Daily Wisdom

[Championfighter25]

''Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter'' - Martin Luther King Jr.

''The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware'' - Henry Miller

''Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack'' - Sun Tzu

''From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate'' - Socrates

 

[deepstrasz]

“There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one’s life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages—most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless—on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men."
----
“STEPAN: Innocence? Yes, maybe I know what that means. But I prefer to shut my eyes to it—and to shut others’ eyes to it, for the time being—so that one day it may have a world-wide meaning. KALIAYEV: Well, you must feel very sure that day is coming if you repudiate everything that makes life worth living today, on its account. STEPAN: I am certain that that day is coming. KALIAYEV: No, you can’t be as sure as that.… Before it can be known which of us, you or I, is right, perhaps three generations will have to be sacrificed; there will have been bloody wars, and no less bloody revolutions. And by the time that all this blood has dried off the earth, you and I will long since have turned to dust.”
----
“Mastery is a blind alley. Since, moreover, he cannot renounce mastery and become a slave again, the eternal destiny of masters is to live unsatisfied or to be killed. The master serves no other purpose in history than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness that really creates history. The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it. Thus, unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long efforts to obtain real freedom. Already, by work, by his transformation of the natural world into a technical world, he manages to escape from the nature which was the basis of his slavery in that he did not know how to raise himself above it by accepting death.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[pyf]

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“If a contract, either civil or natural, could still bind the king and his people, there would be a mutual obligation; the will of the people could not set itself up as absolute judge to pronounce absolute judgment. Therefore it is necessary to prove that no agreement binds the people and the king. In order to prove that the people are themselves the embodiment of eternal truth it is necessary to demonstrate that royalty is the embodiment of eternal crime. Saint-Just, therefore, postulates that every king is a rebel or a usurper. He is a rebel against the people whose absolute sovereignty he usurps. Monarchy is not a king, "it is crime." Not a crime, but crime itself, says Saint-Just; in other words, absolute profanation.”
----
“Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The world must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and which can give us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds—that, according to Nietzsche, is Christ's message. From then on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of
this message. The New Testament is already corrupted, and from the time of Paul to the Councils, subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds.”
----
“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”
----
“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[Championfighter25]

"Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests" - Charles Lindbergh

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative" - H. G. Wells

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present" - Golda Meir

"The object of the superior man is truth" - Confucius

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“The world is divine because the world is inconsequential. That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential, is capable of grasping it.”
----
“On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no climax—far from it. But the fact remains that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarna-tion of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles.”
----
“Now that the ancient regime had definitely disappeared in France, the new regime must again, after 1848, reaffirm itself, and the history of the nineteenth century up to 1914 is the history of the restoration of popular sovereignties against ancient regime monarchies; in other words, the history of the principle of nations. This principle finally triumphs in 1919, which witnesses the disappearance of all absolutist monarchies in Europe
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[TheLordOfChaos201]

wisdom is only valued by man

 

[deepstrasz]

“All of Dostoevsky’s heroes question themselves as to the meaning of life. In this they are modern: they do not fear ridicule. What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral programs and the former on metaphysical programs. In Dostoevsky’s novels the question is propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were satisfied with this inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the consequences that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man’s life, and in this regard he is an artist.”
----
“The year 1789 does not yet affirm the divinity of man, but the divinity of the people, to the degree in which the will of the people coincides with the will of nature and of reason. If the general will is freely expressed, it can only be the universal expression of reason. If the people are free, they are infallible. Once the King is dead, and the chains of the old despotism thrown off, the people are going to express what, at all times and in all places, is, has been, and will be the truth. They are the oracle that must be consulted to know what the eternal order of the world demands. Vox populi, vox naturae. Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason. There we have the new God. The Supreme Being, whom cohorts of young girls come to adore at the Feast of Reason, is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent principles. Deprived of all his representatives, of any intercessor, the god of the lawyers and philosophers only has the value of a demonstration. He is not very strong, in fact, and we can see why Rousseau, who preached tolerance, thought that atheists should be condemned to death. To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well. But that will only come later. In 1793 the new faith is still intact, and it will suffice, to take Saint-Just's word, to govern according to the dictates of reason. The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature. The period of monsters has come to an end with the termination of the period of violence. "The human heart advances from nature to violence, from violence to morality." Morality is, therefore, only nature finally restored after centuries of alienation. Man only has to be given law "in accord with nature and with his heart," and he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt. Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a universal morality. "Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency toward good.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“It had been learned that my mother had died recently at the home. Inquiries had then been made in Marengo. The investigators had learned that I had “shown insensitivity” the day of Maman’s funeral. “You understand,” my lawyer said, “it’s a little embarrassing for me to have to ask you this. But it’s very important. And it will be a strong argument for the prosecution if I can’t come up with some answers.”
----
“During the battle, Spartacus himself tried with frenzied determination, the symbolism of which is obvious, to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman legions. He wanted to perish, but in single combat with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every Roman master; it was his dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality. He did not reach Crassus: principles wage war at a distance and the Roman general kept himself apart. Spartacus died, as he wished, but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves like himself, who killed their own freedom with his. In revenge for the one crucified citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of slaves. The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.”
----
“A rogue who has been condemned to death by the tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold!" Saint-Just's indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of the most obvious symbols of oppression. But at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom. It assures rational unity, and harmony in the ideal city. It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the general will and universal reason. "They question my right to the title of philanthropist," Marat exclaims, in quite a different style. "Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?" A few—a faction? Naturally—and all historic actions are performed at this price. But Marat, making his final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads. But he compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: "Brand them with hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues." This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create. He wrote again, by candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights while his henchmen were installing spectators' benches in prison courtyards—men on the right, women on the left—to display to them, as a gracious example of philanthropy, the spectacle of the aristocrats having their heads cut off.”
----
“If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.”
----
“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[Daffa]

"To place a mark of history is with art of our work." - unknown

 

[Championfighter25]

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear" - George Orwell

''If you can't convince them, confuse them'' - Harry S. Truman

''Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts'' - Marcus Tullius Cicero

''Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud'' - Sophocles

 

[deepstrasz]

“It is good for a man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.”
---
“To grow old is to move from passion to compassion.”
----
“What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; and the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his life time.”
----
“Only the modern city,” Hegel dares write, “offers the mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.” We are thus living in the period of big cities. Deliberately, the world has been amputated of all that constitutes its permanence: nature, the sea, hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness is to be found only in the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets—this is the edict.”
----
“one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one “knew.” This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious.”
----
~Albert Camus.

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

“Our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: 'This is the way I think. What are your objections?' We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: 'This is the truth, we say. You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”
----
“There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent.”
----
“No! No! I refuse to believe it. I'm sure you've often wished there was an after-life.'

Of course I had, I told him. Everybody has that wish at times. But that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or have a better-shaped mouth.”
----
“To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.”
----
“In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it; when the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.”
----
“friendship is a knowledge acquired by free men. And there is no freedom without intelligence or without mutual understanding.”
----
“Thus I return to Chestov. A commentator relates a remark of his that deserves interest: “The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.”
----
“Among us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially approved. But such freedom makes me think of the poor female cousin in certain middle-class families. She has become a widow; she has lost her natural protector. So she has been taken in, given a room on the top floor, and is welcome in the kitchen. She is occasionally paraded publicly on Sunday, to prove that one is virtuous and not a dirty dog. But for everything else, and especially on state occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if some policeman idly takes liberties with her in dark corners, one doesn't make a fuss about it, for she has seen such things before, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it's not worth getting in bad with the legal authorities.”
----
“Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the struggle.”
~Albert Camus.

 

[Ether]

<a href="H. P. Lovecraft Quote" title="H. P. Lovecraft quote"><img src="//www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-in-his-house-at-r-lyeh-dead-cthulu-waits-dreaming-h-p-lovecraft-38-11-51.jpg" alt="In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming - H. P. Lovecraft"></a>

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

Seen these words on the back of a taxi today:
"Are you alive? Don't stay!"

 

[Deleted member 219079]

By burning the oil that U.S. has drilled in the arctic, we can continue contributing to climate change. This is good because the more greenhouse gases we have, the faster the arctic melts, and we want the arctic to melt because we want to have access to all those new shipping routes from Asia to Europe. All that money saved on shipping will go towards other things (the free market), thus strengthening the economy OR we could divert those saved costs through taxes to new green solutions for energy.

 

[deepstrasz]

By burning the oil that U.S. has drilled in the arctic, we can continue contributing to climate change. This is good because the more greenhouse gases we have, the faster the arctic melts, and we want the arctic to melt because we want to have access to all those new shipping routes from Asia to Europe. All that money saved on shipping will go towards other things (the free market), thus strengthening the economy OR we could divert those saved costs through taxes to new green solutions for energy.

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[pyf]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[Althavis]

"Windmills as Giants, Prostitute as a princess. It doesn't matter which you see or believe. After all the world is a mystery waiting for you out there."

- Inspired by Don Quixote

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[Championfighter25]

''The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy'' - Martin Luther King Jr.

''The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it wasn't there'' - Finley Peter Dunne

''If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint'' - Edward Hopper

''Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it'' - Norman Douglas

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[Kuhneghetz]

"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
- Sun Tzu, Art of War

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[pyf]

from the pages of Gilgamesh II #1, by Jim Starlin


Gilgamesh II - Wikipedia

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[ShadowMidas]

 

[Zombie]

 

[deepstrasz]

 

[Championfighter25]

''Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless'' - Thomas Edison

''The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing'' - Eugene Delacroix

''Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't'' - Margaret Thatcher

''Life without liberty is like a body without spirit'' - Khalil Gibran

 

[ShadowMidas]