Uncommon Priors

You can learn a lot about someone from his favorite quotes. Here are some of mine (almost all of which I’ve forgotten the translators for, when foreign):

Borges

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad … The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.”

Byron

“Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.”

Waiting for God (BBC)

Diana: “God, it must be wonderful to have a little handbag so crammed full of moral certainties, love, God, life, death, all sorted out, all nicely, nicely wrapped up, all questions answered, put to one side.”
Tom: “It’s called faith.”
Diana: “It’s called bollocks.”

Coetzee

We do not call on the gods because we no longer believe in them. She hates sentences that hinge on because. The jaws of the trap snap shut, but the mouse, every time, has escaped. And what an irrelevancy anyway! How misguided! Worse than Hölderlin! Who cares what we believe? The sole question is whether the gods will continue to believe in us, whether we can keep alive the last flicker of the flame that once used to burn in them. ‘Friendship, fun, adventure’: what kind of appeal is that, to a god? More than enough fun where they came from. More than enough beauty too.

Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven’t you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.

Parker

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

Machiavelli

[I]t is concluded that men do not know how to be entirely bad or perfectly good, and that when an evil has some greatness in it or is generous in any part, they do not know how to attempt it.

Kafka

Now one might say: “You complain about your fellow dogs, about their silence on crucial questions; you assert that they know more than they admit, more than they will allow to be valid, and that this silence, the mysterious reason for which is also, of course, tacitly concealed, poisons existence and makes it unendurable for you, so that you must either alter it or have done with it; that may be; but you are yourself a dog, you have also the dog knowledge; well, bring it out, not merely in the form of a question but as an answer. If you utter it, who will think of opposing you? The great choir of dogdom will join in as if it had been waiting for you. Then you will have clarity, truth, avowal, as much of them as you desire. The roof of this wretched life, of which you say so many hard things, will burst open, and all of us, shoulder to shoulder, will ascend into the lofty realm of freedom. And if we should not achieve that final consummation, if things should become worse than before, if the whole truth should be more insupportable than the half-truth, if it should be proved that the silent are in the right as the guardians of existence, if the faint hope that we still possess should give way to complete hopelessness, the attempt is still worth the trial, since you do not desire to live as you are compelled to live. Well, then, why do you make it a reproach against the others that they are silent, and remain silent yourself?” Easy to answer: because I am a dog; in essentials just as locked in silence as the others, stubbornly resisting my own questions, dour out of fear.

Bentham

Let us guard against the employment of figures in matter of jurisprudence. Lawyers will borrow them, and turn them into fictions, amidst which all light and common sense will disappear; then mists will rise, amidst the darkness of which they will reap a harvest of false and pernicious consequences.

Camus

“CALIGULA: That’s because everyone around me is living a lie, and I want people to live with the truth. Remember, Helicon, I have the means of forcing them to live with the truth. They are deprived of knowledge and need a teacher who knows what he’s talking about.

HELICON: Don’t take offense, Caius … but shouldn’t you have some rest? Everything else can wait.

CALIGULA: I can’t rest, Helicon.

HELICON: Why not?

CALIGULA: If I sleep, who will give me the moon?

Nietzsche

“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.”

Gasset

“This fact is quite simple to enunciate, though not so to analyse. I shall call it the fact of agglomeration, of ‘plenitude.’ Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”

Thompson

“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are.”

Reed

Just cause you can’t see d stones don’t mean I ain’t building.