“I believe in work. If somebody doesn’t create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they’re treading water — that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn’t mean anything at all in this world. And that’s a despairing and destructive feeling. It’ll kill you.”
―Arthur Miller
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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When our soul begins to lose its appetite for earthly beauties, a spirit of listlessness is apt to steal into it. This prevents us from taking pleasure in study and teaching, and from feeling any strong desire for the blessings prepared for us in the life to come; it also leads us to disparage this transient life excessively, as not possessing anything of value. It even depreciates spiritual knowledge itself, either on the grounds that many others have already acquired it or because it cannot teach us anything perfect. To avoid this passion, which dejects and enervates us, we must confine the mind within very narrow limits, devoting ourselves solely to the remembrance of God. Only in this way will the intellect be able to regain its original fervor and escape this senseless dissipation.
When we have blocked all its outlets by means of the remembrance of God, the intellect requires of us imperatively some task which will satisfy its need for activity. For the complete fulfillment of its purpose we should give it nothing but the prayer ‘Lord Jesus’, ‘No one’, it is written, ‘can say “Lord Jesus” except in the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). Let the intellect continually concentrate on these words within its inner shrine with such intensity that it is not turned aside to any mental images. Those who meditate unceasingly upon this glorious and holy name in the depths of their heart can sometimes see the light of their own intellect. For when the mind is closely concentrated upon this name, then we grow fully conscious that the name is burning up all the filth which covers the surface of the soul; for it is written: ‘Our God is a consuming fire’ (Deut. 4:24). Then the Lord awakens in the soul a great love for His glory; for when the intellect with fervor of heart maintains persistently its remembrance of the precious name, then that name implants in us a constant love for its goodness, since there is nothing now that stands in the way. This is the pearl of great price which a man can acquire by selling all that he has, and so experience the inexpressible joy of making it his own (cf. Matt. 13; 46).
—St. Diadochos of Photiki -
Living with such mediocrity is agonizing.
Bimbo Ubermensch
The Ocean -
I felt a deep metaphysical lack. Sometimes, I still do. I definitely do. I question my existence every day.
Bimbo Ubermensch
The Ocean -
That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
“I know you, I know you. You’re the only serious person in the room, aren’t you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you’ve never finished a single thing in your life. You’re the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that’s real. What is real, then? Nothing’s real to you that isn’t part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal…spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don’t know what real life is, you’ve never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
The Recognitions
William Gaddis -
I understand death now. I don’t think it will do me much harm. I have known hatred, contempt, decay, and other things; I have even known brief moments of love. Nothing of me will survive, and I do not deserve for anything of me to survive. I will have been a mediocre individual in every possible sense.
Platform
Michel Houellebecq -
That said, survival is extremely difficult. One could consider adopting what could be called Pessoa’s strategy: find a little job, publish nothing, and await death peacefully. In practice, one would be going forward to meet significant difficulties: the feeling that one is wasting one’s time, that one is not in one’s place, that one is not being esteemed at one’s true value. . . All this would rapidly become unbearable.
Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)
SO GOOD QUOTES 