July 2012
229 posts
3 tags
He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption. For in fact what...
June 2012
308 posts
5 tags
Rarely is a person seen to be in a bad way because he has failed to attend to what is happening in someone else’s soul, but those who fail to pay attention to the motions of their own souls are bound to be in a wretched state.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.8
1 tag
3 tags
2 tags
4 tags
[T]he life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!
Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi
5 tags
The power of words
[O]ur political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that… or: There is capitalism in...
6 tags
The politics of resentment
“Let us possess things in common; for birth is ours in common. Our relations with one another are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other, and which is upheld in this very way.” ~ Seneca, Epistulae, XCV
I do not normally venture into political topics here (this being primarily a philosophy and art blog), though I certainly have...
All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
Alain Badiou (via dreamznhallucinations)
1 tag
“What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters of Rainer Maria...
2 tags
“I know I am a luminous point that goes uselessly through the gloomy futility of...”
– Renzo Novatore, Spiritual Perversity (1920)
4 tags
Wherever we betake ourselves, two things that are most admirable will go with us—universal Nature and our own virtue.
Seneca, De Consolatione ad Helviam
3 tags
[T]he wise man’s soul ought to be such as would be proper to a god.
Seneca, Epistulae, XCII
2 tags
4 tags
6 tags
“We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill...”
– Laurence Binyon (via colordesignlife)
3 tags
4 tags
To walk along a stream, to pass, to flow with the water, without effort, without haste, while death continues in us its ruminations, its uninterrupted soliloquy…
E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
4 tags
You cannot step twice into the same river.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
4 tags
Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.
Seneca, De...
5 tags
Once-ness
Once-ness: There are times when I am intensely aware of the passing of each and every second as it recedes to… where? All that remains is a faulty memory, an incomplete sketch of events, an abstraction. Even memory itself is transient, as it seeks to reconstruct what fragments I am left with into what we commonly call ‘experience.’
It is in this sense that time is unreal. There is only the...
2 tags
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could...
4 tags
2 tags
I never could understand that friend who, back from Lapland, told me how oppressed he felt when for days on end he lived without seeing the slightest trace of mankind.
E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
2 tags
A leaf, a crop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
4 tags
For it is dangerous to attach one’s self to the crowd in front, so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us...
1 tag
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers...”
– Rumi (via lazyyogi)
2 tags
My new poetry blog, Once-ness →
I’ll begin posting my new and old original poems at my new Tumblr blog, Once-ness. To my followers (259 at my last count!) here at The Examined Life, follow me there as well, especially if you have been enjoying my ‘Sunday poems.’
Gratias vobis to all my followers!
6 tags
Elegy: Godley Head, 2007
ELEGY: GODLEY HEAD, 2007 For Angie The weight of water hurls itself against rock, retreats, re-gathers its strength, the sun shattered into innumerable shards the eye cannot follow. Stranded on an elusive shore, half-remembered, I climb with you into sunlight, up a narrow path,...
2 tags
What can be said lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
1 tag
That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.
Emily Dickinson, poem 1741
1 tag
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (via -astronauts)
4 tags
Important decisions
In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course a day, best to experience its benefits straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he...
4 tags
4 tags
Vices do not wait expectantly in just one spot, but are always in movement and, being at variance with each other, are in constant turmoil, they rout and in turn are routed; but the verdict we are obliged to pronounce upon ourselves will always be the same: wicked we are, wicked we have been, and, I regret to add, always shall be.
Seneca, De Beneficiis, Book I
3 tags
1 tag
3 tags
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange to...
2 tags
We grow up; but the world remains a child. Star and flower, in silence, watch us go. And sometimes we appear to be the final exam they must succeed on. And they do.
Rainer Maria Rilke
2 tags
The world does not explain. That is its special, inhuman privilege.
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
2 tags
A momentous silence reigns always in the woods, and their meaning seems just ripening into expression. But alas! they make no haste. The rush sparrow, Nature’s minstrel of serene hours, sings of an immense leisure and duration.
Henry David Thoreau, Journals, entry dated 25 April 1841
2 tags
Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report. To the full heart she is all but a figure of speech.
Henry David Thoreau, Journals, entry dated 2 July 1852
3 tags
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands, How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
3 tags
I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably can tell me nothing to the purpose. There is life,an experiment untried by me, and it does not avail me that you have tried it. If I have any valuable experience, I am sure to reflect that this my mentors said...
5 tags
[T]here is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long—he has existed long.
Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae
1 tag
