@freelance-philosopher

Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems

Conventional sex gives me claustrophobia.
Tallulah Blankhead, Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead (1980)

Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of ‘the others,’ the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on.
Søren Kierkegaard

My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934

The trivialities natural to life, the insignificancies of the normal and vulgar, lie like a layer of dust, tracing a blurred, grotesque line beneath the squalor and meanness of my human existence.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.
Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts (1932)

Only the rarest and best-formed come to the highest and most illustrious human joys, in which existence celebrates its own transfiguration.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient; when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely boring.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes, and they are right too. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.
Anaïs Nin

For the aesthete, tragedies are interesting to observe, but uncomfortable to experience.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

You want beauty,” said Hercules Poirot. “Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth. I want always truth.
Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment. Mortification, morbid susceptibility, the inability to wreak revenge, the desire and thirst for revenge, the concoction of every sort of poison—this is surely the most injurious manner of reacting which could possibly be conceived by exhausted men. It involves a rapid wasting away of nervous energy, an abnormal increase of detrimental secretions, as, for instance, that of bile into the stomach.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

When you are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly about in the world.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

He who has the courage to hurt, for great reasons, he alone does good.
Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller: 1932–1953

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Sexual union is the most religious experience possible, it is the most thrilling form of meditation, it is direct contact with the divine.
James Broughton

Artists should see nothing as it is, but fuller, simpler, stronger: to that end, their lives must contain a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home⁠—having spent a very pleasant evening.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination.

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin (June 1945)

If I hear myself speaking out loud, the ears with which I hear myself speaking out loud do not listen to me in the same way as the inner ear with which I dare to think those words. And if, when listening to myself, I frequently have to ask myself what I mean, how little others will understand me!
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (1929) ‘Wordsworth in the Tropics’

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if one’s very existence were a work of art.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. He renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.
Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations

Solitude may rust your words.

Anaïs Nin, Collages (1964)

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (via mesogeios )

I loathe the happiness of all these people who don’t know they’re unhappy. Their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other – but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness — of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him.
Erich Fromm

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

This is the way a person always gains courage: when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death