“Roads are not passive; they have instrumentality and agency because they direct us – they give us our limits – even when we stray from them.” – Mary Carruthers, “The concept of ductus”
Author: Tetman Callis
“Children are not invariably conservative, but show conservative tendencies.” – Jess Gropen, et al., “The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English”
“I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never learned to use their sense organs: They did not see the things before their eyes, hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted. Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies. There were others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness, as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change, or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in ‘today’ there was no real ‘tomorrow.’ The future was just the repetition of the past.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary process he had found no trace of God.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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