JDaphorism-june05

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JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations

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June 2005

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind?--They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
Nietzsche

APHORISMS
by Nietzsche

Saul Bellow

Expression begins where thought ends.

If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their gratuitousness.

Albert Camus
(from The Myth of Sisyphus)

Technology is our word for stuff that doesn't work yet.
Danny Hillis

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Eric Hoffer

When you reflect on what you haven't done or don't know you learn humility.
JD

If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
Thackeray

Whatever one knows, he knows for himself only and he should keep it secret. As soon as he reveals it, contradictions appear, and if he begins to argue, he will lose his equilibrium, while what is best in him will be, if not annihilated, at least shaken.
Goethe

To echo Goethe, I offer:

The truth in your own heart is 'eternal' and demands silence. As soon as you confront someone else with it, fruitless argument begins, as each covets his own truth and is hell bent on defending it as he would his ego.
JD

Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?

Insanity in individuals is something rare— but in groups, parties, nations
and epochs, it is the rule.

Umberto Eco
(from Foucault's Pendulum--1989)

...in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come...These slaves, or descendants of slaves, are therefore wiser than the ethnologists of the Sorbonne.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it--they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
(from I, etcetera--1979)

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love......It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.

on Photography:

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.

...Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. ...Images have turned the world into a department store or museum-without-walls, where people become customers or tourists of reality.