Philippe

“For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen

“What remains, in fact? What else is there still right in front of us but the grass which grows and the mountains which erode, bodies which become heavy and faces which become emaciated, life which fecundates, or becomes exhausted, or rather which, while fecundating, is already starting to become exhausted? And vague expectations that crystallize into feverish passion, or else meetings that become less frequent. Or amorous complicities which, without being confessed, turn into relations of power? Or heroic revolutions which (without our being able to locate when) mutate into the privileges of the Party? Or else the wounds of yesterday which are displaced, buried and condensed, and then transcribe themselves into encrypted representation of dreams - and works which ripen in silence?”
― François Jullien, The Silent Transformations

“Wouldn't it be nice to return to some of the old theories? Soul and body? The four humours?'
'Oh, they never worked.'
'Of course they did. Everything works in its own period. Don't you think that people were cured by medieval doctors, soaking up black melancholy bile with white salpetre? We could no more use their remedies than they could use ours, but they did work once. That's what you have to remember. Of course some people say that they might work again.”
― Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven't: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven't read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”
― john durham peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media