- It is we, the living, who walk in a world of phantoms
-- Gerard de Nerval
- At a certain point, what we call events disappear
from within our memory. The Uiko who was walking up those 105 moss-covered
steps remains before my eyes. It seems to me that she is walking up those
steps eternally. -- The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
- He swore with his hand on his heart, "I'd be a dog
if I tolerated that." Then he started running every which way on all fours.
-- Franz Kafka
- The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so
that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a
fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants
of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other
corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are
to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. -- Carl Sagan
- It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I
might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no
better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image
of our tiny world. -- Carl Sagan
- Nationalism is a narcissism of small differences.
-- Sigmund Freud
- There are 2 things infinite in this world - the universe
and human stupidity; I'm not sure about the former. -- Albert Einstein
- Despite his easy grace and virtuosity, Don Giovanni
doesn't possess himself sufficiently to belong definitely to the absolute
and to march unwaveringly towards the silence of being. -- Glenn Gould explaining
his dislike of Mozart by quoting a theologian Jean Le Moyne who likened Mozart
to Don Giovanni
- Postmodern art is an exercise in which the gesture
is disconnected from the message, or even worse, has no message at all. --Yehudi
Menuhin, commenting on Schoenberg