“Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still; this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo. And as the lesser surrenders to the greater, that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so the greatest, too, surrenders and for the sake of power stakes–life. The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death. And where sacrifice and service and loving glances are, there too is will to be master. There the weaker steals by secret paths into the castle and even into the heart of the more powerful–and steals the power.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)
“A scene in ‘Gangster Squad,’ featuring a shoot-out in a cinema, was cut and replaced after the killings in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20th of last year. And the première of ‘Jack Reacher,’ in Pittsburgh, on December 15th, was postponed after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, the previous day; the film begins with citizens being gunned down by a sniper with a high-powered rifle. These reactions were respectful and responsible. To claim that all due respect has now been paid, however, or that all ethical responsibilities have been fulfilled, would be disingenuous. The issue of screen violence carries far less weight, in such fathomless horrors, than that of gun control; the connection between what a disturbed and resentful young man used to watch, or play on his computer, and what he then wreaks in public with an assault weapon wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t lay his hands on such a weapon in the first place. Yet the connection, however oblique, exists. You can argue that evil will always seek a blueprint and find a way, but we are still obliged, I think, to pass beyond the pathology of the madman and pose a vaster and no less vexing question. What does it mean for the majority of us, the nonviolent millions, that, year after year, we should observe such a rising flood of savage fictional acts that, after a while, we scarcely notice or mind?” – Anthony Lane, “Violent Screen”
“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have really long legs.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)
“People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just by when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.” – John McPhee, “Structure”
“If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.” – John McPhee, “Structure”
“What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also.
“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my happiness? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease. But my happiness should justify existence itself!’
“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my reason? Does it long for knowledge as the lion for its food? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’
“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How tired I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’
“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my justice? I do not see that I am fire and hot coals. But the just man is fire and hot coals!’” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)
“All writing is a journey. You take the reader by the hand and you lead him somewhere. And you want to make sure he never lets go of your hand.” – Roger Ebert (quoted in “Roger Ebert: A film critic with the soul of a poet,” by Rick Kogan)
“I ask myself what my body really wants from music generally. I believe it wants to have relief: so that all animal functions should be accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-assured rhythms; so that brazen, leaden life should be gilded by means of golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy would fain rest its head in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection: for this reason I need music.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Common)
“Although the most intelligent judges of the witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt, nevertheless, was not there. So it is with all guilt.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Common)
“The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it’s something that a person needed to do and which awakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Shapes of Things”
“The writers we absorb when we’re young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.” – Daniel Mendelsohn, “The American Boy”
“There is only one way to learn to write and that is by reading. Don’t read for duty, try all the good stuff though, sample it, then devour what stimulates and enriches you. This will seep in to your own work, which may be derivative at first but this does not matter. Your own style will develop later.” – Mary Renault (quoted by Daniel Mendelsohn in “The American Boy”)
“It behoveth thee not to grieve for that which must happen: for who can avert, by his wisdom, the decrees of fate? No one can leave the way marked out for him by Providence. Existence and non-existence, pleasure and pain all have Time for their root. Time createth all things and Time destroyeth all creatures. It is Time that burneth creatures and it is Time that extinguisheth the fire. All states, the good and the evil, in the three worlds, are caused by Time. Time cutteth short all things and createth them anew. Time alone is awake when all things are asleep: indeed, Time is incapable of being overcome. Time passeth over all things without being retarded. Knowing, as thou dost, that all things past and future and all that exist at the present moment, are the offspring of Time, it behoveth thee not to throw away thy reason.” — Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, The Mahabharata: Adi Parva (trans. Roy)
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” —Susan Sontag, On Photography
“There are in all nine virtues, and when we say that a man possesses these virtues it is as much as to say that he begins to do such and such things. They are liberality combined with dignity, mildness combined with firmness, bluntness combined with respect, aptness for government combined with caution, docility combined with boldness, straightforwardness combined with gentleness, easy negligence combined with discrimination, resolution combined with sincerity, and courage combined with justice. If these are apparent, and that continuously, how fortunate it will be.” — Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (trans. Allen)
“Whenever a person reveals something, one can ask: what is it supposed to conceal? From what is it supposed to divert the eyes? What prejudice is it supposed to arouse? And additionally: how far does the subtlety of this dissimulation go? And in what way has it failed?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale)
“In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself. We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included—but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young—and that we missed them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“The poor sheep say to their shepherd: ‘go on ahead and we shall never lack the courage to follow you’. The poor shepherd, however, thinks to himself: ‘follow me and I shall never lack the courage to lead you’.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale)
“Poor, happy and independent!—these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave!—these things can also go together—and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition—I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations—the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived—until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Above all, in every state it is necessary, both by the laws and every other method possible, to prevent those who are employed by the public from being venal.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“It is a general maxim in democracies, oligarchies, monarchies, and indeed in all governments, not to let any one acquire a rank far superior to the rest of the community, but rather to endeavour to confer moderate honours for a continuance than great ones for a short time; for these latter spoil men, for it is not every one who can bear prosperity: but if this rule is not observed, let not those honours which were conferred all at once be all at once taken away, but rather by degrees. But, above all things, let this regulation be made by the law, that no one shall have too much power, either by means of his fortune or friends.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)