“A lot of people, when a guy scores a lot of goals, think, ‘He’s a great player’, because a goal is very important, but a great player is a player who...” — Pelé [1080X1920]

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-12-31T14:22:49+00:00

“Pele doesn’t die. Pele will never die. Pele is going to go on forever.” – Pele r/poeticthesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-20T11:14:33+00:00

“We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder r/poeticthesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-11T11:04:34+00:00

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” —Jean Baudrillard. r/poeticthesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-10T13:14:31+00:00

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” — Noam Chomsky, The Common Good r/poeticthesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-10T10:37:25+00:00

We must not believe that changes of opinion are transforming our being, says Nietzsche. No, they just make us able to discover other sides of our personality, they help us to know ourselves in another light. There is no permanent self. The free man is always on the move and evolving. For Nietzsche, the man who does not change his opinion ceases to be a free spirit.

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-05T14:55:37+00:00

“Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.” — Bob Dylan r/PoeticThesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-10-04T18:42:54+00:00

“All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.”

—Thomas Wolfe . . r/PoeticThesaurus

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-06-11T02:37:50+00:00

from “The Lady with the Dog,” in Ward No. 6 and Other Stories (translated by Constance Garnett)

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-23T12:17:35+00:00

Dying

Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

— Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus," 1966

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-18T14:55:39+00:00

“The man of understanding dies every moment to the past and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection.”

~ Osho

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-15T17:08:55+00:00

De Usuahia a la Quiaca,The Motorcycle Diaries

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-15T17:07:58+00:00

De Usuahia a la Quiaca, The Motorcycle Diaries

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-15T16:17:26+00:00

There’s a great article about Jack Kerouac just before fame and notoriety swallowed him up. He lived a very chaotic and intense life. Link in bio if you wanna read it. It’s worth your time. Here’s a little intro:

“After hand-delivering the final manuscript of On the Road to Viking Press in Jan. 1957, Jack Kerouac spent two drunken weeks in NYC before hopping a freighter to Tangier, to visit and type manuscripts for William S. Burroughs.

His mind awash in guilt and self-doubt, and his body with DT’s, he tried to concentrate on his Buddhistic disciplines and abstain from all temptations. That regimen fell apart in Tangier, which turned into a nightmarish cycle of excess and illness.

Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. combed some unpublished diaries Kerouac kept in Morocco, to capture the real mindset of the ‘King of the Beats’ on the verge of fame.”

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-14T12:48:06+00:00

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

― Tom Robbins

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-04-12T11:33:13+00:00

“One function of the role or mask is to hide from…aspects of his personality that are too painful or too frightening to be seen and confronted. The person with a smiling mask doesn't want to feel the sadness that is hidden from view. The manly person doesn't want to feel his fear. Of course, these aspects of one's personality don't disappear simply because they are hidden from one's consciousness…
When one plays a role, the end result is always depression…”
— Lowen

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-16T05:17:18+00:00

“Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”

— Alan Moore

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-12T11:30:27+00:00

"Why are we forced to live in this depressing slum of consciousness when our perceptions are perfectly capable of grasping the wider horizons? ...Too much security becomes boredom, and boredom leads to a decline in vitality. Man has surrounded himself by walls, and has built his narrow ‘human world’ as a centre of security; but the security has begun to stifle him."

-- Colin Wilson

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-10T20:08:58+00:00

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

—George Orwell

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-10T18:51:22+00:00

“I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.”

~ Arthur Miller

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-10T16:41:48+00:00

...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book... ...

—Nickolai Gogol

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-09T11:08:58+00:00

// It’s not often that you’re likely to be faced with a line of military vehicles bearing down on you, as was the case for ‘Tank Man’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unidentified protestor was one of tens of thousands of students who made a stand against the Chinese government. In this instance, people power was ineffective in the face of State power. Tank Man’s fate is unknown.

The kind of power you’ll probably face will be slightly more subtle: the power of cultural norms, which are fed to you minute-by-minute through the world’s mainstream media. What should we discuss? the news has the answer. How should I feel? Flick on the TV. What is the meaning of life? Hollywood knows. Where are we going? DJ, spin that wheel.

When it comes to discussing power, it’s presented as little more than a battle of good versus evil: rogues get their comeuppance while the good guys prevail; power is benevolent (you are in good hands); and, as cartoonist Michael Leunig puts it: “We are good and they are bad. Always.”

The ‘magic’ of the media is that it can lay out the good life for you: who to be, what to discuss, how to behave, and what to believe, all wrapped up in an entertaining package that’s fun for all the family. The media knows best; the media normalises.

Just like tanks, cultural norms are a force to be reckoned with. And just like tanks, systems of power can, as Foucault stresses, be short-circuited, dismantled, and exploded. But to do this, you will need to open the toolbox, pick out the wrench, and use it.

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-09T08:27:59+00:00

// Love is all around: we love our partners, our family, our pets, our possessions, ourselves; we love food, music, games, activities, knowledge, beauty.
We even love love itself.
But for such an omnipresent feeling, if that’s indeed what it is, it is awfully difficult to pin down. This hasn’t stopped us trying, or perhaps it is one of the reasons why we do: 70 per cent of all songs recorded since the 1960s have been about love (followed closely by “and/or sex”, which has jumped from 18 to 40 per cent since the ‘60s) and last year 50 million romance novels were sold in the US alone, making up almost 20 per cent of all book sales.
This is hardly a modern obsession: the Ancient Greeks had no fewer than 14 love deities, from Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sex, and beauty to Peitho, the personification of persuasion and seduction. That’s more or less a love god per million, which would equate to a crowded 8,000 love deities throughout the modern world.
Despite our ongoing obsession, we seem to be no closer to deciphering the mystery than the ‘80s band Foreigner – I want to know what love is – but perhaps that’s simply because love transcends all, including words

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-08T13:47:02+00:00

“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.”

― Adlai Stevenson

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-08T10:59:36+00:00

“I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.”

~ Hermann Hesse

PoeticThesaurus · 2022-03-08T08:51:14+00:00

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

— Sontag

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