Books

And finally, one must consider how great the ease of learning
there is in books, how yeilding, how trusty!
How safely we reveal, without shyness, in the face of our books
the poverty of our human ignorance!
They are teachers who instruct us without switches or rods,
without slaps or anger, without notice of rags or riches.
If you approach them, they are not asleep;
If you ask a question, they do not hide;
They do not mutter at you if you make a mistake;
When you are ignorant, they do not know how to laugh at you.

Richard de Bury (Philobiblion, I, 9)

Definition

A dead atheist is someone who's all dressed up with no place to go.

And God said

"And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan.'" -- George Burns

The Simpsons as philosophy

The Simpsons is more than a funny cartoon - it reveals truths about human nature that rival the observations of great philosophers from Plato to Kant... while Homer sets his house on fire, says philosopher Julian Baggini... more here

No Mourning

We carry in us seeds of all the gods
the germ of death and germ of happiness,
whoever divides them: the words and things,
whoever mixes them: agony and the place
where they end, wood and flowing tears,
for a few hours, a pitiful home.

There can’t be any mourning. Too far, too wide,
too unfeeling bed and tears,
no yes, or no
birth and bodily pain and belief
a nameless wave, a flicker
a supernatural thing, stirring in sleep,
agitated bed and tears—
go to sleep!


by Gottfried Benn

—Translated from the German by Teresa Iverson

Online Kierkegaard Links

Kierkegaard thought we should undertake philosophy with fear and trembling. This has led some to ask why we should read him at all. This site is set up with the wish that it might lead you, the reader, through the riddles and mirrors by which Kierkegaard hoped to guide us back to and beyond ourselves in primitivity...more here

Bibliography

Research on Evil: An Annotated Bibliography...more here

E. M. Cioran

Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who lived most of his life in Paris. He is the author of many books—essays and aphorisms.

Selections from Cioran here

Fear

The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula...more here

Time

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
--Hector Berlioz

The Law

“Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.” —Edward W. Howe

Brutality, War Crimes, Genocide, and Rape

Imagine if the leader of a modern country decided his people required land and then proceeded to invade neighbouring countries. Imagine if in some areas he enslaved entire cities, and in others, he ordered his army to completely annihilate the population, first killing soldiers, then killing non-combatants in cold blood (women, children, even babies). Imagine if in some cities he allowed his men to force women they found attractive to have sex with them. Imagine if in some cities he plundered all the goods he found, while in others he simply burnt them to the ground. Imagine if this leader even went so far as to kill livestock for no purpose other than spite. Imagine if this leader also commanded his troops to desecrate the places of worship in the lands he had conquered. Then imagine if his followers kept records of his campaigns, recording with pride the killing of 12,000 people on one day, and 25,000 on another...more here

Last night

Last night I dreamed I died .

Perfect Evolution (and the Buried Soul)

In a culture increasingly defined by our ability to mix and match at will—blending pirated elements of old songs to create “mash-ups,” blending DNA from different plants and animals, blending elements of various subcultures, eras, and ethnic groups—vampires have clearly ceased to be villains and have become one more exciting style to adopt. Sure, dressing like a vampire is fun for the goths, and rooting for vampires (they kill people, but they have such lovely angst) is a blast for Rice fans—but a true mix-and-match era should hold out the promise of actually being a vampire...more here

Romantics

Joseph Koerner's book Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape offers a useful summary of Romanticism. Its artists tended to have:

- a heightened sensitivity to the natural world
- a belief in nature's correspondence to the mind
- a focus on the subjective
- a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate and the obscure
- a desire to be lost in nature's infinity
- an infatuation with death
- a preference for night over day

More coffee

“Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

MICHELET, JULES (1798-1874)

Conversation

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.

Professor Michael Oakeshott

Scientology

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars he should start his own religion."

L Ron Hubbard

The Truth

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain"

A Clear Midnight

THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

Walt Whitman