscar Wilde
    • One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. — Virginia Woolf
    • Our only hope is not integration with  a doomed society, but  complete separation from a doomed society. — Malcolm X
  • Thinking—Words—Concepts—Myths—Truth—Violence—cf. Arrogance & Awe & Images & Reality & Implosions
    • An idea becomes false the moment one becomes satisfied by it. — Alain
    • There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. — Hannah Arendt
    • If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and ideas and signs that are their representation. — Antonin Artaud
    • You hope, yes,
      your books will excuse you,
      save you from hell…

      — W. H. Auden
    • You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble. — James Baldwin
    • Words come only when everything is over. — Julian Barnes
    • Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. — Samuel Beckett
    • With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worse. Unlessenable least best worse. — Samuel Beckett
    • We live among ideas much more than we live in nature. — Saul Bellow
    • You see, gentlemen, what we call history is the history of the word – and the word is a killer virus… — William S. Burroughs
    • If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself? — Charles Darwin
    • Words are hefty, words are slow, words are too soft or too rigid. — René Daumal
    • There is more certitude in a face than in what is spoken. — Massa Makan Diabate
    • Still, everything that remains visible, speakable, is often the superfluous… The rest remains inside… The more things are intense, the more it becomes difficult for them to appear to the surface in their entirety. — Marguerite Duras
    • A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie. — Umberto Eco
    • The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • Nature is the incarnation of thought. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • The good writer is the one who, every day, buries one word. — Léon-Paul Fargue
    • I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. — Richard Feynman
    • Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom. — Anatole France
    • We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think. — R. Buckminster Fuller
    • When ideas fail, words come in very handy. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • When one is asked to be "realistic" then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts; neither is it really some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Normally it's a recognition of the effects of the systematic threat of violence. — David Graeber
    • What drivel it all is!... A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbors for using a word they don't happen to like. A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach. — Aldous Huxley
    • Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling
    • Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. — Christof Koch
    • The word is not the thing. — Alfred Korzybski
    • I think where I am not; Thus I am where I am not. — Jacques Lacan
    • I think about where I am, there where I don’t think I think. — Jacques Lacan
    • Language uses us as much as we use language. — George Lakoff
    • Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. — George Lakoff
    • Intelligenti pauca (Few words suffice for those who understand). — Latin expression
    • In my view, writing and communicating is about being able to make anyone believe anything. — J. M .G. Le Clézio
    • Both egos and identities, and words and theories are entrapments. Move and live beyond them. — Pier Marton
    • Each word is so full of itself; it assumes we should live by its side. — Pier Marton
    • Why do I still use words?! — Pier Marton
    • Words are slogans too easy. — Pier Marton
    • Words impose their own world the way dictators dictate. — Pier Marton
    • If one survives what is commonly described as “hell,” that word and all words are reduced and relegated to being just hollow utterances, and concessions to miserable conventions. — Pier Marton
    • Even if it is true, it is false. — Henri Michaux
    • Even France after a certain number of years should change its name, by honesty, to free itself from the myth “France.”— Henri Michaux
    • Henri Michaux

      Henri Michaux

    • Be nonviolent in language, judgement and action. — Arne Naess
    • Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.
      There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. — Friedrich Nietzsche
    • It is in the entire body that one finds the mind.— Gao Panlong
    • Everything has been said. No doubt. Were it that words had not changed their meanings; and meanings, their words. — Jean Paulhan
    • Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. — Harold Pinter
    • The mental world lies monumentally. (Le monde mental ment monumentalement.) — Jacques Prévert
    • My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. — Theodore Roethke
    • The meaning of this world consists in seeing all of the meanings one thought one had discovered, fall apart, one after another. — François Roustang
    • Language does not make sense… The fundamental error is to want to understand, when it’s absolutely not about that: it is about language taking us somewhere where something else besides language makes its appearance. — François Roustang
    • The way to understand TV is to shut off the sound. No one remembers any words they hear; the mind is a technicolor movie of images, not words. — Jerry Rubin
    • Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
    • I used to think the mind was the most wonderful organ in the body. Then, I realized who was telling me that. — Bertrand Russel
    • There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. —  Ferdinand de Saussure
    • Words, words, words. — William Shakespeare
    • Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic. — Wallace Stevens
    • Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. — Jonathan Swift
    • In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. — Thomas Szasz
    • Instead of saying “I am going to work,” I would say “I am going to make myself some surprises.” — Paul Valéry (as reported by Robert Bresson)
    • A witty saying proves nothing. —Voltaire
    • If I can think about it that makes it a thing. All things are thinks. — Alan Watts
    • The real war will never get in the books. ― Walt Whitman
    • Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. — Oscar Wilde
    • We were against the power of words, against power. — Gil J Wolman
    • We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body. ― W.B. Yeats
    • I might have thrown poor words away
      And been content to live. — W. B. Yeats
    • Anything that can be articulated lacks importance. — Zhou Zuoren
    • Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him? ― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou
    • Deeper intelligence surrounds the whole, small intelligence discriminates; deeper language is brilliant, small language is verbose. ― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou


While Gustave Flaubert and Ambrose Bierce produced witty dictionaries, this particular effort is not trying to be clever.
It is a kind of physical enterprise, possibly more in line with Roland Barthes’s Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse.


—  BRAQUEPORCHIAU.G. WITTGENSTEIN
[have their own pages of quotes]
with much appreciation for four “macro-thinkers”
Arne Naess, Robert Bresson, Edgar Morin & George Lakoff
and
their much needed sense of perspective.

And for a very clear type of undoing:
AJAHN SUMEDHO

We need a kind of thinking that reconnects that which is disjointed and compartmentalized, that respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdependencies. We need a radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systemic thinking. — Edgar Morin
Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Mutt and Jeff by Al Smith

“Mutt and Jeff” by Al Smith (1942)

A comic in honor of Nasreddin, Nasrudeen, Nasrudin, Nasruddin, Nasr ud-Din, Nasredin, Naseeruddin, Nasr Eddin, Nastradhin, Nasreddine, Nastratin, Nusrettin, Nasrettin, Nostradin, Nastradin and Nazaruddin [the “Hoxha,” “Khwaje,” “Hodja,” “Hoja,” “Hojja,” “Hodscha,” “Hodža,” “Hoca,” “Hogea,” “Mullah,” “Mulla,” “Mula,” “Molla,” “Efendi,” “Afandi,” “Ependi,” (أفندي ’afandī), “Hajji”].



The School’s Quotes
[an earlier version without the so-called “accordion” structure]
– its curriculum –
(without the above “accordions”)

Arrogance—Belief—Culture—Doxa—Lies—Stupidity—Truth—Worship—cf. Difficulty & Knowledge & Thinking & Society
  • Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards… —Nelson Algren
  • The praise he gives to what he professes is only praise to himself.— Ibn ‘Arabi
  • We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things… An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés.— Hannah Arendt
  • Never before, when it is life that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize life. … This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea which is first of all a protest.— Antonin Artaud
  • And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell. —James Baldwin
  • The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items but always the same meaning. — Roland Barthes
  • A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. — Saul Bellow
  • If you are not living on the edge, you’re taking too much room.—Bob Brozman
  • Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.— William Burroughs
  • Stupidity is always stubborn. — Albert Camus
  • The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind.— Albert Camus
  • The reason they call it The American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe.— George Carlin
  • I cannot help the one who has no question.— Confucius
  • The end result is that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the currently visible universe, the vast majority of which cannot be observed with present day technology as they are too faint. — Christopher J. Conselice
  • Let me state once & for all: I do not wish to be civilized. — Arthur Cravan
  • The day humans will understand that animals can think without having recourse to language, we will die of shame for having locked them into zoos and for having humiliated them with our laughter… — Boris Cyrulnik
  • Man is truly the king of all animals; his cruelty surpasses that of all other animals.— Leonardo da Vinci
  • When they inform you, they tell you what you are supposed to believe. — Gilles Deleuze
  • We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The intellectual is for me someone who challenges the principles and the cultured person someone who never does that.— Marguerite Duras
  • We see only the surface of things, we can interpret what lies below anyway we see fit. – Bob Dylan
  • Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. – William Faulkner
  • The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.— Richard Feynman
  • Every one is right from his own standpoint, but it is not impossible that every one is wrong. — Mahatma Gandhi
  • We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to a method of questioning.— Werner Heisenberg
  • In listening to the nightingale, how is it possible not to feel that one is lying? — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture. —Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.— Franz Kafka
  • Repetition is a way of changing people’s brains. — George Lakoff
  • Thought is mostly unconscious. — George Lakoff
  • Principles, systems… weapons to fight against life.— j.m.g. le clézio
  • It is.. well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.— Primo Levi
  • The hoax (and arrogance) of centrality and normalcy.— Pier Marton
  • Polarization is one of the ways we can think we are right; one of humanity’s deadliest disease.— Pier Marton
  • At its worse, culture is the glue that reaffirms, again and again, that we are united by what we venerate; an ensemble of fetishes, rituals and temples, a totalitarian cult endlessly celebrating itself.— Pier Marton
  • Culture validating itself: keep reading and watching. – Pier Marton
  • Words, along with images, conceal much more than they reveal. — Pier Marton
  • We are held hostage by our own words, deadly myths and clichés that they are. — Pier Marton
  • We are much longer dead than alive.— Pier Marton
  • Until I believe it, I can’t see it.— Marshall McLuhan
  • Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.— Terence McKenna
  • The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. —Michel de Montaigne
  • What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all… —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • There are no facts, only interpretations. —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Neither is contradiction a proof of falsehood, nor is the lack of contradiction a form of certitude. — Blaise Pascal
  • To like something, you have to see it or hear it for a long time, you bunch of idiots.— Francis Picabia
  • The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.— Harold Pinter
  • Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open?— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • It is as deadly for the mind to have a system as it is not to have one. One must decide to combine both. — Friedrich von Schlegel
  • The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. — Elvin Semrad
  • All great truths begin as blasphemies. — George Bernard Shaw
  • Nothing proves that humans are any more important than a butterfly or a cow… Personally, I don’t believe that there could be peace in this world as long as animals are treated the way they are today.— Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are. — Thomas Szasz
  • It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.— Mark Twain
  • We, civilizations, now know that we are mortal.— Paul Valéry
Awe—Immediacy—Nothing—Emptiness—Silence—cf. Knowledge & Reality & Thinking
  • Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.— Arab Proverb
  • I prefer when there is silence behind the words.— Aharon Appelfeld
  • The mind that is not baffled is not employed.— Wendell Berry
  • Energy is eternal delight. — William Blake
  • We’re nothing and nothing can help us.—David Bowie
  • To create is first of all to prune.— Robert Bresson
  • Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence. — Robert Bresson
  • It’s always the first time.— Peter Brook
  • Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. — William Burroughs
  • Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.— John Cage
  • Long live nothing since it is the only thing that exists!— Albert Camus
  • A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary,a painter too many colors on his palette,a musician too many notes on his keyboard.— Jean Cocteau
  • The night of truth cut off our speech.— René Daumal
  • He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.— Epicurus
  • Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.— Epicurus
  • No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.― Gorgias
  • The miracle is to walk on the earth. — Thich Nhat Hahn
  • Today having power means knowing what to ignore. — Yuval Noah Harari
  • Putting something into context so it is not news anymore.— Alan Kay
  • To become full, become hollow.— Laozi/Lao Tse
  • If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.— Laozi/Lao Tse
  • Against oblivion, the present is our present.— Pier Marton
  • Nothing else to give:kindness – the highest form of intelligence – and presence.— Pier Marton
  • Once fullness has been taught, emptiness has to be untaught… and animals will do that with you.— Pier Marton
  • After weeks in an intensive care unit, I finally came back to life when, from the deepest place in my body, I found myself shouting “No!” — Pier Marton
  • We can speak… or not. — Pier Marton
  • How good it is to remember one’s insignificance. — Pier Marton (transforming Tolstoy’s question into an affirmation)
  • I would prefer not to.— Herman Melville
  • All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence.— Herman Melville
  • In silence the world which our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.— Thomas Merton
  • It’s always what illuminates that remains in the shadows.— Edgar Morin
  • The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth. — Thích Nhất Hạnh
  • For once on the face of the earth,let’s not speak in any language;let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much…What I want should not be confusedwith total inactivity.Life is what it is about. —Pablo Neruda
  • When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.— Blaise Pascal
  • There is more silence in a human being than can be used in a lifetime.— Max Picard
  • There is no other primary phenomenon that is more present with each instant than silence. — Max Picard
  • The more technique there is, the less there is.— Pablo Picasso
  • For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrifying…— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • True life is absent. We have not been born.— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Let silence take you to the core of life.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • One must always say “no,” one must always oppose what is there; the “no,” to have a perfect conscience of one’s “no,” or of the necessity of the moment when one must say “yes.” But careful, one starts by saying “no,” “no” it’s revolution, it’s change, its “no!” But it seems that it’s the destiny of the “ no,” that it is going to change into a “yes.” And when that happens, one must say one more time, “no.”— José Saramago
  • Substance is what remains when everything you can think of has gone.— Eli Siegel
  • Wisdom starts in wonder. — Socrates
  • After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.— Wallace Stevens
  • Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.— Wallace Stevens
  • Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. — Thomas Szasz
  • Abandon, abandon everything, abandon everything you know. Abandon, abandon, abandon, and do not fear to be left with nothing, for ultimately it is that nothing that sustains you. – Tiziano Terzani
  • To the Creator: high time to return my ticket. […] To your senseless world/I only say: rejection.— Marina Tsvetaïeva
  • When we see what we were on this earth and what we leave behind/Only silence is grand; everything else is weakness.— Alfred de Vigny
  • May you be praised, o silence that surrounds thoughts… — Ilarie Voronca
  • I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen…― Walt Whitman
  • Do anything, but let it produce joy.― Walt Whitman
  • Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.― W.B. Yeats
  • One Measures the Richness of a Human Being Through What He/She Can Live Without.— Zen Saying
Difficulty—Struggle—Adversity—Kindness—Experience—cf. Arrogance & Implosions & Independence& Reality
  • One must always conjugate the verb to resist in the present tense. —Lucie Aubrac
  • To become someone one must have problems, and conquer them.— Tania Balachova
  • Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.— Samuel Beckett
  • Serenity can only be reached through complete despair. —Blaise Cendrars
  • If you are having a difficulty, what you must do is face it.— Ajahn Chah
  • People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one. When nature finally calls, they have no idea where to go and are in a mess. — Ajahn Chah
  • If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground.— Frederick Douglass
  • Always look further down, not higher. — Janina Dyamant Kurland
  • For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • True wisdom, true superiority is not won through fighting but by letting things happen. Plants that resist the wind break while those that bend survive the biggest storms.— Epicurus
  • You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.— Epicurus
  • What is to give light must endure burning. — Victor Frankl
  • When we are no longer able to change our situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.– Victor Frankl
  • The best way out is always through.— Robert Frost
  • No tears in the writer, no tears inthe reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise inthe reader.— Robert Frost
  • Those that live, those are the ones that fight. — Victor Hugo
  • This stumbling block is in your hand. You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble upon them.— Nehunya ben HaKanah,Sepher Ha-Bahir
  • Jacob’s name become “Yisrael” after a most disturbing dream/struggling all night with his conscience/an angel(Hebrew for “God Wrestler” – לִשְׂרות & אֵל)//ezer kenegdo(Hebrew for “Helper Against”- עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ): away from moldy molds, opposition fosters life. An egg needs to be broken… Be against where/what/who you are.— Pier Marton
  • What does not kill you may wound you. — Pier Marton
  • Weakness is a source of strength. — Pier Marton
  • Seek the center of conflict, and treat opponents with the utmost respect.— Arne Naess
  • Find joy in simple things.— Arne Naess
  • Before you know what kindness really is – You must lose things…— Naomi Shehab Nye
  • Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.— José Ortega y Gasset
  • Who is with me is against me.— Francis Picabia.
  • It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • The cure for pain is in the pain.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • If you can do it, then why do it?— Gertrude Stein
  • Rabbi Tarfon taught: The day is short, the work is great…it is not your task to finish the work but neither are you free to exempt yourself from it. — The Talmud/Ethics of the Fathers
  • The dead-alive write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. —Yevginy Zamyatin
Images—Shortcuts—Media—Art—Ideals—Sight—Lies—cf. Arrogance & Reality & Thinking
  • The medias consist of decisions made in advance.— Günther Anders
  • Even though the images show everything, nevertheless there is nothing to see.— Jean Baudrillard
  • … when you take a photograph, you stop looking at what you’ve shot. — John Berger
  • The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.— Henri Bergson
  • Cinema is the art of showing nothing.— Robert Bresson
  • The viewer must abandon the idea of the image.— Robert Bresson
  • Beauty is only beauty if it is new.— Robert Bresson
  • Photography is at the very heart of lying.— Robert Bresson
  • Smash the control images. Smash the control machine. — William Burroughs
  • We live in a rainbow of chaos. — Paul Cézanne
  • Mirrors should reflect twice before sending images back to us.— Jean Cocteau
  • The media asks those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimize it.— Serge Daney
  • Commercial filmmaking can be very clever, but rarely intelligent.— Marguerite Duras
  • For something to become interesting, all one needs to do is look at it long enough.— Gustave Flaubert
  • We declare ourselves irreconcilable with Art since it is intrinsically linked with theology, metaphysics, and mysticism… Death to ART.— Aleksei Gan
  • Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. — Robert Irwin
  • Those who think they are spectators are in fact the spectacle. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Franz Kafka
  • The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. — Dorothea Lange
  • By being a consumer, one gives up on being a producer. Claude Lévy-Strauss
  • There is nothing as beautiful as a key, so long as one does not know what it opens.— Maurice Maeterlinck
  • You may not make images for yourself or for others to worship or for any other purpose.— Moses Maimonides
  • The piano is an instrument that politically needs to be destroyed… One must destroy anything one may have learned. — Bachar Mar-Khalifé
  • Why call it art? Why call it anything!— Pier Marton
  • Henri Michaux
  • Fool, the shadow you perceive is only the reflection of your image. What you search for is nowhere … It has come with you and will stay with you. With you it will leave, if you could only leave! … When I smile, you smile back. And I have often seen your tears when I weep tears… I am burning with love for myself… My riches make me poor. — Ovid
  • Nobody asks what the new technologies will undo.— Neil Postman
  • An artist is always attentive to what s/he does not know.— Pierre Soulages
  • They have eyes but cannot see.— Tehilim
  • SENSORY MASSAGE – Find quote!! U.G.
  • One evening, I sat down Beauty onto my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I insulted her. (Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère. – Et je l’ai injuriée.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Only with the heart does one see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • In order to experience the ground of being, you need to be free from images. That is to say you need to suspend the activity of thinking. — Alan Watts
  • And your very flesh shall be a great poem.― Walt Whitman
  • The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.— Oscar Wilde
  • The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Implosions—Rationality—Understanding—Vocabulary—cf. Difficulty & Knowledge & Independence & Reality
  • If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. — Antonin Artaud
  • Sometimes a little braindamagecan help.— George Carlin
  • The only knowledge which is really alive is the one that expresses itself at its kindling point, bringing about its own destruction.— Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • … the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.— Robert Frost
  • Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.— Robert Frost
  • If you understand me, it is that I did not express myself well.— Jean-Luc Godard
  • We are and we are not.— Heraclitus
  • God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.― Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.— Franz Kafka
  • Truth is what consumes me, I write that. — Imre Kertész
  • The fire that burns me is the one that provides me light. — Étienne de La Boétie
  • If you have understood, surely you are wrong. — Jacques Lacan
  • The arrogance of normalcy, and of that which has not yet imploded.— Pier Marton
  • L’avenir de l’architecture n’est plus architectural.— Jean Nouvel
  • The source of all the heresies is not to be able to conceive the accordance of opposite truths.— Blaise Pascal
  • Who is with me is against me.— Francis Picabia
  • Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.— Pablo Picasso
  • The poet becomes a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all of the senses. (Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.— Arthur Schopenhauer
  • My paintings function as questioning and meditation spaces where the senses and meanings may come together to become undone. (Ma peinture est un espace de questionnement et de méditation où les sens qu’on lui prête peuvent venir se faire et se défaire.— Pierre Soulages (artist of the “outrenoir” – ultrablack)
  • The universe Is under no obligation to make sense to you. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
  • My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of whatI am saying.— U.G.
  • We go to the movies
To blow up the movies
In order to see the movies.— Dziga Vertov
  • Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes. ― Walt Whitman
  • Integral art is only such that at the moment when it involves all the senses, it thus explodes itself.— Gil J Wolman
  • Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…― W.B. Yeats
Independence—Interdependence—Self—Ego—cf. Difficulty& Implosions & Reality & Society
  • The main purpose of the illusion of me is to keep you at all costs from realizing your own nothingness. — Adyashanti
  • We need more far more disturbed followers than we need active followers.— Antonin Artaud
  • To know oneself is an imbecile’s itch.— George Bernanos
  • Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.— John Donne
  • We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. — T.S. Eliot
  • Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.― R. Buckminster Fuller
  • “I,”that’s the end of possibilities. — Romain Gary
  • Life I never can divide, … Inner and outer together you see. … Whole to all I must abide.— Goethe
  • The impostor is the one that sells his appearance and imposes himself onto someone else by using that person’s “funds“ to take care of his own needs. L’imposteur, c’est celui qui vend ses apparences, qui impose (cf. impôt) à l’autre et donc prélève dans la bourse d’autrui pour pouvoir répondre à ses propres besoins. — Roland Gori
  • If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?— Hillel the Elder
  • That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah/teaching; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.— Hillel the Elder
  • Do not imitate anything nor anyone. A lion that imitates a lion becomes a monkey. — Victor Hugo
  • It’s so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.
    To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?
    I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don’t know what I am, but I am not that. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • I have hardly anything in common with myself.– Franz Kafka
  • To become a warrior, every Cohiuano man must leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey, he has to discover, in solitude and silence, who he really is. — Karamakate
  • The poet has no identity.— John Keats
  • It is very hard to remain what I am not. — Imre Kertész
  • A decision is a folly because it is a jump into the unknown and into novelty. One goes from the past into the future through a decision, that is by abandoning the infantile dream of keeping everything.— Soren Kierkegaard
  • You are nobody and yet everything depends on you.— Pier Marton
  • From the get-go, the ego is so self-serving, we gotta to let it go! — Pier Marton
  • I have no more produced this book than this book has produced me.— Michel de Montaigne
  • We tend to confuse self with the narrow ego.— Arne Naess
  • 1.All living beings have intrinsic value.2.The richness and diversity of life has intrisic value.3.Except to satisfyvitalneeds humans do not have the right to reduce this diversity and richness.4.It would be better for humans if there were fewer of them, and much better for other living creatures.5.Today the extent and nature of of human interference in the various systems is not sustainable, and the the lack of sustainability is rising.6.Decisive improvement requires considerable considerable changes: social, economic, technological, and ideological.7.An ideological change would essentially entail seeking a better quality of life rather than a raised standard of living.8.Those who accept the aforementioned points are responsible for trying to contribute directly or indirectly to the necessary changes.— Arne Naess
  • Following is as odious to me, as acting as a guide is.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Become what you are.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Identity is relationship; it is not an essence. — Mona Ozouf
  • Nothing can be done without solitude.— Pablo Picasso
  • You want to heal? Forget you are a human being, become an animal. You would like to feel better? Forget your thoughts, forget you have a will at your disposal and, very simply, accept your status of being a living organism. — François Roustang
  • You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That’s how I hold your voice.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • We are all one – and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way. — Bayard Rustin
  • I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself. —Max Stirner
  • Don’t take your life personally. — Ajahn Sumedho
  • Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with himself.— Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be. — Alan Watts
  • I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.― Walt Whitman
  • Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • The concept of identity is the devil incarnate. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.― W.B. Yeats
Knowledge—Education—Illusions—Unlearning—cf. Arrogance & Awe & Implosions
  • Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.— James Baldwin
  • So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed…
Give your approval to all you cannot understand…
Ask the questions that have no answers.— Wendell Berry
  • There is an age when one teaches what one knows: but thereafter comes another age when one teaches what one does not know: we call it the search. Now comes maybe the age of another experience: that of unlearning, to let the unpredictable reshuffling that forgetfulness imposes onto the layering of knowledges, of cultures and beliefs that one passed through. This experience has, I believe, the illustrious and obsolete name that I will dare uphold, at the crossroads of its etymology: Sapientia.  — Roland Barthes
  • It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
 we have begun our real journey.— Wendell Berry
  • The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.— Daniel Boorstein
  • When something seems “the most obvious thing in the world,” it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.— Bertolt Brecht
  • Sometimes a little brain damage can help.— George Carlin
  • The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.— G.K. Chesterton
  • Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. — Confucius
  • To know—that is the best way to put a stop to the movement of meaning.— Jacques Derrida
  • It’s always in the regions where I don’t understand anything anymore that I go. Do you understand death? A bird? Laughter? — Marguerite Duras
  • Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Nobody gives a damn… At the poetry school, one does not learn. One fights!— Léo Ferré
  • The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.— Richard Feynman
  • The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity’s most pernicious and sterile manias.— Gustave Flaubert
  • To find something that is not part of knowledge but that should be part of it.— Michel Foucault
  • Dear Teachers: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.— Haim G. Ginott
  • Doubt grows with knowledge. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Nothing is more dreadful than active ignorance. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life. — John Holt
  • School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.— Ivan Illich
  • Pataphysics: The Science of Imaginary Solutions.— Alfred Jarry
  • School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.— Alan Kay
  • The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. ― John F. Kennedy
  • We cannot reach the unknown as we pursue the known.— Jean Klein
  • Beware of understanding. — Jacques Lacan
  • Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.— Lao Tzu
  • KnowLEDGE: the educational movement that bring us to thatvertiginous precipice where we need to stand,lost.— Pier Marton
  • Only what is impossible to know (everything) is worth our time. — Pier Marton
  • A whole life is not enough to unlearn, what you, naive subject, you allowed yourself to get stuffed in your head, innocent! – without weighing the consequences.— Henri Michaux
  • Complexity, not complication.— Arne Naess
  • From the mountains, we learn modesty; their size makes us feel small and humble, and so we participate in their greatness.— Arne Naess
  • There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • A knowledgeable ignorance that knows itself. (Une ignorance savante qui se connaît.)— Blaise Pascal
  • If one knows exactly what is about to do, why do it at all?— Pablo Picasso
  • Make for yourself a teacher.— Pirkei Avot/Talmud
  • The moment you know what you’re up to in a profession, you are lost. — Jean Renoir
  • It is to be expected for human beings to go astray; only the insane persist in their error. (C´est le propre de l´homme de se tromper ; seul l´insensé persiste dans son erreur.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Universities are a small, enclosed world, where people have quite tight constraints on what they can think; it’s a kind of culture of a rather narrow, old-fashioned kind, where lots of thoughts are not allowed. — Rupert Sheldrake
  • The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.— Socrates
  • It is what I do that teaches me what I seek. — Pierre Soulages
  • One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset.— Wallace Stevens
  • It is impossible to pass on experience or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say: use your father’s experience! Too easy: each of us must get its own. But once we’ve got it, we no longer have time to use it. And the new generations rightfully refuse to listen to it: they want to live it, but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning: we cannot impose our experience on other people or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience we understand life. — Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Tear off all of the masks, with the skin and the flesh if that is what it takes.— Marina Tsvetaïeva
  • Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. — Mark Twain
  • Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.— U.G.
  • Tell them there is nothing to understand.— U.G.
  • A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of X%#@! tries to unlearn something daily.— Alan Watts
  • One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.— Alan Watts
  • We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance. — John Archibald Wheeler
  • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.— Oscar Wilde
  • Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ― W.B. Yeats
  • A path is made by walking on it.― Zhuangzi
Reality—Living—What Is—No Wishful Thinking—No Hope—cf. Awe & Difficulty & Images & Implosions & Thinking
  • What it is. (shortened from: What it is, what it was, and what it shall be.) — African-American idiom
  • A dream becomes a dream only when you wake up; only then do you tell others that the life you lived in the dream was just a dream. Good or bad, happy or unhappy, in reality the dream is then recognized as having been absolutely nothing. — Meher Baba
  • The essence of normalcy is the refusal of reality.— Ernst Becker
  • His writing is not about something, his writing is that something itself.— Samuel Beckett
  • There comes a longing… never to travel again except on foot.— Wendell Berry
  • To have a free head: to be present.— Georges Braque
  • Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet.— Bertolt Brecht
  • Give time to time.— Miguel de Cervantes
  • human kind/Cannot bear very much reality — T.S. Eliot
  • Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.— Max Frisch
  • When I use the word “body,” I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside. — Eugene Gendlin
  • The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated, reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle this confusion, we ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, orbecause we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good. And because we unplugged ourselves from reality, we elected a president who insists that reality is whatever he claims it to be.— Chris Hedges
  • Once we have revolutionized the kingdom of ideas, reality can no longer resist.— Georg W. F. Hegel
  • What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg
  • And in the how, there lies the whole difference. — Hugo von Hoffmansthal
  • Shitr(Merdrein French) — Alfred Jarry
  • Is there life before death?—Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • True reality is always unrealistic.— Franz Kafka
  • In the fight between you and the world, back the world.— Franz Kafka
  • Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. — John Keats
  • Whatever you say it is, it isn’t.— Alfred Korzybski
  • Is there life after birth?— Tuli Kupferberg
  • The real is when we bruise.– Jacques Lacan
  • The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of.— George Lakoff
  • What there is is all there is (and to demand more is ludicrous).— J.M.G. Le Clézio
  • Against oblivion, the present is our present.— Pier Marton
  • Through myths, wishful thinking, transference, projections and entropy, we wander… will kindness lessen the damage?— Pier Marton
  • Life demands to be lived.— Pier Marton
  • Our spontaneous experience is far richer than any abstractions about it.— Arne Naess
  • Every event has many descriptions and aspects.— Arne Naess
  • We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. — Anaïs Nin
  • While unable to heal death, misery and ignorance, human beings decided in order to be happy not to think about any of this.— Blaise Pascal
  • I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly. — Sylvia Plath
  • I am what I am, and that’s all that I am. — Popeye
  • When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in state of unconsciousness.— Antonio Porchia
  • Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.— Robert Rauschenberg
  • Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Action is not life, but just a way to waste some energy, a nervous irritation. (L’action n’est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • One does not leave. – Let’s take the local roads again. (On ne part pas. – Reprenons les chemins d’ici.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • The irrepressible vigor of that seed that says “I am alive.” — François Roustang
  • There is no domain to add. When one is human, one has everything, spirituality, religion… and it’s not worth speaking about it. Everything works together. — François Roustang
  • You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • We have three choices in life: to kill ourselves, go crazy, or learn to live with what we have in life. — Elvin Semrad
  • True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. ― Seneca
  • Reality is a cliché.— Wallace Stevens
  • I Am that I Am (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, ehyeh asher ehyeh) — Torah (Jewish Bible)
  • The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.― Alan Watts
  • Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.— Alan Watts
  • I exist as I am, that is enough.― Walt Whitman
Society—Normalcy—Consensus—Politics—cf. Arrogance & Independence
  • If you have come here to help me, then don’t waste your time. But if you have come here, because your liberation is bound up with mine, then come, let us join in the struggle together.— Australian Aborigine Activists
  • You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.— Wendell Berry
  • I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. — William Blake
  • Sound, it’s spoken words, and the appearance of being intelligent. — Alain Cavalier
  • Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T.S. Eliot
  • The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • I took the one less traveled by.And that has made all the difference.— Robert Frost
  • We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. — Stephen Hawking
  • The politicians, the priests, the teachers, the readers of the soulhave created that language through which they could steal my story and my experience away from me.— Imre Kertész
  • There are some things in our society and some thingsin our world for which I am proud to be maladjusted, and I call for all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things… I believe firmly that our world is in dire need of a new organization – the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.— Martin Luther King, Jr
  • Tyrants only appear to be tall because we are on our knees. — Étienne de La Boétie
  • Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. To submit it to the individual discussion is to destroy it; it is given life only through the national mind, that is to say, by political faith, which is a creed.— Joseph de Maistre
  • More wishful thinking: to appreciate, a verb that needs to be conjugated in the present tense. — Pier Marton
  • I declare a state of permanent happiness
  • And the right for everyone to all the privileges.
    I say that suffering is a sacrilege
    When there are roses and rich bread for everyone.
    I contest the legitimacy of wars,
    Justice that kills and death that punishes. — Georges Moustaki
  • The quality of our experience depends on our choice of norms.— Arne Naess
  • Do you want an easy life? Remain always close to the herd, and forget yourself in it.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed, all in the name of public utility and the general good. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  • Regardless of how stupid their existence may be, human beings remain attached to it. (Si stupide que soit son existence, l’homme s’y rattache toujours.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • It is false to say: I think. One should say: “I am being thought. (C’est faux de dire : Je pense. On devrait dire : On me pense.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Freedom can only be all freedom; a bit of freedom is not freedom.— Max Stirner
  • Every institution is inherently demonic. — Paul Tillich
  • Nature is busy creating unique individuals whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.— U.G.
  • Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding.— Paul Valéry
  • Crush the infamy.— Voltaire
  • Resist much, obey little.― Walt Whitman
  • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.— Oscar Wilde
  • One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.— Virginia Woolf
Thinking—Words—Concepts—Myths—Truth—Violence—cf. Arrogance & Reality & Awe & Images & Implosions
  • An idea becomes false the moment one becomes satisfied by it.— Alain
  • There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.— Hannah Arendt
  • If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and ideas and signs that are their representation. — Antonin Artaud All true language is
  • You hope, yes,your books will excuse you,save you from hell…
— W. H. Auden
  • You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.— James Baldwin
  • We live among ideas much more than we live in nature. – Saul Bellow
  • You see, gentlemen, what we call history is the history of the word – and the word is a killer virus…— William S. Burroughs
  • If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself?— Charles Darwin
  • Words are hefty, words are slow, words are too soft or too rigid. — René Daumal
  • A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie.— Umberto Eco
  • The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Nature is the incarnation of thought.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.— Richard Feynman
  • Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom.— Anatole France
  • We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.— R. Buckminster Fuller
  • When ideas fail, words come in very handy.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. – Rudyard Kipling
  • Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something.— Christof Koch
  • The word is not the thing.— Alfred Korzybski
  • I think where I am not; Thus I am where I am not. — Jacques Lacan
  • I think about where I am, there where I don’t think I think. — Jacques Lacan
  • Language uses us as much as we use language. — George Lakoff
  • Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. — George Lakoff
  • Each word is so full of itself; it assumes we should live by its side.— Pier Marton
  • Why do I still use words?! — Pier Marton
  • Words are too easy. — Pier Marton
  • If one survives what is commonly described as “hell,” that word and all words are reduced and relegated to being just hollow utterances, and concessions to miserable conventions. — Pier Marton
  • Even if it is true, it is false.— Henri Michaux
  • Even France after a certain number of years should change its name, by honesty, to free itself from the myth “France.”— Henri Michaux
  • Henri Michaux
  • Be nonviolent in language, judgement and action.— Arne Naess
  • Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • It is in the entire body that one finds the mind.— Gao Panlong
  • Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.— Harold Pinter
  • When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in state of unconsciousness. — Porchia (with his own page)
  • The mental world lies monumentally. (Le monde mental ment monumentalement.)— Jacques Prévert
  • My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue.— Theodore Roethke
  • The meaning of this world consists in seeing all of the meanings one thought one had discovered, fall apart, one after another. — François Roustang
  • Language does not make sense… The fundamental error is to want to understand, when it’s absolutely not about that: it is about language taking us somewhere where something else besides language makes its appearance.— François Roustang
  • The way to understand TV is to shut off the sound. No one remembers any words they hear; the mind is a technicolor movie of images, not words.— Jerry Rubin
  • Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • I used to think the mind was the most wonderful organ in the body. Then, I realized who was telling me that.— Bertrand Russell
  • There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.— Ferdinand de Saussure
  • Words, words, words. — William Shakespeare
  • Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.— Wallace Stevens
  • In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. — Thomas Szasz
  • Instead of saying “I am going to work,” I would say “I am going to make myself some surprises.”— Paul Valéry (as reported by Robert Bresson)
  • A witty saying proves nothing.—Voltaire
  • If I can think about it that makes it a thing. All things are thinks. — Alan Watts
  • The real war will never get in the books.― Walt Whitman
  • Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.— Oscar Wilde
  • We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.― W.B. Yeats
  • Anything that can be articulated lacks importance.— Zhou Zuoren
  • Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him?― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou
  • Deeper intelligence surrounds the whole, small intelligence discriminates; deeper language is brilliant, small language is verbose. ― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou

 

UPDATE to be edited into above text!

Arrogance—Belief—Culture—Doxa—Lies—Stupidity—Truth—Worship—cf. Difficulty & Knowledge & Thinking & Society
  • Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards… —Nelson Algren
  • The praise he gives to what he professes is only praise to himself.— Ibn ‘Arabi
  • We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things… An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés.— Hannah Arendt
  • Never before, when it is life that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize life. … This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea which is first of all a protest.— Antonin Artaud
  • And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell. —James Baldwin
  • The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items but always the same meaning. — Roland Barthes
  • A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. — Saul Bellow
  • One must forget. — Robert Bresson
  • If you are not living on the edge, you’re taking too much room.—Bob Brozman
  • Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.— William Burroughs
  • Stupidity is always stubborn. — Albert Camus
  • The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind.— Albert Camus
  • The reason they call it The American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe.— George Carlin
  •  I cannot help the one who has no question.— Confucius
  • The end result is that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the currently visible universe, the vast majority of which cannot be observed with present day technology as they are too faint. — Christopher J. Conselice
  • Let me state once & for all: I do not wish to be civilized. — Arthur Cravan
  • The day humans will understand that animals can think without having recourse to language, we will die of shame for having locked them into zoos and for having humiliated them with our laughter… — Boris Cyrulnik
  • Man is truly the king of all animals; his cruelty surpasses that of all other animals.— Leonardo da Vinci
  • When they inform you, they tell you what you are supposed to believe.  — Gilles Deleuze
  • We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The intellectual is for me someone who challenges the principles and the cultured person someone who never does that.— Marguerite Duras
  • We see only the surface of things, we can interpret what lies below anyway we see fit. – Bob Dylan
  • All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. – Bob Dylan
  • Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. — Frantz Fanon
  • Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. – William Faulkner
  • The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.— Richard Feynman
  • Every one is right from his own standpoint, but it is not impossible that every one is wrong. — Mahatma Gandhi
  • We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to a method of questioning.— Werner Heisenberg
  • In listening to the nightingale, how is it possible not to feel that one is lying? — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture. —Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.— Franz Kafka
  • Repetition is a way of changing people’s brains. — George Lakoff
  • Thought is mostly unconscious. — George Lakoff
  • Principles, systems… weapons to fight against life.— j.m.g. le clézio
  • It is.. well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.— Primo Levi
  • The world began without man and it will end without him. — Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • The hoax (and arrogance) of centrality and normalcy.— Pier Marton
  • Polarization is one of the ways we can think we are right; one of humanity’s deadliest disease.— Pier Marton
  • At its worse, culture is the glue that reaffirms, again and again, that we are united by what we venerate; an ensemble of fetishes, rituals and temples, a totalitarian cult endlessly celebrating itself.— Pier Marton
  • Culture validating itself: keep reading and watching. – Pier Marton
  • Words, along with images, conceal much more than they reveal. — Pier Marton
  • We are held hostage by our own words, deadly myths and clichés that they are. — Pier Marton
  • We are much longer dead than alive.— Pier Marton
  • Until I believe it, I can’t see it.— Marshall McLuhan
  • Unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.— Terence McKenna
  • The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. —Michel de Montaigne
  • What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all… —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • There are no facts, only interpretations. —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Neither is contradiction a proof of falsehood, nor is the lack of contradiction a form of certitude.  — Blaise Pascal
  • To like something, you have to see it or hear it for a long time, you bunch of idiots.— Francis Picabia
  • The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.— Harold Pinter
  • Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open?— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • It is as deadly for the mind to have a system as it is not to have one. One must decide to combine both. — Friedrich von Schlegel
  • The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. — Elvin Semrad
  • All great truths begin as blasphemies. — George Bernard Shaw
  • Nothing proves that humans are any more important than a butterfly or a cow… Personally, I don’t believe that there could be peace in this world as long as animals are treated the way they are today.— Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • The system isn’t stupid, but the people in it are. — Thomas Szasz
  • It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.— Mark Twain
  • We, civilizations, now know that we are mortal.— Paul Valéry
Awe—Immediacy—Nothing—Emptiness—Silence—cf. Knowledge & Reality & Thinking
  • Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.— Arab Proverb
  • I prefer when there is silence behind the words.— Aharon Appelfeld
  • Nothing is more real than nothing. – Samuel Beckett
  • Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. ― Samuel Beckett,
  • The mind that is not baffled is not employed.— Wendell Berry
  • Energy is eternal delight. — William Blake
  • We’re nothing and nothing can help us.—David Bowie
  • To create is first of all to prune.— Robert Bresson
  • Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence. — Robert Bresson
  •  It’s always the first time.— Peter Brook
  • We rush full speed on this Earth with one single thought, all of us: fight the giant wall, you know, the wall of nothingness with a limitless height, width and power, this wall which entraps us, whence we come, where we go. We would like to pierce through it, scale it, see through it, we set up our flimsy ladders, we throw our cannon balls, our hooks. No use… We throw ourselves, often weapon in hand, into invisible vertigoes and ghostly vortices. Lost in advance. Nothingness is nothingness. —Luis Buñuel (through Jean-Claude Carrière)
  • Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. — William Burroughs
  • Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.— John Cage
  • Long live nothing since it is the only thing that exists!— Albert Camus
  • Nothing left to do. It is always too late. — Jean-Claude Carrière
  • A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary,a painter too many colors on his palette,a musician too many notes on his keyboard.— Jean Cocteau
  • The night of truth cut off our speech.— René Daumal
  • Deep down, he’s shallow. — Peter De Vries
  • Everywhere there will be nothing, read that I love you.— Denis Diderot in a letter.
  • He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.— Epicurus
  • Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.— Epicurus
  • No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.― Gorgias
  • The miracle is to walk on the earth.  — Thich Nhat Hahn
  • Today having power means knowing what to ignore.  — Yuval Noah Harari
  • Putting something into context so it is not news anymore.— Alan Kay
  • To become full, become hollow.— Laozi/Lao Tse
  • If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.— Laozi/Lao Tse
  • Against oblivion, the present is our present.— Pier Marton
  • Nothing else to give:kindness – the highest form of intelligence – and presence.— Pier Marton
  • Once fullness has been taught, emptiness has to be untaught… and animals will do that with you.— Pier Marton
  • After weeks in an intensive care unit, I finally came back to life when, from the deepest place in my body, I found myself shouting “No!” — Pier Marton
  • We can speak… or not. — Pier Marton
  • There is not a big difference between everything and nothing. — Pier Marton
  • How good it is to remember one’s insignificance. — Pier Marton (transforming Tolstoy’s question into an affirmation)
  • I would prefer not to.— Herman Melville
  • All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence.— Herman Melville
  • In silence the world which our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.— Thomas Merton
  • It’s always what illuminates that remains in the shadows.— Edgar Morin
  • The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth. — Thích Nhất Hạnh
  • For once on the face of the earth,let’s not speak in any language;let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much…What I want should not be confusedwith total inactivity.Life is what it is about. —Pablo Neruda
  • When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.— Blaise Pascal
  • There is more silence in a human being than can be used in a lifetime.— Max Picard
  • There is no other primary phenomenon that is more present with each instant than silence. — Max Picard
  • The more technique there is, the less there is.— Pablo Picasso
  • For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrifying…— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • True life is absent. We have not been born.— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Let silence take you to the core of life.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • The quieter you become,  the more you are able to hear.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • One must always say “no,” one must always oppose what is there; the “no,” to have a perfect conscience of one’s “no,” or of the necessity of the moment when one must say “yes.” But careful, one starts by saying “no,”  “no” it’s revolution, it’s change, its “no!” But it seems that it’s the destiny of the “ no,” that it is going to change into a “yes.” And when that happens, one must say one more time, “no.”— José Saramago
  • Substance is what remains when everything you can think of has gone.— Eli Siegel
  • Wisdom starts in wonder. — Socrates
  • It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. ― Gertrude Stein
  • After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.— Wallace Stevens
  • Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.— Wallace Stevens
  • Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. — Thomas Szasz
  • Abandon, abandon everything, abandon everything you know. Abandon, abandon, abandon, and do not fear to be left with nothing, for ultimately it is that nothing that sustains you. – Tiziano Terzani
  • To the Creator: high time to return my ticket. […] To your senseless world/I only say: rejection.— Marina Tsvetaïeva
  • When we see what we were on this earth and what we leave behind/Only silence is grand; everything else is weakness.— Alfred de Vigny
  • May you be praised, o silence that surrounds thoughts…  — Ilarie Voronca
  • I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen…― Walt Whitman
  • Do anything, but let it produce joy.― Walt Whitman
  • I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about. ― Oscar Wilde
  • Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.― W.B. Yeats
  • One Measures the Richness of a Human Being Through What He/She Can Live Without.— Zen Saying
Difficulty—Struggle—Adversity—Kindness—Experience—cf. Arrogance & Implosions & Independence& Reality
  • One must always conjugate the verb to resist in the present tense. —Lucie Aubrac
  • To become someone one must have problems, and conquer them.— Tania Balachova
  • Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.— Samuel Beckett
  • Serenity can only be reached through complete despair. —Blaise Cendrars
  • If you are having a difficulty, what you must do is face it.— Ajahn Chah
  • People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one. When nature finally calls, they have no idea where to go and are in a mess. — Ajahn Chah
  • If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground.— Frederick Douglass
  • Always look further down, not higher. — Janina Dyamant Kurland
  • For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • True wisdom, true superiority is not won through fighting but by letting things happen. Plants that resist the wind break while those that bend survive the biggest storms.— Epicurus
  • You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.— Epicurus
  • What is to give light must endure burning. — Victor Frankl
  • When we are no longer able to change our situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.– Victor Frankl
  • The best way out is always through.— Robert Frost
  • No tears in the writer, no tears inthe reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise inthe reader.— Robert Frost
  • In such condition (life in the state of nature), there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — Thomas Hobbes
  • Those that live, those are the ones that fight. — Victor Hugo
  • What makes night within us may leave stars within us. — Victor Hugo
  • This stumbling block is in your hand. You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble upon them.— Nehunya ben HaKanah,Sepher Ha-Bahir
  • Jacob’s name become “Yisrael” after a most disturbing dream/struggling all night with his conscience/an angel(Hebrew for “God Wrestler” – לִשְׂרות & אֵל)//ezer kenegdo(Hebrew for “Helper Against”- עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ): away from moldy molds, opposition fosters life. An egg needs to be broken… Be against where/what/who you are.— Pier Marton
  • What does not kill you may wound you. — Pier Marton
  • Weakness is a source of strength. — Pier Marton
  • Seek the center of conflict, and treat opponents with the utmost respect.— Arne Naess
  • Find joy in simple things.— Arne Naess
  • Before you know what kindness really is – You must lose things…— Naomi Shehab Nye
  • Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.— José Ortega y Gasset
  • Who is with me is against me.— Francis Picabia.
  • It is clear that we must embrace struggle.  Every living thing conforms to it.  Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.  We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us.  It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy.  The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • The cure for pain is in the pain.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. — Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • If you can do it, then why do it?— Gertrude Stein
  • Rabbi Tarfon taught: The day is short, the work is great…it is not your task to finish the work but neither are you free to exempt yourself from it. — The Talmud/Ethics of the Fathers
  • My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. — U.G.
  • The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. — Kurt Vonnegut
  • The dead-alive write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. —Yevginy Zamyatin
Images—Shortcuts—Media—Art—Ideals—Sight—Lies—cf. Arrogance & Reality & Thinking
  • The medias consist of decisions made in advance.— Günther Anders
  • Even though the images show everything, nevertheless there is nothing to see.— Jean Baudrillard
  • … when you take a photograph, you stop looking at what you’ve shot. — John Berger
  • The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.— Henri Bergson
  • Cinema is the art of showing nothing.— Robert Bresson
  • The viewer must abandon the idea of the image.— Robert Bresson
  • Beauty is only beauty if it is new.— Robert Bresson
  • Photography is at the very heart of lying.— Robert Bresson
  • I look at things and people but I do not think of giving myself a title. — Robert Bresson
  • Smash the control images. Smash the control machine. — William Burroughs
  • (In “The Film You Don’t See”) How do you create a visible image? — Jean-Claude Carrière
  • We live in a rainbow of chaos. — Paul Cézanne
  • Mirrors should reflect twice before sending images back to us.— Jean Cocteau
  • The media asks those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimize it.— Serge Daney
  • Et pourtant, tout ce qui reste visible , dicible, c’est souvent le superflu… Le reste demeure à l’intérieur… Plus les choses sont intenses, plus il leur devient difficile d’ affleurer dans leur entièreté.
  • Commercial filmmaking can be very clever, but rarely intelligent.— Marguerite Duras
  • For something to become interesting, all one needs to do is look at it long enough.— Gustave Flaubert
  • We declare ourselves irreconcilable with Art since it is intrinsically linked with theology, metaphysics, and mysticism… Death to ART.— Aleksei Gan
  • It is impossible to express the beauty in words. The art of painting is dead for this is life itself or something higher, if we could find a word for it – Constantin Huygens after seeing an image in a camera obscura (1622)
  • Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. — Robert Irwin
  • Those who think they are spectators are in fact the spectacle. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Franz Kafka
  • The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. — Dorothea Lange
  • By being a consumer, one gives up on being a producer. Claude Lévy-Strauss
  • There is nothing as beautiful as a key, so long as one does not know what it opens.— Maurice Maeterlinck
  • You may not make images for yourself or for others to worship or for any other purpose.— Moses Maimonides
  • The piano is an instrument that politically needs to be destroyed… One must destroy anything one may have learned. — Bachar Mar-Khalifé
  • Why call it art? Why call it anything!— Pier Marton
  • Henri Michaux
  • The world, essentially, is not what we call “real.”  The arts are attempting to approach that world.  — Arthur Miller
  • Fool, the shadow you perceive is only the reflection of your image. What you search for is nowhere … It has come with you and will stay with you. With you it will leave, if you could only leave! … When I smile, you smile back. And I have often seen your tears when I weep tears… I am burning with love for myself… My riches make me poor. — Ovid
  • Nobody asks what the new technologies will undo.— Neil Postman
  • Photography lies. — Auguste Rodin
  • An artist is always attentive to what s/he does not know.— Pierre Soulages
  • They have eyes but cannot see.— Tehilim
  • SENSORY MASSAGE – Find quote!! U.G.
  • One evening, I sat down Beauty onto my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I insulted her. (Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère. – Et je l’ai injuriée.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Only with the heart does one see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • In order to experience the ground of being, you need to be free from images. That is to say you need to suspend the activity of thinking. — Alan Watts
  • And your very flesh shall be a great poem.― Walt Whitman
  • The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.— Oscar Wilde
  • The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Implosions—Rationality—Understanding—Vocabulary—cf. Difficulty & Knowledge & Independence & Reality
  • If there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. — Antonin Artaud
  • Sometimes a little braindamagecan help.— George Carlin
  • The only knowledge which is really alive is the one that expresses itself at its kindling point, bringing about its own destruction.— Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • … the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.— Robert Frost
  • Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.— Robert Frost
  • If you understand me, it is that I did not express myself well.— Jean-Luc Godard
  • We are and we are not.— Heraclitus
  • God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.― Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.— Franz Kafka
  • Truth is what consumes me, I write that. — Imre Kertész
  • The fire that burns me is the one that provides me light. — Étienne de La Boétie
  • If you have understood, surely you are wrong. — Jacques Lacan
  • The arrogance of normalcy, and of that which has not yet imploded.— Pier Marton
  • L’avenir de l’architecture n’est plus architectural.— Jean Nouvel
  • The source of all the heresies is not to be able to conceive the accordance of opposite truths.— Blaise Pascal
  • To poke fun of philosophy is to be a true philosophizer. — Blaise Pascal
  • Who is with me is against me.— Francis Picabia
  • Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.— Pablo Picasso
  • The poet becomes a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all of the senses.  (Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.— Arthur Schopenhauer
  • My paintings function as questioning and meditation spaces where the senses and meanings may come together to become undone. (Ma peinture est un espace de questionnement et de méditation où les sens qu’on lui prête peuvent venir se faire et se défaire.— Pierre Soulages (artist of the “outrenoir” – ultrablack)
  • The universe Is under no obligation to make sense to you. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
  • My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of whatI am saying.— U.G.
  • Just tell them, there is nothing to understand. — U.G.
  • We go to the movies
To blow up the movies
In order to see the movies.— Dziga Vertov
  • Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes. ― Walt Whitman
  • Integral art is only such that at the moment when it involves all the senses, it thus explodes itself.— Gil J Wolman
  • Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…― W.B. Yeats
Independence—Interdependence—Self—Ego—cf. Difficulty& Implosions & Reality & Society
  • The main purpose of the illusion of me is to keep you at all costs from realizing your own nothingness. — Adyashanti
  • We need more far more disturbed followers than we need active followers.— Antonin Artaud
  • To know oneself is an imbecile’s itch.— George Bernanos
  • One does not truly know oneself until one is confronted with obstacles. — Albert Camus
  • Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.— John Donne
  • We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison. — T.S. Eliot
  • Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.― R. Buckminster Fuller
  • “I,”that’s the end of possibilities. — Romain Gary
  • Life I never can divide, … Inner and outer together you see. … Whole to all I must abide.— Goethe
  • The impostor is the one that sells his appearance and imposes himself onto someone else by using that person’s “funds“ to take care of his own needs.   L’imposteur, c’est celui qui vend ses apparences, qui impose (cf. impôt) à l’autre et donc prélève dans la bourse d’autrui pour pouvoir répondre à ses propres besoins. — Roland Gori
  • If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?— Hillel the Elder
  • That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah/teaching; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.— Hillel the Elder
  • Do not imitate anything nor anyone. A lion that imitates a lion becomes a monkey. — Victor Hugo
  • It’s so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.
    To have hands, to have fingers, is weird. Real life is weird, to have fingers?
    I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don’t know what I am, but I am not that. — Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • I have hardly anything in common with myself.– Franz Kafka
  • To become a warrior, every Cohiuano man must leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey, he has to discover, in solitude and silence, who he really is. — Karamakate
  • The poet has no identity.— John Keats
  • It is very hard to remain what I am not. — Imre Kertész
  • A decision is a folly because it is a jump into the unknown and into novelty. One goes from the past into the future through a decision, that is by abandoning the infantile dream of keeping everything.— Soren Kierkegaard
  • You are nobody and yet everything depends on you.— Pier Marton
  • From the get-go, the ego is so self-serving, we gotta to let it go! — Pier Marton
  • Idolatry starts with “I.”— Pier Marton
  • I have no more produced this book than this book has produced me.— Michel de Montaigne
  • We tend to confuse self with the narrow ego.— Arne Naess
  • 1.All living beings have intrinsic value.2.The richness and diversity of life has intrisic value.3.Except to satisfyvitalneeds humans do not have the right to reduce this diversity and richness.4.It would be better for humans if there were fewer of them, and much better for other living creatures.5.Today the extent and nature of of human interference in the various systems is not sustainable, and the the lack of sustainability is rising.6.Decisive improvement requires considerable considerable changes: social, economic, technological, and ideological.7.An ideological change would essentially entail seeking a better quality of life rather than a raised standard of living.8.Those who accept the aforementioned points are responsible for trying to contribute directly or indirectly to the necessary changes.— Arne Naess
  • Following is as odious to me, as acting as a guide is.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Become what you are.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Identity is relationship; it is not an essence. — Mona Ozouf
  • Nothing can be done without solitude.— Pablo Picasso
  • We are the others.  — Yasmina Reza
  • To be an adult is to be alone. — Jean Rostand
  • You want to heal? Forget you are a human being, become an animal. You would like to feel better? Forget your thoughts, forget you have a will at your disposal and, very simply, accept your status of being a living organism. — François Roustang
  • You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That’s how I hold your voice.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • We are all one – and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way. — Bayard Rustin
  • I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself. —Max Stirner
  • Don’t take your life personally. — Ajahn Sumedho
  • Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with himself.— Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be. — Alan Watts
  • I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.― Walt Whitman
  • Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • The concept of identity is the devil incarnate. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.― W.B. Yeats
Knowledge—Education—Illusions—Unlearning—cf. Arrogance & Awe & Implosions
  • Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.— James Baldwin
  • So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed…
Give your approval to all you cannot understand…
Ask the questions that have no answers.— Wendell Berry
  • It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
 we have begun our real journey.— Wendell Berry
  • The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.— Daniel Boorstein
  • When something seems “the most obvious thing in the world,” it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.— Bertolt Brecht
  • Sometimes a little brain damage can help.— George Carlin
  • The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.— G.K. Chesterton
  • Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. — Confucius
  • To know—that is the best way to put a stop to the movement of meaning.— Jacques Derrida
  • It’s always in the regions where I don’t understand anything anymore that I go. Do you understand death? A bird? Laughter? — Marguerite Duras
  • Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Nobody gives a damn… At the poetry school, one does not learn. One fights!— Léo Ferré
  • The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.— Richard Feynman
  • The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity’s most pernicious and sterile manias.— Gustave Flaubert
  • To find something that is not part of knowledge but that should be part of it.— Michel Foucault
  • Dear Teachers: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.— Haim G. Ginott
  • Doubt grows with knowledge. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Nothing is more dreadful than active ignorance. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life. — John Holt
  • School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.— Ivan Illich
  • Pataphysics: The Science of Imaginary Solutions.— Alfred Jarry
  • School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.— Alan Kay
  • The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. ― John F. Kennedy
  • We cannot reach the unknown as we pursue the known.— Jean Klein
  • Beware of understanding. — Jacques Lacan
  • Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.— Lao Tzu
  • KnowLEDGE: the educational movement that bring us to thatvertiginous precipice where we need to stand,lost.— Pier Marton
  • To understand means to stand under – to be overwhelmed by reality. — Pier Marton
  • Only what is impossible to know (everything) is worth our time. — Pier Marton
  • A whole life is not enough to unlearn, what you, naive subject, you allowed yourself to get stuffed in your head, innocent! – without weighing the consequences.— Henri Michaux
  • Complexity, not complication.— Arne Naess
  • From the mountains, we learn modesty; their size makes us feel small and humble, and so we participate in their greatness.— Arne Naess
  • There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • A knowledgeable ignorance that knows itself. (Une ignorance savante qui se connaît.)— Blaise Pascal
  • If one knows exactly what is about to do, why do it at all?— Pablo Picasso
  • Make for yourself a teacher.— Pirkei Avot/Talmud
  • The moment you know what you’re up to in a profession, you are lost.  — Jean Renoir
  • It is to be expected for human beings to go astray; only the insane persist in their error. (C´est le propre de l´homme de se tromper ; seul l´insensé persiste dans son erreur.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Universities are a small, enclosed world, where people have quite tight constraints on what they can think; it’s a kind of culture of a rather narrow, old-fashioned kind, where lots of thoughts are not allowed. — Rupert Sheldrake
  • The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.— Socrates
  • It is what I do that teaches me what I seek. — Pierre Soulages
  • One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset.— Wallace Stevens
  • It is impossible to pass on experience or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say: use your father’s experience! Too easy: each of us must get its own. But once we’ve got it, we no longer have time to use it.  And the new generations rightfully refuse to listen to it: they want to live it, but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning:  we cannot impose our experience on other people or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience we understand life.  — Andrei Tarkovsky
  • Tear off all of the masks, with the skin and the flesh if that is what it takes.— Marina Tsvetaïeva
  • Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. — Mark Twain
  • Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion.— U.G.
  • A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of X%#@! tries to unlearn something daily.— Alan Watts
  • One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.— Alan Watts
  • We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance. — John Archibald Wheeler
  • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.— Oscar Wilde
  • Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ― W.B. Yeats
  • A path is made by walking on it.― Zhuangzi
Reality—Living—What Is—No Wishful Thinking—No Hope—cf. Awe & Difficulty & Images & Implosions & Thinking
  • What it is. (shortened from: What it is, what it was, and what it shall be.) — African-American idiom
  • A dream becomes a dream only when you wake up; only then do you tell others that the life you lived in the dream was just a dream. Good or bad, happy or unhappy, in reality the dream is then recognized as having been absolutely nothing. — Meher Baba
  • The essence of normalcy is the refusal of reality.— Ernst Becker
  • His writing is not about something, his writing is that something itself.— Samuel Beckett
  • There comes a longing… never to travel again except on foot.— Wendell Berry
  • To have a free head: to be present.— Georges Braque
  • Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet.— Bertolt Brecht
  • Give time to time.— Miguel de Cervantes
  • human kind/Cannot bear very much reality — T.S. Eliot
  • Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.— Max Frisch
  • When I use the word “body,” I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside. — Eugene Gendlin
  • The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated, reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle this confusion, we ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, orbecause we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good. And because we unplugged ourselves from reality, we elected a president who insists that reality is whatever he claims it to be.— Chris Hedges
  • Once we have revolutionized the kingdom of ideas, reality can no longer resist.— Georg W. F. Hegel
  • What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg
  • And in the how, there lies the whole difference. — Hugo von Hoffmansthal
  • Shitr(Merdrein French) — Alfred Jarry
  • Is there life before death?—Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • True reality is always unrealistic.— Franz Kafka
  • In the fight between you and the world, back the world.— Franz Kafka
  • Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. — John Keats
  • Whatever you say it is, it isn’t.— Alfred Korzybski
  • Is there life after birth?— Tuli Kupferberg
  • The real is when we bruise.– Jacques Lacan
  • The brain is not neutral; it is not a general-purpose device. It comes with a structure, and our understanding of the world is limited to what our brains can make sense of.— George Lakoff
  • What there is is all there is (and to demand more is ludicrous).— J.M.G. Le Clézio
  • Against oblivion, the present is our present.— Pier Marton
  • Through myths, wishful thinking, transference, projections and entropy, we wander… will kindness lessen the damage?— Pier Marton
  • Life demands to be lived.— Pier Marton
  • Our spontaneous experience is far richer than any abstractions about it.— Arne Naess
  • Every event has many descriptions and aspects.— Arne Naess
  • We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. — Anaïs Nin
  • While unable to heal death, misery and ignorance, human beings decided in order to be happy not to think about any of this.— Blaise Pascal
  • I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly. — Sylvia Plath
  • I am what I am, and that’s all that I am. — Popeye
  • When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in state of unconsciousness.— Antonio Porchia
  • Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.— Robert Rauschenberg
  • Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.— Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Action is not life, but just a way to waste some energy, a nervous irritation. (L’action n’est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • One does not leave. – Let’s take the local roads again. (On ne part pas. – Reprenons les chemins d’ici.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • The irrepressible vigor of that seed that says “I am alive.” — François Roustang
  • There is no domain to add. When one is human, one has everything, spirituality, religion… and it’s not worth speaking about it. Everything works together. — François Roustang
  • You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • We have three choices in life: to kill ourselves, go crazy, or learn to live with what we have in life.  — Elvin Semrad
  • True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. ― Seneca
  • Reality is a cliché.— Wallace Stevens
  • I Am that I Am (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, ehyeh asher ehyeh) — Torah (Jewish Bible)
  • The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.― Alan Watts
  • Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.— Alan Watts
  • I exist as I am, that is enough.― Walt Whitman
Society—Normalcy—Consensus—Politics—cf. Arrogance & Independence
  • If you have come here to help me, then don’t waste your time. But if you have come here, because your liberation is bound up with mine, then come, let us join in the struggle together.— Australian Aborigine Activists
  • You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.— Wendell Berry
  • I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. — William Blake
  • Sound, it’s spoken words, and the appearance of being intelligent. — Alain Cavalier
  • Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T.S. Eliot
  • The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • I took the one less traveled by.And that has made all the difference.— Robert Frost
  • We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. — Stephen Hawking
  • The politicians, the priests, the teachers, the readers of the soulhave created that language through which they could steal my story and my experience away from me.— Imre Kertész
  • There are some things in our society and some thingsin our world for which I am proud to be maladjusted, and I call for all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things… I believe firmly that our world is in dire need of a new organization – the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.— Martin Luther King, Jr
  • Tyrants only appear to be tall because we are on our knees. — Étienne de La Boétie
  • Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. To submit it to the individual discussion is to destroy it; it is given life only through the national mind, that is to say, by political faith, which is a creed.— Joseph de Maistre
  • More wishful thinking: to appreciate, a verb that needs to be conjugated in the present tense. — Pier Marton
  • I declare a state of permanent happiness
  • And the right for everyone to all the privileges.
    I say that suffering is a sacrilege
    When there are roses and rich bread for everyone.
    I contest the legitimacy of wars,
    Justice that kills and death that punishes. — Georges Moustaki
  • The quality of our experience depends on our choice of norms.— Arne Naess
  • Do you want an easy life? Remain always close to the herd, and forget yourself in it.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed, all in the name of public utility and the general good. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  • Regardless of how stupid their existence may be, human beings remain attached to it. (Si stupide que soit son existence, l’homme s’y rattache toujours.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • It is false to say: I think. One should say: “I am being thought. (C’est faux de dire : Je pense. On devrait dire : On me pense.)— Arthur Rimbaud
  • It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Freedom can only be all freedom; a bit of freedom is not freedom.— Max Stirner
  • Every institution is inherently demonic. — Paul Tillich
  • Nature is busy creating unique individuals whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.— U.G.
  • Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding.— Paul Valéry
  • Crush the infamy.— Voltaire
  • Resist much, obey little.― Walt Whitman
  • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.— Oscar Wilde
  • One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.— Virginia Woolf
Thinking—Words—Concepts—Myths—Truth—Violence—cf. Arrogance & Reality & Awe & Images & Implosions
  • An idea becomes false the moment one becomes satisfied by it.— Alain
  • There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.— Hannah Arendt
  • If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and ideas and signs that are their representation. — Antonin Artaud All true language is
  • You hope, yes,your books will excuse you,save you from hell…
— W. H. Auden
  • You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.— James Baldwin
  • Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. — Samuel Beckett
  • We live among ideas much more than we live in nature. – Saul Bellow
  • You see, gentlemen, what we call history is the history of the word – and the word is a killer virus…— William S. Burroughs
  • If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself?— Charles Darwin
  • Words are hefty, words are slow, words are too soft or too rigid. — René Daumal
  • Still, everything that remains visible, speakable, is often the superfluous… The rest remains inside… The more things are intense, the more it becomes difficult for them to appear to the surface in their entirety. — Marguerite Duras
  • A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie.— Umberto Eco
  • The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Nature is the incarnation of thought.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The good writer is the one who, every day, buries one word. — Léon-Paul Fargue
  • I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.— Richard Feynman
  • Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom.— Anatole France
  • We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.— R. Buckminster Fuller
  • When ideas fail, words come in very handy.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. – Rudyard Kipling
  • Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something.— Christof Koch
  • The word is not the thing.— Alfred Korzybski
  • I think where I am not; Thus I am where I am not. — Jacques Lacan
  • I think about where I am, there where I don’t think I think. — Jacques Lacan
  • Language uses us as much as we use language. — George Lakoff
  • Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. — George Lakoff
  • Intelligenti pauca (Few words suffice for those who understand). — Latin expression
  • Both egos and identities, and words and theories are entrapments. Move and live beyond them. — Pier Marton
  • Each word is so full of itself; it assumes we should live by its side.— Pier Marton
  • Why do I still use words?! — Pier Marton
  • Words are too easy. — Pier Marton
  • If one survives what is commonly described as “hell,” that word and all words are reduced and relegated to being just hollow utterances, and concessions to miserable conventions. — Pier Marton
  • Even if it is true, it is false.— Henri Michaux
  • Even France after a certain number of years should change its name, by honesty, to free itself from the myth “France.”— Henri Michaux
  • Both egos and identities, and words and theories are entrapments. Move and live beyond them. — Pier Marton Henri Michaux
  • Be nonviolent in language, judgement and action.— Arne Naess
  • Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.— Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • It is in the entire body that one finds the mind.— Gao Panlong
  • Everything has been said. No doubt. Were it that words had not changed their meanings; and meanings, their words.— Jean Paulhan
  • Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.— Harold Pinter
  • When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in state of unconsciousness. — Porchia (with his own page)
  • The mental world lies monumentally. (Le monde mental ment monumentalement.)— Jacques Prévert
  • My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue.— Theodore Roethke
  • The meaning of this world consists in seeing all of the meanings one thought one had discovered, fall apart, one after another.  — François Roustang
  • Language does not make sense… The fundamental error is to want to understand, when it’s absolutely not about that: it is about language taking us somewhere where something else besides language makes its appearance.— François Roustang
  • The way to understand TV is to shut off the sound. No one remembers any words they hear; the mind is a technicolor movie of images, not words.— Jerry Rubin
  • Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.— Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī)
  • I used to think the mind was the most wonderful organ in the body. Then, I realized who was telling me that.— Bertrand Russell
  • There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.—  Ferdinand de Saussure
  • Words, words, words. — William Shakespeare
  • Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.— Wallace Stevens
  • In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. — Thomas Szasz
  • Instead of saying “I am going to work,” I would say “I am going to make myself some surprises.”— Paul Valéry (as reported by Robert Bresson)
  • A witty saying proves nothing.—Voltaire
  • If I can think about it that makes it a thing. All things are thinks. — Alan Watts
  • The real war will never get in the books.― Walt Whitman
  • Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.— Oscar Wilde
  • NWe were against the power of words, against power. — Gil J WolmanGil J Wolman
  • We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.― W.B. Yeats
  • Anything that can be articulated lacks importance.— Zhou Zuoren
  • Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him?― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou
  • Deeper intelligence surrounds the whole, small intelligence discriminates; deeper language is brilliant, small language is verbose. ― Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou

CONTRARY TO ALL APPEARANCES, THE SCHOOL IS ABOUT
WHAT LIES BEYOND CULTURE, MEDIA AND WORDS

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