Welcome!

Hi! I’m glad you’ve found this blog and hope it will be useful to you – or at the least, interesting. It was started predominately for my own use after years of having long and unruly ‘quote lists’, and I was excited by the ability to cross-reference, search using various criteria, and update whenever I had time…but that I can share them is a fantastic bonus.

To make it clear – this is not a list of my ideological basis or it’s antithesis. There are things I agree with completely, others infuriate me, while some just make me laugh – but all of them have informed my thoughts about authors, ideas and worldviews in some way. As this blog is mainly for organizational and personal use, what it contains (and why) changes and will continue to change every time I update it. However, it’s also public domain so please comment if you wish! I hope you find what follows illuminating, infuriating, occasionally helpful and hopefully always fascinating!

Simone de Beauvoir

“Beauvoir argues that aging transforms our relationship to time:

For human reality, existing means existing in time: in the present we look towards the future by means of plans that go beyond our past, in which our activities fall lifeless, frozen and loaded with passive demands. Age changes our relationship with time: as the years go by our future shortens, while our past grows heavier.”

Simone de Beauvoir

“The task of literature is to render the singularity of individual experience as transparent as possible to other human beings, to safeguard the human dimension of experience from alienation by bureaucracy and technocracy.”

Simone de Beauvoir

“Indicating the human wastage incurred by capitalism, Beauvoir argues that ’society cares about the individual only insofar as he is profitable.’ This is a moral indictment of society – ‘old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization’ – and she advocates a radical transformation of the conditions of life to remedy the alienation experienced by young and old alike.”

To Have or to Be?

“Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that ‘free conscious activity’ (i.e., human activity) is ‘the species character of man.’ Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom – should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.

“Marx’s whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rotted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.”

Simone de Beauvoir

“Beauvoir envisages freedom as only being realized by actively engaging itself in the world. In other words, we cannot just sit about and passively proclaim our freedom – we have to go out and actively use that freedom in the world and in our relationships with other people.”

To Have or to Be?

“For Spinoza, mental health is, in the last analysis, a manifestation of right living; mental illness, a symptom of the failure to live according to the requirements of human nature. ‘But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as ‘illness”(Ethics, 4, prop. 44). In this statement, so foreign to the thinking of our time, Spinoza considers passions that do not correspond to the needs of human nature as pathological; in fact, he goes so far as to call them a form of insanity.”

To Have or to Be?

Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing – i.e., stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by ’sitting on it,’ by holding onto our ego and our possessions – can the mode of being emerge. ‘To be’ requires giving up one’s egocentricity and selfishness, or in words often used by the mystics, by making oneself ‘empty’ and ‘poor.’”

To Have or to Be?

“Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol suggested to me by Max Hunziger: A blue glass appears to be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all other colors and thus does not let them pass. This is to say, we call a glass ‘blue’ precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possesses but for what it gives out.”

To Have or to Be?

“The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience.”

To Have or to Be?

“Having refers to things and things are fixed and describable. Being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable. What is fully describable is our persona – the mask we each wear, the ego we present – for this persona is in itself a thing. In contrast, the living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another’s psychical structure. But the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike.”