#sm

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#knowledge #life #philosophy #life

Thanks to Lana Turner, Eleven Eleven, The Nation, LIT Magazine (USA), Critical Quarterly (UK), Beautiful Outlaw Press, no press, The Capilano Review, cv2, Rhubarb and Centre A Gallery (Canada). ↗

— Erin Moure

#capitalism #feltheart #friends #heartfelt #lana-turner

The more I read arguments for atheism, the more I am convinced it takes a very strong faith to be an atheist. And atheism seems to me the least reasonable of all faiths. ↗

— Corrado Ghinamo

#atheist #creation #faith #science #beauty

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#masochism #mistress #prostitute #psychopathology #sexuality

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. ↗

— George Orwell

#pacifism #world-war- #imagination

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

...for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force." Vesadeva to Siddartha ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#buddhism #monasticism #siddhartha #siddhartha-gautama #love

Cynicism places the cynic at the center seat of judgement with the self appointed authority to criticize and condemn. ↗

— Jayce O'Neal

#dr-jayce #god #jayce-oneal #love #love

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves? ↗

— Alain de Botton

#love #love

This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before. ↗

— Karl Barth

#universalism #love