Inventory

“What is to give light must endure burning.”
― Victor Frankl

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde

"We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors."
―Rainer Maria Rilke

And what if reality dissolved before our very eyes? Not into nothingness, but into the more real than real (the triumph of simulacra)? What if the modern universe of communication, of hyper-communication, had plunged us, not into the senseless, but into a tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its success - without the game, the secret, or distance? ...If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth.
―Jean Baudrillard

Relations of power are not in themselves forms of repression. But what happens is that, in society, in most societies, organizations are created to freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a certain number of persons get an advantage, socially, economically, politically, institutionally, etc. And this totally freezes the situation. That’s what one calls power in the strict sense of the term: it’s a specific type of power relation that has been institutionalized, frozen, immobilized, to the profit of some and to the detriment of others.
―Foucault

“Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well."
―Alex (A Clockwork Orange)