Federico Mengozzi > Federico's Quotes

“It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?”
― Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke

“Thoughtful thinking and the “concept” The name seems to say that this thinking is an intensified, heightened, “more energetic” thinking, one which takes hold of itself by force and brings itself forward with force, i.e., forceful thinking. Certainly more concentrated, but for that very reason less forceful; indeed in its purity it is without force. On the contrary, it is ordinary thinking which is pressing, calculating, planning, ingenious, restless—a matter of lurking, assaulting, mastering. Otherwise with thoughtful thinking (thanking). The diffidence of distinguishing; the diffidence of experiencing the uncanny. Hardly a representation in the sense of a bringing before oneself. In the modern age, through calculative thinking we have long ago become accustomed to seeing in thinking, and demanding from thinking, grip [Zugriff], grasp [Griff], and concept [Begriff], i.e., we understand the “concept” on the basis of a grasping: conceptus—no longer ὁρισμóς. We know rigorous thinking only as conceptual representation. But its rigor rests in the originariness of imageless saying in the compliant word that inheres in the essence of truth. The invasion of the uncanny in the sudden.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Event

“A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.”
― Joseph Campbell

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“My Dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it's much better to be killed by a lover.
-Falsely yours”
― Charles Bukowski

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“When you're happy, you enjoy the music but when you're sad, you understand the lyrics.”
― Frank Ocean

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.”
― William Blake

“All i can do is be me, whoever that is”
― Bob Dylan

“The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything.”
― Terence McKenna

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
― Terence McKenna

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Skeleton

Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
― Terence McKenna

“our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Fatalism is now offered, not as just one possible philosophical attitude among others with reasons given for and against it, but as a fact backed by the tremendous authority of science.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

“Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.”
― Sylvia Plath

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!

(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)”
― Russell T. Davies

“The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
― Thucydides