• 672 replies
    marye
    Joined:
    Sometimes you come across a quote, a line, a statement that just nails it, at some level. Cosmic, comic, whatever. If you'd like to share it, post it here, duly credited!

Comments

sort by
Recent
Reset
  • daverock
    Joined:
    No milk today

    Jean - Paul Sartre walks into a café, and the waiter asks what he'd like to order. Sartre replies, " I'd like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream." The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. "I'm sorry Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream. How about with no milk?"

    Quoted from the film Ninotchka, in the excellent "At The Existentialist Café. Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails" by Sarah Bakewell

  • rdevil
    Joined:
    Wright Morris

    This is relatively lengthy but I love it. It's a passage from Wright Morris' novel, The Huge Season. A truncated version precedes the novel Bang the Drum Slowly and that's how I discovered this book.

    "What's your novel about?" I said and glanced at the yellow sheets on the desk. A small pile of typed sheets were in the case for his typewriter. A big photograph of Lawrence, smashing one away, was under the jelly glass full of sharpened pencils. "It wouldn't be about a tennis player?" I said.
    He wiped his face with the towel again. "Old man, a book can have Chicago in it, and not be about Chicago. It can have a tennis player in it without being about a tennis player."
    I didn't get it. I probably looked it, for he went on, "Take this book here, old man--" and held up one of the books he had swiped from some library. Along with the numbers I could see Hemingway's name on the spine. "There's a prizefighter in it, old man, but it's not about a prizefighter."
    "Is it about the sun rising?" I said. I knew that was part of the title.
    "Goddam if I know what it's about," he said and opened it up, as if he might have overlooked it.

  • Vguy72
    Joined:
    Chatty indeed!!....

    ...."Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." - Stephen King
    I 💖 King

  • Kate_C.
    Joined:
    Thread Revival! Come 1 Come All, Wednesday, June 19th...

    Aren't y'all just chatty today.

    I've been reading a good bit of Wilde lately and, as with Twain and Rogers, I'm simply amazed at the timelessness of the occasional Transcendent Mind among our species: "The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy."

    Strider88! Next thing you know CosmicBadger will be revived from reported extinction...Gosh I miss you guys.

  • Strider 808808
    Joined:
    A sign at the seniors center

    Lost Dog

    Has one eye

    Three legs

    Broken tail

    Recently castrated

    Answers by the name Lucky

  • Strider 808808
    Joined:
    golden nuggets of the Sun

    Just another dopeless hope fiend

    I have high friends in places

    I’m not as think as you stoned I am

  • slo lettuce
    Joined:
    .....

    The sun
    with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it
    can still ripen a bunch of grapes
    as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

    -Galileo Galilei

  • rickla
    Default Avatar
    Joined:
    Happiness
    It’s only after you give up trying to hold on to everything that you think will make you happy that you can truly be happy
  • wilfredtjones
    Joined:
    Be nice
    ~Jerome John Garcia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlXEGLXlV0
  • slo lettuce
    Joined:
    ~K.K.~
    Touch her in all ways non physical... Give her intellectual orgasms in multiples and allow temptation to drip from her ears. Go down on her thoughts and taste her perception. Learn her soul and she will fill the void of your filthiest imaginations... Never start with the hands. -A.D. Woods
user picture

Member for

17 years 5 months
Forums
Sometimes you come across a quote, a line, a statement that just nails it, at some level. Cosmic, comic, whatever. If you'd like to share it, post it here, duly credited!
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'Awakening is not a thing. It's not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying "And then I shall have wings and antennae", there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.' - Alejandro Jodorowsky
user picture

Member for

17 years 5 months
Permalink

...Tom BanjoIt's time to matter. The Earth will see you On through this time The Earth will see you On through this time --Robert Hunter, Mountains of the Moon
user picture

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

"So how do we go about seeing through the illusion of this false notion of the self? How do we generate the insight that would directly contradict that form of perception? Nagarjuna says that if a "self","I", or person exists as we normally assume it to exist, if it exists as we falsely view it, then the more we look at it, the more we search for its essence, the referent behind our terms and labels, then the clearer it should become. But that is not the case. If we were to search for the self or person as we normally perceive it, then it disappears, it sort of disintegrates, and this is an indication that such a notion of self was an illusion from the start. Because of this point, one of Nagarjuna's students, Aryadeva, stated in his "Four Hundred Verses on the Middle Way" that it is our ignorant conception of consciousness which is the seed of samsara (cyclic existence) and that things and events are its objects of grasping and apprehension. And it is only through seeing through the illusion of such a conception that we will be able to put an end to the process of existence." – His Holiness the Dalai Lama
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'And I imagine...with great pleasure...all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day i'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.' - Alejandro Jodorowsky
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was a illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the centre of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand: I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget: I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny - Philemon Holland's - and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly: I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circualtion of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon - the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.' - Jorge Luis Borges
user picture
Default Avatar

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

"While we may honestly acknowledge that we wouldprefer a certain outcome, it is essential to surrender our attachment to how we think our prayer should out-picture." -Michael Bernard Beckwith
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

"when I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.then i realized that the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me." -emo phillips
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

glazed eyes aren't suspicious at all.they're simply the more energy-efficient model of windows to the soul.........officer -sl
user picture

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption." – Victor Lebow (1955)
user picture
Default Avatar

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

"A white spiderupon a white flower consuming a white moth... the canvas without color is governed by itself. What for curiosities sake is it, in of itself." -Written upon a white piece of paper and found in a binder of yester-year.
user picture

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodley do,What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust. – Kurt Vonnegut
user picture
Default Avatar

Member for

17 years 4 months
Permalink

"Our greatest glory is not in neverfalling but in rising every time we fall." -Fortune Cookie Lucky numbers 1, 2, 20, 45, 37, 43
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.' - Georges Perec
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

"As soon as a person does not take their own existence for granted,but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins." -Albert Schweitzer
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'I mean, the human race, we are a tribe, let's face it, and let's stop all this religious bullshit. I think everybody, or at least a lot of my friends, are just so exhausted with this whole self-importance of religious people. Just drop it. We're all fucking animals, so let's just make some universal tribal beat. We're all pagan. Let's just march.' - Björk
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'In the part of the world we are dealing with everybody wants to own everything. Existence feels so uncertain and so fragile that people fight fiercely and with great passion to hold on to things: land, culture, religious symbols, food - everything is in danger of being snatched away or of disappearing. The result is fiery arguments about provenance, about who and what came first. As we have seen through our investigations, and will become blatantly apparent to anyone reading and cooking from this book, these arguments are futile. ... they are futile because it doesn't matter. Looking back in time or far afield into distant lands is simply distracting. The beauty of food and of eating is that they are rooted in the now. Food is a basic, hedonistic pleasure, a sensual instinct we all share and revel in. It is a shame to spoil it.' - Yotam Ottolenghi
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.' - Austin Osman Spare
user picture

Member for

14 years 10 months
Permalink

Chi-chi, grab the yay-oh
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." -Eleanor Roosevelt
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

"Without accepting the fact that everything changes,we cannot find perfect composure. Unfortunately, this truth is difficult for us to accept and because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer." -Shunryu Suzuki
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

"If the head fits, wear it." -Bob Weir - from David Letterman interview, 1982
user picture

Member for

12 years 3 months
Permalink

'It is conventional to call "monster" any blending of dissonant elements. I call "monster" every original inexhaustible beauty.' - Alfred Jarry