Aphorisms
A selection of epigraphs to provoke food for thought.
"Ethics is the evaluation of justifications."
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down
"Anything that is dangerous can sometimes appear attractive and beautiful"
Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish
"The truth isn't always beautiful, but the hunger for it is."
Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times
"Is it worth tormenting onself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?"
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"Wherever justice is lacking the oppressed may provide it for themselves"
Bartolome de las Casas, Historia de las Indias
"As power is born of conspiracy, the mighty cannot but think in its terms"
Stefan Heym, The King David Report
"The classics can console. But not enough."
Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes
"That which most preoccupies human beings is whatever they reject. In this way they move closer to the rejected principle until they manage to embody it."
Thorwald Dethlefsen and Rudiger Dahlke, La Enfermedad Como Camino
"When small crimes are recorded, it is usually by their victims, but when enormous crimes are recorded, it is almost always by their perpetrators".
Robert Harms, The Diligent
"What seemed to me important was that it could be read as parody, irony or seriously. It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience."
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
"The great difference between poets and madmen is the destiny of the madness that possesses them"
Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
"All run, in a hurry, it's urgent, after the nomad shadow of wealth and power. Space exists for time to defeat, and time for progress to sacrifice on its altars".
Eduardo Galeano, Faces and Masks
"No man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending?"
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere"
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
"The author of a beautiful poem is always dead"
Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose
"The surge of philosophical or political thought in ancient Greece or Rome is partly attributed to the leisure time slavery made available to the ruling classes"
Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery
"Blindness, willful or natural, is the key for success in a persecuting society"
Jose Faur, In the Shadow of History
"I knew most of my lust came from loneliness"
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
"The wise man makes life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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