FLUXEUROPA: MAXIMS

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MAXIMS AND QUOTATIONS

Injunctions, observations and grim humour concerning aspects of the human condition

BAUDRILLARD, JEAN

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.

Simulacra and Simulation 1981

ELIOT, T S

Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Collected Poems 1936 'Burnt Norton pt. 1'

HULME, T E

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress. One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absoulutely constatnt. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.
Speculations, 1936

LEWIS, Wyndham

Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
'The Code of a Herdsman', The Ideal Giant 1917.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich

I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Twilight of the Idols, Maxim 26.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."

Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Part One, Zarathustra's Discourses, Of the New Idol

There are no facts, only interpretations.
Nachlass

JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

Nothing so saps the profound resosurces of a life as finding life too easy.
'In Search of Goethe from Within', The Worlds of Existentialism

POUND, Ezra

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless.
'On The Vanity Of Existence', Parerga and Paralipomena.

WEBER, Max

Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalist influence.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

UNKNOWN, ANONYMOUS OR DISPUTED AUTHORSHIP

Constitutions are made of paper, but bayonets are made of steel.

(Last updated 17 May 2003)