“Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness and give it back to the earth’s own weight; the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
Tag: Quoted
William Faulkner on the Past
Slavoj Žižek on Freedom
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Friedrich Nietzsche on God
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Simone de Beauvoir on Becoming a Woman
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Bertrand Russell on Religion
“My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (via Philosophy Bits)
Erica Avey on Subjectivity
“Is speaking/(writing) subjectively an inherently selfish act? Can you still become no one if you find a subjective way to speak for yourself that also speaks for others? Can you speak for all those who came before you (especially those silenced) by speaking now? Do women get challenged more for speaking subjectively than men?”
Seth Godin on Our Culture
Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.”
— Seth Godin (via A Layman’s Blog)
Virginia Woolf on Meaning
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (via Macrolit)
Baruch Spinoza on Free Will
So experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that men [sic] believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the cause by which they are determined, that the decisions of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves which therefore vary as the disposition of the body varies.”
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Lisa Marie Blair 