Considered in their specialization and technicality, superior activities leave a ‘technical vacuum’ between one another which is filled up by everyday life. Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human — and every human being — a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.

— Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life

[Everyday life is a concept] some people are averse to confronting because it . . . represents the standpoint of totality; it would imply the necessity of an integral political judgment. . . . Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics.

— Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life”

Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further: we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.

— Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism”

Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. “I should think not,” he said; “he took himself along with him.”

Why should we move to find
Countries and climates of another kind?
What exile leaves himself behind?

[Horace]

If a man does not first unburden himself and his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will crush it still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled. You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him. You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them. Wherefore it is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves.

— Montaigne, “Of Solitude”

The soul’s at fault, which ne’er escapes itself.

[Horace]

Every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth. The development of philosophy is to be expected because each annihilation of these metaphysical elements in an epistemology simultaneously refers it to a deeper, more metaphysically fulfilled experience.

— Walter Benjamin, “In epistemology”

For Merleau-Ponty, all of the creativity and free-ranging mobility that we have come to associate with the human intellect is, in truth, an elaboration, or recapitulation, of a profound creativity already underway at the most immediate level of sensory perception.

— David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

Let us leave aside the tedious comparison between the solitary and the active life; and as for that fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover, “That we are not born for our private selves, but for the public,” let us boldly appeal to those who are in the midst of the dance; and let them cudgel their conscience and say whether, on the contrary, the titles, the offices, and the hustle and bustle of the world are not sought out to gain private profit from the public. The evil means men use in our day to push themselves show clearly that the end is not worth much. Let us reply to ambition that it is she herself that gives us a  taste for solitude.

— Montaigne, “Of Solitude”

The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as ‘rational’. The everyday implies on the one hand cycles, nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, life and death, and it implies on the other hand the repetitive gestures of work and consumption.

In modern life the repetitive gestures tend to mask and to crush the cycles. The everyday imposes its monotony. It is the invariable constant of the variations it envelops. The days follow one another and resemble one another, and yet — and here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness — everything changes. But the change is programmed: obsolescence is planned. Production anticipates reproduction; production produces change in such a way as to superimpose the impression of speed on that of monotony. Some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation. They are both right.

— Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness”

But he had lost Bill, who was no longer listening to the content of what Mark said — only its form. Bill was listening to the emotional shapes Mark was making. In the rising and falling of tone, the bunching and stretching of rhythm, he was able to discern the architecture of Mark’s past history: the outhouses of unfeeling and evasion; the vestibules of need and recrimination; the garages of wounding and abuse. All of it comprehensively planned together, so as to form a compound of institutionalization and neglect. Bill honed his ears, concentrating on this shading in of a sad blueprint.

— Will Self, “Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys”

Paik once told a story about buying books in Japan: he succeeded in buying all the most important Japanese philosophical works on the subject of time, in order to study them in the original, only to discover on his return to New York that he didn’t have time to read them.

— Wulf Herzogenrath

A universe in pieces, abandoned, without hope, an image of the real . . . Everything has taken on the miraculous tint of time.

— Louis Aragon

Time is a mystery precisely because the observations that are to be made regarding it cannot be unified.

— Paul Ricoeur

All my possessions for one moment of time.

— Queen Elizabeth I

Casque d’or, at times funny, at times tragic, proves that we can surpass parody; we can look at the picturesque and bloody past and evoke it with tenderness and violence.

— François Truffaut

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

— Sartre, Nausea

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils, and if it deprives man of any good thing, it also takes away his desire for it. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures, while leaving his appetite for them, and brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, men fear death and desire old age.

— Giacomo Leopardi

To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savoring of death, the spilling of one’s own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: the most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves.

— Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

Life is the maintenance of an equilibrium that is perpetually threatened.

— Jules Bordet