#lit

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#great-minds #life #madmen #purpose-of-life #rationality

Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. ↗

— Frédéric Bastiat

#law #legislation #liberty #man #politics

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#authorship #truth #writing #art

Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#reality #art

Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory is won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. ↗

— Sun Tzu

#military #war #art

... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools ↗

— Norman Friedman

#poetry #spirituality #stereotypes #art

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III') ↗

— Paul Murray Kendall

#ricardian #art

Take lights and deform them as brutally as you can. ↗

— Kurt Schwitters

#brutality #creativity #deform #art

Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability. ↗

— Jennifer Birkett

#corruption #crime #criminal #culpability #decadence

He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes. ↗

— Jon Meacham

#art