The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruc...tion leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly" because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony... and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on t...heir mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against en...emies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-developm...ent, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such ba...d taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know, there's a certain irony in the fact that our lives and perhaps the lives of everyone on Earth may depend on Captain Patt...erson's sex appeal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and ...female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »