Mabel Pettigrew thought: I can read him like a book. She had not read a book for over forty years, could never concentrate on reading, but this nevertheless was her thought.

- Muriel Spark

"Tell me, tell me,
tell me the answer
You may be a lover
but you ain't no dancer!"
~Macca, '68

"The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life." ~Rabindranath

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”

- John le Carré

"Maybe cynics are disappointed optimists (bitter) and absurdists disappointed pessimists (grateful) – the difference between schadenfreude & singing the blues." ~180 Proof

"At the very limit of his life, when familiar, differentiated daylight had become the edge of undifferentiated eternity, where words were only the spindrift off breaking silence, he had glimpsed the strange truth that, 'to one who sees the world aright' all lives that are not terrible are wonderful. In the beginning was astonishment. And so it was with a cry of astonishment, of wonder, perhaps even of joy, that he passed over into silence." -- Raymond Tallis

“You can be poor, but you can educate yourself for free.” ~S.A. Cosby

*

"There's nowhere you can be
that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy"
~John Lennon

"Hmmm... been fearsome confused for a month or two, but I ain't never been lost!" Henry Frapp

Hito Steyerl on Art and Life:

Artistic autonomy was traditionally predicated not on occupation, but on separation — more precisely, on art’s separation from life. As artistic production became more specialized in an industrial world marked by an increasing division of labor, it also grew increasingly divorced from direct functionality. While it apparently evaded instrumentalization, it simultaneously lost social relevance. As a reaction, different avant-gardes set out to break the barriers of art and to recreate its relation to life. Their hope was for art to dissolve within life, to be infused with a revolutionary jolt. What happened as rather the contrary.

To push the point: life has been occupied by art, because art’s initial forays back into life and daily practice gradually turned into routine incursions, and then into constant occupation. Nowadays, the invasion of life by art is not the exception, but the rule. Artistic autonomy was meant to separate art from the zone of daily routine — from mundane life, intentionality, utility, production, and instrumental reason — in order to distance it from rules of efficiency and social coercion. But this incompletely segregated area then incorporated all that it broke from in the first place, recasting the old order within its own aesthetic paradigms. The incorporation of art within life was once a political project (both for the Left and Right), but the incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.

Re: capitalism:

"Our moment permits interest in one question only – Will we of Deadwood be more than targets for assfucking? To not grab ankle is to declare yourself interested. What's your posture, Bullock?" ~Al Swearengen to Seth Bullock

"The fundamental problem of political philosophy: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" ~Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” -- Paine

"... on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made." ~Charles W. Mills, 1951-2021

"Cognitive therapy seeks to alleviate psychological stresses by correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals. By correcting erroneous beliefs we can lower excessive reactions." ~Aaron T. Beck 1921-2021

"While we can isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such, because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways."

- C.I. Lewis

Je souffre d'être. — Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, 1657-1757

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

--Abraham Maslow

Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. — William Blake

Wisdom is the daughter of experience. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Black women can never rest and so we die early.

If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. — bell hooks d. 2021

Thank you. I didn't know of bell hooks. Great quotes. Here's more with references.


From the Guardian.

A life in quotes: bell hooks

The groundbreaking feminist critic, poet, and intellectual on love, feminism, patriarchy, white supremacy, forgiveness and the power of art

bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69

Bell hooks, the feminist author, poet, theorist and cultural critic, has died at the age of 69 at her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her works, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, All About Love, Bone Black, Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, were beacons for a generation of writers and thinkers in academia and beyond.

Here’s a handful of her most memorable quotes: — The Guardian - Books - bell hooks

Here's one under 'On Community':

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/15/bell-hooks-best-quotes-feminism-race

Following an interesting discussion, started by @Ciceronianus:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12268/is-philosophy-a-game-of-lets-pretend/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/632795

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume

"So liquid now has acc- cause liquid-...the liquid-...the liquid-....so now I have the liquid..."
–Neil deGrasse Tyson on the show Hot Ones

Following the discussion, started by @jancanc
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12284/can-a-metaphor-be-a-single-word/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/634130

Philosophy is the battle against [the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language]. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109)
— SEP: Metaphor

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion d. 2021

Following your post and wonderful quotes, just read a bit in the Guardian.

Her second essay collection, The White Album (1979) contained her most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“For me, writing is a kind of exploration,” Didion told the Guardian in 2003. “I’m not sure that I have a social conscience. It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth.” — Guardian - Joan Didion

:up: "What I want and what I fear." This is the line that grabbed me thirtysomething years ago and made me a fan of her (early) essays.

What I want and what I fear. — 180 Proof

I wish I'd read that 30 years ago ! Yes, desire and fear - the prime motivators - would have been good to have explored that, all the better to know self. Perhaps, a different path would have been taken...

I have read similar to:
'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking'

That's something TPF is good for, I find. Well, sometimes... :wink:

Wrong!
Do it again!
If you don't eat your meat,
you can't have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!
You!
Yes, you,
behiind the bike shed,
stand still, laddy! — Another Brick in the Wall, part II

:yum: MERRY SOLSTICE :sparkle:

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.

Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.

Ubuntu [...] speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say [...] "Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons."

We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are.

We are made for loving. If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water. — Desmond Tutu, d. 2021

You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. — E.O. Wilson, d. 2021

:up: