But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum th...eory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, lif...e consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled wit...h men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two destitute lives. Two sickly bachelors, chaste though without vows, deprived of all daily affection, suffering all the torments... of poetic passion, but for the Idea--adventurers of the mind only. Two existences virtually devoid of external vicissitudes. For one, the breaking-off of an engagement, the final attack against the Church, and death at forty-two. For the other, still less: a few years' professorship, a long wandering solitude, madness at forty-four. Each produced in some fifteen years his difficult, seminal work, and attracted only in extremis, by scandal, the attention of a few contemporaries. This external nakedness, contrasting with so much inner pathos, renders these lives exemplary; two pure tensions. In them the action of the mythic powers perfectly reveals its slow movements of approach, of alternating emergence and eclipse. These two chaste men meditated much on love, on women, and on marriage. Nietzsche has certainly written less on these subjects than Kierkegaard, but his work is no less rich in brief, often brazenly contradictory judgments on these three themes. It is remarkable that Nietzsche's contradictions afford a faithful epitome of Kierkegaard's, which in their turn repeat those of St. Paul himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I try to make a rough music, a dance of the mind, a calculus of the emotions, a driving beat of praise out of the pain and mystery... that surround me and become me. My poems are meant to make your mind get up and shout.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinit...esimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life direct...is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing... to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal ...of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Lang...uage is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »