kniznistripky

[kniznistripky]

“Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It includes purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”

— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book Of Tea 

[kniznistripky]

... my heart suddenly beating — Thinking I'm gonna get the local vibrations instead here I am almost fainting only it isn't an ecstatic swoon by St Francis, it comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me — In me and in everyone — I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices like thoughts about life or meditations under trees and the 'ultimate' and all that shit, in fact the other pitiful devices of making supper or saying 'What I do now next? chop wood? I see myself as just doomed, pitiful - An awful realization that I have been fooling myslef all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else.

Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

[kniznistripky]

Definition is always limitation - the "fixed" and "unchangeless" are but terms expressive of stoppage of growth. Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We never forgive others because we know that we ourselves are in the wrong. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous!

Okakuro Kakuzo - The Book of Tea

[kniznistripky]

And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman, is woman, and will be woman so long as the stars drift in the sky and the heavens flux eternal change. Greater than our toil and eneavor, the play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing and mystery - greatest of all has been woman.

Jack London - The Star Rover

[kniznistripky]

But how describe emotion in words? The charm of woman is wordless. It is different from perception that culminates in reason, for it arises in sensation and culminates in emotion, which, be it admitted, is nothing else than super-sensation. In general, any woman has fundamental charm for any man. When this charm becomes particular, then we call it love.

Jack London - The Star Rover

[kniznistripky]

It takes the cold patience of the Asiatic to conceive and execute huge and complicated conspiracies.

Jack London - The Star Rover

[kniznistripky]

The woman factor explains many things of men.

Jack London - The Star Rover

[kniznistripky]

Modern physics plays perhaps only a small role in this dangerous process of unification. But it helps at two very decisive points to guide the development into a calmer kind of evolution. First, it shows that the use of arms in the process would be disastrous and, second, through its openness for all kinds of concepts it raises the hope that in the final state of unification many different cultural traditions may live together and may combine different human endeavors into a new kind of balance between thought and deed, between activity and meditation.

Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy

[kniznistripky]

After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence - that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point

[kniznistripky]

Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude - that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point

[kniznistripky]

"You know I love you." "Yes, I know you do." She smiled and stroked his cheek. "When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic." "No, that isn't true." But secretly he knew it was. All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter. Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point

[kniznistripky]

He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment. But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one’s life for. With the women who hadn’t been sensible and had taken love too seriously, John Bidlake had been ruthlessly cruel. It was the battle of  ‘All for love’ against 'anything for his quiet life.’ John Bidlake always won. Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point

[kniznistripky]

But the personal major premiss, he was thinking, is hard to deny; and the major premisss that isn't personal is hard, however excellent, to believe in.  Honour, fidelity - these were good things. But the personal major premiss of his present philosophy was that Lucy Tantamount was the most beautiful, the most desirable...

Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point

[kniznistripky]

Sam ji až do té doby považoval za nezlomnou ženu. Milou, usmívající se, ale v jádru tvrdou, životem zocelenou. Teď ale jako by ji zahlédl pod kouzelnou lupou a spatřil veškerou její nejistotu, najednou si ji dokázal představit jako patnáctiletou holku, zranitelnou, ještě trochu neohrabanou, ještě trochu zmatenou vrtochy vlastního těla, která kromě rozostřené vzpomínky na otce má už jen autoritativní matku.

Simon Mawer - Pražské jaro

[kniznistripky]

Seděli každý na opačném konci postele a oba si prožívali své vlastní trauma, agonii příznačnou pro měnící se časy, kdy láska měla být údajně volná, ale důsledky toho proklamovaného osvobození byly často svazující.

Simon Mawer - Pražské jaro

[kniznistripky]

The first rule of communication is to shut up and listen.

David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics

[kniznistripky]

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel)