“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Month: February 2023
“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The main problem facing any kind of studies on solifuges is the keeping of these animals in captivity. So far, nobody has successfully reared them in a laboratory. It is even difficult to keep them a short time (e.g., two weeks) in captivity. Most of the Namibian species died after a couple of days after they had been captured. The Argentinean species survived a maximum of about two weeks in captivity. The eremobatid species, captured in Arizona (USA) survived in general for about a week. The galeodid species from Kazakhstan survived a slightly longer period up to a couple of months, which could implicate, that these animals are less susceptive regarding e.g., differences in temperature. All solifuges independent the country where they were collected became lethargic after a couple of days and did not show any kind of a natural behavior any more.” – Anja Elisabeth Klann, Histology and Ultrastructure of Solifuges
“A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“Susan Sontag wrote in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ that ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’ Meaning: the interpretation of art is a tiresome pseudoscience, and the magnetism of art is what has always saved it from becoming dull, weighted down. It’s something we see and feel first and foremost, before we attempt to understand it. It’s a pretty rich line of thinking for an art critic, no? Still, I’ll drink to it. As a people, we’ve toiled for too long at the heavy project of understanding individual works. Entire books are devoted to it. Entire academic disciplines. Entire careers. The important thing, it seems, is to develop tools with which to dissect art so that no piece of art need remain a mystery to its viewer. But . . . why? So few experiences have the ability to enrapture that art has, and I mean all kinds of art. The mystique of it is the point. To be arrested by a sentence, a key change, a flash of white sun poking through deep brown twigs in a landscape—that’s why we keep making all this crap. It can be so insular to make art, and so lonely. Our projects consume us.” – Rax King, “Three Small Words,” in Tacky (emphases in original)
“Literature cannot cause or make anything, because its reality is neither spiritual nor material, subjective nor objective. But as the expression of the total meaningfulness of the logos or the setting up of a world, literature uncovers the world and opens up other possible worlds.” – Pheng Cheah, What is a world? On postcolonial literature as world literature
“Every tacky loudmouth of a girl is behaving strategically. For all the tiresome gender essentialism that leads people to mock girls for the obnoxious way they scream, nobody seems to acknowledge that a screaming girl knows exactly how annoying she’s being. She simply doesn’t care . . .. For a girl, a scream is a potent reclamation of space that cannot be claimed any other way.” – Rax King, “You Wanna Be On Top?,” in Tacky
“Bad history may be good mythology or folk-lore, and statements the most wildly at variance with fact often throw a useful light on the beliefs or institutions of the age when they became current.” – W. G. Aston, Nihongi
“As one passes through the levels of incarceration—from the minimum to the moderate to the maximum security institutions, and then to the solitary confinement section of these institutions—one does not pass deeper and deeper into a subpopulation of the most ruthlessly calculating criminals. Instead, ironically and tragically, one comes full circle back to those who are emotionally fragile and, often, severely mentally ill.” – Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement”
“The thing about dessert is that nobody needs it. I never order a slice of cake to satisfy a need, but rather to fulfill some craving, succumb to an impulse. I am tempted, constantly, by dessert, which does little to sustain my body but does wonders for my soul.” – Rax King, “Six Feet from the Edge,” in Tacky
“We shall all no doubt be wise after the event; we study history that we may be wise before the event.” – John Robert Seeley (quoted by Duncan Bell in “John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire”)
“Idiocy in a family is one thing, and money is another.” – James Thurber, “Lavender with a Difference”
“One of saddest lessons in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
“In the United States we have what is often called an adversarial system of justice. However, because it is adversarial—as distinct from inquisitorial—it is sometimes easy to forget that the purpose of the system is not to hold a contest for its own sake. The purpose of our system of justice is the orderly ascertainment of the truth and the application of the law to that truth. Just because a court must rely on fallible litigants to present competent evidence does not vitiate the fundamental purpose of the proceeding, which is most assuredly not to have a contest but to establish what actually happened. The adversarial system works not because it is a contest to see who has the cleverest lawyer but because allowing two or more sides to present evidence to a neutral decisionmaker is an epistemologically sophisticated way to get at the truth. And while certain aspects of the law, namely the fact that there are fixed rules and outcomes, allow it to be analogized to a game, it is most definitely not a spectator sport.” – Presiding Judge Sills, Guardianship of Simpson, November 10, 1998 (internal cites and quotations omitted)
“As a matter of case law, as well as common sense, the question of whether one parent has actually murdered the other is about as relevant as it is possible to imagine in any case involving whether the surviving parent should be allowed any form of child custody.” – Presiding Judge Sills, Guardianship of Simpson, November 10, 1998
“Congress may impose penalties in aid of the exercise of any of its enumerated powers. The power of taxation, granted to Congress by the Constitution, may be utilized as a sanction for the exercise of another power which is granted it.” – Associate Justice William O. Douglas, Sunshine Anthracite Coal Co. v. Adkins, 310 U.S. 381 (1940)
“Central Florida is like a waiting line for hell, with overweight diabetics and geriatrics shuffling through the motions of life, no matter how much of it they have left.” – Dominic Gwinn, a/k/a “The Smoke Eater,” August 7, 2022
“We have so little time to engage with the art that our fellow humans have created, and of course nobody is obligated to like all of it. But to decide that someone’s work has no merit because that person is drunk, or sick, or unhappy, that is a judgment call that none of us should feel qualified to make.” – Rax King, “Six Feet from the Edge,” in Tacky