“Music does not depend on being right, on having good education and all that.”
“Then what does it depend on?”
“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable.”
Hesse, Herman – “Steppenwolf”
“In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
Hesse, Herman – “Steppenwolf”
“His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoomaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that lonelineess of the Garden of Gethsemane.”
Hesse, Herman - “Steppenwolf”
“Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He laughed so hard that he turned a somersault in the air and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: ‘Hey, my young fellow, does your tongue smart, man, do your lungs really pinch, man? You think of your readers, those carrion feeders, and all your typesetters, those wretched abettors, and saber-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with printer’s ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if that’ll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectacled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, who will bear you away and slice you and aplice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”
Hesse, Herman – “Steppenwolf”
“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and – sans End!”
Khayyam, Omar – “Rubaiyat” No. XXIII
“It is possible to talk for quite a long time to a psychotic patient of this type before discovering this inner core of abnormality. Many people have mini-paranoid sub-systems in their prejudices, sentiments and other emotional habits. The pioneer of behaviourism in psychology, J. B. Watson, had much to say about this in his discussion of personality and its disturbance (Watson 1919). He suggests that therapists should inquire into the ’soured’ aspects of a patient’s mental life and into how he has adjusted to past failures. He refers to ‘balancing factors’ – components of the personality, ranging from religious faith to a sense of humour, which may have enabled a person to adjust to past failures and past mistakes. The word ‘paranoia’ refers to the personality in which an over-sensitive and disturbed sub-system is not making these adjustments. Such an individual is likely to be solitary, and to lack the friends and acquaintances who can moderate his or her distorted apprehensions of the world.”
McKellar, Peter – “Mindsplit: The Psychology of Multiple Personality and the Dissociated Self”
“…this is not the end of the story: the best mirror to discover “oneself” is not the soul of another human being, located in the horizontal plane of human interaction, but god, who draws out the best in us, “the part of our souls that has to do with wisdom and knowledge,” along the vertical axis of trancendence.”
Reydams-Schils, Gretchen – The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection
“What Marcus Aurelius means by peritrope, “turning things around,” is clarified by another passage about reservation, in which he explains that when the ruling power in us is in agreement with nature, “it converts into material for itself any obstacle that meets it, just as fire does” (4.1). That which would have been an obstacle to the original intention becomes in itself an opportunity for the exercise of virtue insofar as it amounts to accepting the divine plan and order of fate.”
Reydams-Schils, Gretchen – The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection
“Friendship and all types of relationships among rational human beings are so important for the Stoics because they consider reason to be intrinsically social. The relational mode of existence is not something humans merely share with animals, in terms of lower soul functions; it is something they have in common with the divine principle that structures all of reality. A Stoic gets to know herself properly and arrives at the proper relationship with hersolf only if, through the study of physics, she locates herself within this immanent ordered structure. The withdrawel into oneself, then, is a psychological process whereby one distances oneself from superficial, problematic, and conflictual forms of entanglement in everyday life only to arrive at the deepest engagement possible, not just with an anonymous humanity at large but with the people in one’s immediate surroundings. At the start of this inquiry we found the mediating self talking to itself, but now we fully realize that it engages in such soliloquies not merely for the sake of itself but for the sake of community.”
Reydams-Schils, Gretchen – The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection
“The quest for the spiritual or psychological liberation of the individual is a measure, not of personal ‘problems’, on the one hand, or of ‘the human condition’, on the other, as many would like to make it, but rather a measure of social alienation.”
Wilden, Anthony – System and Structure
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