Quote thread

[Anonymous No.22116121]

A thread devoted to your favourite quotes whether it be for their aesthetic value or their philosophical contents or their humour or whatever.

Extra points for rare ones.

1/6:
> "I know that there's a paradox in the US of the people who get powerful jobs tend to go to really good schools, and often in school you study the liberal arts, which is this philosophy, classical stuff and languages. And it's all very much about the nobility of the human spirit and broadening the mind. And then from that, you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to write copy of that will make people buy a certain type of SUV."

- David Foster Wallace, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc&list=PLIZqvqbtz9I30kDK7RrKXxtLK9WxA33-T&index=48&ab_channel=ManufacturingIntellect

[Anonymous No.22116129]

2/6:

> "For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again."

- Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha"

[Anonymous No.22116136]

3/6:

> "But this was a knowledge he could not act upon, stronger than the knowledge was his love for the boy, stronger was his tenderness, his fear to lose him."

- Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha"

[Anonymous No.22116141]

4/6 (my loose translation):

> "In the monogamous system, where romance and love rules, desire and pleasure may only be achieved via the loved one, so evidently via one single person. In the liberal society [...] the model of sex as propagated by the official culture (advertising, magazines, social and public health organizations) was the model of a d v e n t u r e: within such a system desire and pleasure result from the process of s e d u c t i o n, which promotes first and foremost novelty, passion and individual creativity (which all happen to be traits expected from workers as part of their work duties)."

- Michel Houellebecq, "Atomised"

[Anonymous No.22116150]

5/6:

> "I am not a 'democrat', if only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power — and then we get and are getting slavery."

- J. R. R. Tolkien

[Anonymous No.22116157]

6/6:

> "'No!' The frog said. 'The world isn't fundamentally unfair. The world isn't anything. It's just full of creatures that make it so. You're the problem, convincing yourself everything is futile just so you can give in to your cynical zero-sum game impulses, which you can choose to assess and discard at any time, and then things wouldn't be unfair. Idiocy is passive; it takes a special kind of idiot to inflict their idiocy on someone else.' The scorpion considered this, then said 'Fuck you.'"

- Alexander McKechnie (exurb1a), "How the Frogs Cooked Dinner", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Q3crLWQY8&ab_channel=exurb1a

[Anonymous No.22116185]

In another passage of the Commentaries, the dictator relates that, for all public and private affairs, the Celts used Greek letters. By a singular anomaly, the Druids would not write down anything of their doctrines or their rites, and forced their pupils to learn everything by heart. It was a strict rule. According to this information, it is beyond dispute that before having passed through Roman education, the Celtic nations were accustomed to the graphic representation of their ideas, and, what is here particularly interesting, the use which what they did with this science was quite different from that of which the great Asiatic peoples of antiquity have given us the spectacle. Among the latter, writing was mainly used by priests, was revered as a religious mystery, and passed so difficultly into familiar usage that until the time of Peisistratus, no one wrote, not even the poems of Homer, objects, however, of general admiration. Among the Celts, on the contrary, it is the sanctuaries that do not want the alphabet. Private life and profane administration take hold of them: they are used to indicate the value of currencies and for matters of personal or public interest. In a word, among the Celts, writing, stripped of all religious prestige, is an essentially popularized science.