seth dowler > seth's Quotes

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Love...no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Je est un autre.”
― Rimbaud

“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems and Letters

“Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes

“There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you
control it.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.”
― Henry Miller

“Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.”
― Jeff Buckley

“I love anything that haunts me...and never leaves”
― Jeff Buckley

“We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.”
― Jeff Buckley

“Lots of times I feel like I don’t belong to this place.”
― Jeff Buckley

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
― Marcel Proust

“The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”
― Jodi Picoult

“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories