Happiness - Jorge Luis Borges

Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve.

Everything happens for the first time.

I saw something white in the sky. They tell me it is the moon, but
what can I do with a word and a mythology.

Trees frighten me a little. They are so beautiful.

The calm animals come closer so that I may tell them their names.

The books in the library have no letters. They spring forth when I open
them.

Leafing through the atlas I project the shape of Sumatra.

Whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire.

Inside the mirror an Other waits in ambush.

Whoever looks at the ocean sees England.


Whoever utters a line of Liliencron has entered into battle.
I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that destroyed Carthage.
I have dreamed the sword and the scale.


Praised be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed, but
both surrender.

Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we the power to
create hell.


Whoever goes down to a river goes down to the Ganges.
Whoever looks at an hourglass sees the dissolution of an empire.
Whoever plays with a dagger foretells the death of Caesar.
Whoever dreams is every human being.


In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted.
There is nothing else so ancient under the sun.
Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal.

Whoever reads my words is inventing them.

Patrice and Catherine are having their breakfast on the terrace, in the sun. Catherine is in her bathing suit, the Boy, as Merseult’s friends call him, the Boy is in his shorts, a napkin around his neck. they are eating salted tomatoes, potato salad, honey, and huge amounts of fruit. They keep the peaches on ice, and lick the tiny drops which have congealed on the velvety skins. They also make grape juice, which they drink with their faces tipped to the sun in order to get a tan - at least the Boy does, for he knows a suntan becomes him. “Taste the sun,” Patrice said, holding out his arm to Catherine. She licked his arm. “Yes,” she said, “now you.” He tasted too, then stretched and stroked his ribs. Catherine sprawled on her stomach and pulled her bathing suit down to her hips. “I’m not indecent, am I?”
“No,” the Boy said, not looking.
— Albert Camus - La Mort Heureuse
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Jorge Luis Borges

(via sometimesagreatnotion)

(via psychotherapy)

Reblogged from Therapy Notes.

kylebunch:

Alan Moore Reads Rorscarch Journal: When I finally get around to writing that children’s book I’ve been concepting, I’m definitely getting Alan Moore to do the book-on-tape reading.
Reblogged from The Daily Bunch
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
— Oscar Wilde (via reluctantbuddha)
Reblogged from the reluctant buddha
The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy should not be made a basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims.

Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.

But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).

I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.

(via mills)

Reblogged from Meta is Murder
Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you’ll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I’m so angry and the truth is I’m so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.
— the Minister in Syndecnoche, New York (written by Charlie Kaufman)

Happy Monday! (via sharingtime) (via dalasverdugo)
Reblogged from Pseudolectual
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.
— David Foster Wallace (via tmblg)
Reblogged from TMBLG
Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye. We put off from time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing when we please.
— Plutarch (via reluctantbuddha)
Reblogged from the reluctant buddha
I run out of that building and I see… the sky. I see all the things I love in this world. The work, the food, the time to sit and smoke. And I look at this pen and I ask myself, “What the hell am I grabbing this thing for? Why am I trying to become something I don’t wanna become when all I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am?”

Death of a Salesman

I played Biff in a production in college, but his search for his own American Dream has taken on new meaning for me recently. What an incredible, incredible play.

(via thegreg)

I agree this is a beautiful quote.  And, quite relevant right now.

(via grapefruite) (via poortaste)

Reblogged from poortaste