muguetrouge

[muguetrouge]

Might it have been nothing but life itself ? Life ; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

[muguetrouge]

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence : that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown — as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

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But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

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What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself ?

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

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The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

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What then is truth ? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people : truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

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All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul”.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

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What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

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To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

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We praise or find fault, depending on which of the two provides more opportunity for our powers of judgment to shine.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

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I wanted to explode like a rocket, light the sky for an instant and disappear.

Paul Schrader, Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

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Syndrome banal: un être vous manque, le monde prend sa forme.

Sylvain Tesson, La Panthère des neiges

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Le monde de mes désirs a pris la place de mon désir. J’habite la terre des rapports hasardeux, fragiles et profonds comme la musique ; ma voix en est l’ombre et ma parole le souvenir. J’habite avec ma vie un monde sans lien avec la vie, et dont la dissolution abolirait jusqu’au souvenir de mon existence. Je suis la mort de quelqu’un que je ne suis plus.

Joë Bousquet, Mystique

[muguetrouge]

Les citations ne sont pas des paravents derrière lesquels se réfugier. Elles sont la formulation d'une pensée qu'on a caressée un jour et que l'on reconnait, exprimée avec bonheur, sous la plume d'un autre. Les citations révèlent l'âme de celui qui les brandit.

Sylvain Tesson, Géographie de l'instant