So how do you put that bottle away Saul?

I don't know. One day, you just decide to get up and walk out of your room.

 

 

I see you Kevin

 

Dinesen/Blixen

 

 

 “You've changed a lot.” Hobbes said sadly.

Your race is appallingly alone in this world, No other mammalian species. No other ambiseuxal species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers — it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.

 

— The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.

 

 

 

 The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

 

 

 

It'll be a hard day.

 

Rollo May on Kierkegaard

We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish. 

 

Washington's body organized the space around it, as a dancer's arms or legs seem to stretch beyond the tips of the fingers or toes. When he entered a room or a crowd, he was noticed. 

 

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them. They go in, fold their hands, look around their feet, sing songs... and when they come out it's usually me they find. I've picked up a lot of business on this spot. 

 

This salutary multiplicative destruction had been a plank of Mondrian's theory almost from the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The life that you seek you will never find:
when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
life they kept for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for any lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies. 

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. 

Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement.

 

 

Looking for Greta's bathroom, I went into the first one on the right, attracted by all kinds of pleasant smells. The glass shelves were loaded with bottles of cologne and perfume, and there were soaps of all colors, bath salts, and oil beside the tub—and an electric razor. Wrong one. I thought, this is George's bathroom. I tried the opposite one. This was Greta's all right; her swimsuit was hanging on a hook. Otherwise the room was practically bare: a toothbrush, a comb with a couple of teeth missing, half a bar of Lux soap.