If reading continually reteaches you how to think, television is a perpetual anesthetic. Philosophy, history, complex thought are all impossible on the tube: “Its form works against the content.” — Noah McCormack, “We Used to Read Things in This Country”, The Baffler #81, November 2025
Category Archives: Quotations
Martin Lutheracy
In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by [the demands of] eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read. […] The Protestant impact on literacy and education can still be observed today in the differential impact of Protestant vs. Catholic missions in Africa and India. In Africa, regions with early Protestant missions at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (now long gone) are associated with literacy rates that are about 16 percentage points higher, on average, than those associated with Catholic missions. In some analyses, Catholics have no impact on literacy at all unless they faced direct competition for souls from Protestant missions. These impacts can also be found in early twentieth-century China.
Night Blight
“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the cross-roads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?” — Henry Beston (1888-1968), The Outermost House, 1933
Ein Licht im Nichts
„Soweit wir erkennen können, besteht der einzige Zweck der menschlichen Existenz darin, ein Licht in der Dunkelheit des bloßen Seins zu entzünden.“ — Carl Jung (1875-1961)
• “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Hue Views
The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty, — nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who
“Could strip, for aught the prospect yields
To them, their verdure from the fields;
And take the radiance from the clouds
With which the sun his setting shrouds.”
But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair, — if they could but see for an instant, white human creatures living in a white world, — they would soon feel what they owe to color. The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color, and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
• John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol II, Chapter 5, xxx
S’éteignent, S’encroûtent, S’allument…
« Des soleils s’éteignent & s’encroûtent, des planètes périssent & se dispersent dans les plaines des airs ; d’autres soleils s’allument, de nouvelles planètes se forment pour faire leurs révolutions ou pour décrire de nouvelles routes, & l’homme, portion infiniment petite d’un globe, qui n’est lui-même qu’un point imperceptible dans l’immensité, croit que c’est pour lui que l’univers est fait, s’imagine qu’il doit être le confident de la nature, se flatte d’être éternel, se dit le roi de l’univers ! » — Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature (1770), Partie 1, Chapitre 6
“Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself, flatters himself that he is eternal, calls himself king of the universe!”
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum…
Mais… Mens Major Est Quam Materia…
R.I.pH
Here lie the bones of Henry Jones:
Alas, he is no more!
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4!
• Traditional rhyme
Papillons de Papier
Tsavudz’ gvdjo
Hmorksa ržmju:
Í hmístaghjo,
Í hmůldzva lšju! — Franček Zymosjő (1883-1941)
White butterflies,
On paper wings,
Are mystagogues,
Enchanted things!
• Translation by Elena Nebotsaya in On Paper Wings: Selected Poems and Prose of Franček Zymosjő (Symban Press 1986)
Omnia e Tarot
« Une personne emprisonnée sans autre livre que le Tarot, s’il savait comment l’utiliser, pourrait dans quelques années acquérir une connaissance universelle et pourrait s’exprimer sur tous les sujets avec un savoir inégalé et une éloquence inépuisable. » – Éliphas Lévi (1810-75)
• “An imprisoned person, with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequalled learning and inexhaustible eloquence.” – Éliphas Lévi
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
I’m not sure if the above is the French original. It might be a back-translation of the English translation of the French original, because I found it here, not in any online French texts by Lévi.
Luis’ Lip
“Decíamos ayer…” — Fray Luis de León (1527-1591)
Sus biógrafos cuentan que fray Luis acostumbraba, en sus años de docencia, resumir las lecciones explicadas en la clase anterior; y que, al volver a la Universidad a su nueva cátedra, retomó sus lecciones con la frase “Decíamos ayer…” (Dicebamus hesterna die) como si sus cuatro años de prisión no hubieran transcurrido. Pero, aunque la frase tiene sello luisiano, se supone que es una invención posterior de fray Nicolaus Crusenius. — Wikipedia
• “As we were saying yesterday…” — Fray Luis de León, in the lecture hall of the University of Salamanca, December 30, 1576, after he had returned from an imprisonment of nearly five years by the Spanish Inquisition. (From Anecdotes from History: Being a Collection of 1000 Anecdotes, Epigrams, and Episodes Illustrative of English and World History, Grant Uden, 1968)
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 