February 2008
14 posts
“Outward semblances delude us all.
Enigmas are the pictures earth presents,
To...”
– Edith Stein
January 2008
26 posts
“How I would like to believe in tenderness —
The face of the effigy,...”
– Sylvia Plath
Some thoughts on love...
“Love, Christianity understood, is sacrifice and at the same time, humanly understood, is madness.”
— Kierkegaard, Works of Love
“Love is a madness…but then there is some reason in madness.”
— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On...
"The Base of All Metaphysics"
And now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finale too for all metaphysics.
(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)
Having studied the new and antique,
the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and started,
Fichte and Shelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato,
and Socrates greater than Plato, and...
“How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward.”
– Spanish proverb
“…We drink a little
and philosophize a little
and perhaps we both
who...”
– Zbigniew Herbert A Parable of King Midas
“I stand head in my hands thinking how
unimportant are the traps we set for one...”
– Marina Tsvetayeva (a lovely Russian poetess)
“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife...”
– Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions.”
– De Caussade
“Theology insists precisely in saying that for which only another can answer—the...”
– Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— William Butler Yeats
From Kierkegaard's "Johannes Climacus"
“By paying heed to the conversation of others, he realized that he had not come across the writings of the great thinkers among recent philosophers. Again and again he heard their names mentioned with enthusiasm, almost with reverence. This gave him indescribable joy, even though he did not venture to read them because he had heard that they were so difficult that the study of them took ages. ...
“One ought to me a mystery, not only to others, but also to one’s self. I...”
– Soren Kierkegaard
“The misery and greatness of this world offers no truths, but only objects of...”
– Albert Camus, Notebooks
“What shall I do, by nature and trade
a singing creature (like a wire —...”
– Marina Tsvetayeva, The Poet
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll gladly listen. Talk to me...”
– C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
“I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But I don’t revere all...”
– Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
“A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, — the light which,...”
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening
“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he,...”
– Albert Camus, The Plague