Faith

“All faith is autopsy”

Søren Kierkegaard—Journals, 1844

Atheist's Bible

"All thinking men are atheists," Ernest Hemingway famously wrote. True? Here are quips, quotes, and questions from a distinguished assortment of geniuses and jokers, giving readers a chance to decide for themselves....

When I think of all the harm [the bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz

God is love, but get it in writing.
Gypsy Rose Lee

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw

Published June, 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers, Hardcover, 208 Pages, ISBN: 9780061349157, ISBN-10: 0061349151, List Price $16.95. by Konner, Joan

Loneliness

Now it is Loneliness who comes at night
Instead of Sleep, to sit beside my bed.
Like a tired child I lie and wait her tread,
I watch her softly blowing out the light.
Motionless sitting, neither left or right
She turns, and weary, weary droops her head.
She, too, is old; she, too, has fought the fight.
So, with the laurel she is garlanded.

Through the sad dark the slowly ebbing tide
Breaks on a barren shore, unsatisfied.
A strange wind flows... then silence. I am fain
To turn to Loneliness, to take her hand,
Cling to her, waiting, till the barren land
Fills with the dreadful monotone of rain

(Katherine Mansfield)

Everything falls back to coldness

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."


The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

(Wallace Stevens)

Grief

One day of grief is an hundred years, as Cardan observes: 'Tis carnificina hominum, angor animi, as well saith Aretaeus, a plague of the soul, the cramp and convulsion of the soul, an epitome of hell; and if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. I, Sect. 4, Memb. I (Prognosticks of Melancholy)

On the Shortness of Life

Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 3.3 (tr. John W. Basore)

The Course of Life

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth? -
Most men eddy about
Here and there - eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die -
Perish; - and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

The Course of Life - Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel, lines 58-72

Solemn Sadness

...the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things - in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and in eternal poems.

Fernando Pessoa

Reading

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” Joseph Brodsky said. “One of them is not reading them.”

The Pleasure Of Life

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world
All we have to do beyond that
Is to die.

Ikkyu Sojun - (1394-1481)

Works of Art

"Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it -- every word, every phrase -- deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such." ·

THE CURTAIN An Essay in Seven Parts By Milan Kundera

Is anything worse

ELECTRA: Is anything worse than death?
AEGISTHUS: Life, if you wish to die.

Seneca - Agamemnon

To Read

To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers."

Orhan Pamuk

All my tendencies are deadly ones

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless, world in which everything is always devastating and deadly.

Quote from The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

My melancholy

I have one intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me . My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
—Søren Kierkegaard (from Either/Or)

A Gloomy View

There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims (tr. T. Bailey Saunders)

The Melancholic

Dissimulation, secretiveness appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself--these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Susan Sontag - Under the Sign of Saturn

Nothing Lasts

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

- Henri Frederic Amiel

Sadness

“There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass”

Charles Kuralt

The Church of the Non-Believers

MY FRIENDS, I MUST ASK YOU AN IMPORTANT QUESTION TODAY: Where do you stand on God?

It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.

This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.

Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith...more here