Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching.

— Dogbert’s motto

I still wonder about the subtle distinction between “marketing” and fraud.

— Scott Adams

It feels as though I make my own way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it’s you, though —

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand
and you, the fullness of my cry.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours III, 1

I envy the beasts two things —
their ignorance of evil to come,
and their ignorance of what is
said about them.

— Voltaire

I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men,
that God might manifest them, and that they might see that
they themselves are beasts.

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts;
even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence
above a beast: for all is vanity.

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

— Ecclesiastes III, 18-21

His asylum at Vigny-sur-Seine was always full. It was called a “Rest Home” in the prospectuses, because it was in the middle of a big garden, where the nuts went walking on nice days. They walked as if they had trouble keeping their heads balanced on their shoulders, they seemed in constant fear of stumbling and spilling the contents. All sorts of misshapen things, things they were dreadfully attached to, were bobbing and bumping about in there.

When the patients spoke of their mental treasures, it was always with anguished contortions or airs of protective condescension that made you think of powerful and ultrameticulous executives. Not for an empire would those lunatics have gone outside their minds. A madman’s thoughts are just the usual ideas of a human being, except that they’re hermetically sealed inside his head. The world never gets into his head, and that’s the way he wants it. A sealed head is like a lake without an outlet, standing, stagnant.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Do not measure in terms of time: one year or ten years means nothing. For the artist there is no counting or tallying up; just ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and endures the storms of spring without fearing that summer will not come. But it will come. It comes, however, only to the patient ones who stand there as if all eternity lay before them — vast, still, untroubled. I learn this every day of my life, I learn it from hardships I am grateful for: patience is all.

— Rilke, Viareggio, April 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

We, though we yearn for the One,
already feel the pull of other things.
Are not lovers ever pushing
at each other’s limits? Lovers,
who promised each other
vastness, hunt, and home. . . .

— Rilke, From the Fourth Duino Elegy

The shapeless heaps turn out to be beggars.
They reveal themselves as you pass by.
They are selling the nothing
their hands hold out.

— Rilke, New Poems

All feelings that gather you up and lift you are pure. If they twist and tear at your being, they are not. All tenderness you may feel for your childhood is good. Every emotion that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is good. Every intensification is good, if it seizes you entire and is not an intoxication or delusion, but a joy you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

— Rilke, Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

Center of all centers, innermost core,
almond sweetening in its self-embrace —
all of this, out to the stars,
is the fruit of your body. We greet you.

You feel how little clings to you now.
Endlessness is your shell,
and there, too, the strength.
It is summoned by the radiance

of the full and glowing suns
that wheel around you.
Yet those stars will be outlasted
by what you have begun.

— Rilke, New Poems

In my isolation, searching for a way to punish man’s universal egoism, it’s true that I was jerking off my imagination, looking for punishment everywhere, even in death. You amuse yourself as best you can when you’re short of friends and don’t often get a chance to go out, much less to emerge from yourself and fuck.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension
so that, released, it travels farther.
For there is nowhere to remain.

— Rilke, From the First Duino Elegy

There is only one thing to do. Go into yourself. Examine your reason for writing. Discover whether it is rooted in the depths of your heart, and find out whether you would rather die than be forbidden to write. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, have I no choice but to write? Dig deep within for the truest answer, and if this answer is a strong and simple yes, then build your life upon this necessity. Your life henceforth, down to its most ordinary and insignificant moment, must prove and reveal this truth.

— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 12

We are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set around us; there is nothing that should frighten or torment us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through millennia of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly, that we, when we hold still, through a happy mimicry, can hardly be distinguished from everything that surrounds us.

— Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet