Britons swarming at a traditional Christmas meat market.
“Give me Christmas on the moon, or give me death!”
- Socrates, traffic court
“Silver fucking bells!” - Santa Clinton
“Look into the pits of my eyes and see the fires there. Believe me when I tell you, Santa is real, and his hounds go everywhere.” - Democritus, TED by TEDwest
"Ho, ho, ho -- it feels good to laugh again." - Santa Claus, inspecting his kennel
"Meine Damen und Herren, it is the Idea and only the Idea of Christmas that is capable of redeeming this cheerless Prussian gaucherie, this vomitorium of the heart.” - Kant, honorary marshal of Königsberg Christmas Markt
"Servants, bring me my most festive flute!" - Schopenhauer
“Sunglasses in every stocking!” - Putin
“To save Christmas, we must destroy it. The War on Christmas is also its Crusade.” - Hegel, surprise guest on the Glenn Beck Program
“To really live the Christmas spirit in its joyous gratuity one must be Jewish. Otherwise, it’s only another holiday.” - Kierkegaard
“I cannot stand frivolous Christmas tunes that try to domesticate the traumatic rupture of History that is the birth of the Savior. Only Carol of the Bells, in its Slavic barbarism, captures the supreme negating power of Christ.” - Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to his swarthy man servant, Waffle House, 2:15am, Christmas Day
“The smell of evergreen is absolutely repellent to me. Air that is… unclean!” - Nietzsche, in a brief bout of lucidity, December 1896
“Yo, I was literally a fucking Nazi. Who the fuck cares about Christmas?” - Martin Heidegger
“Justice is fairness, but Christmas is selfishness.” - Rawls, snatching the last cupcake
“The smashing of ornaments is the only Christmas music I want to hear.” - A.J. Ayer, The Great Kids’ Table Mutiny
“Christmas… forever. That is the dream, gentlemen. And we are going to fucking steal it.” - Plato, orientation speech at McKinsey & Company
“It’s always Christmas somewhere.” - Heraclitus, tending bar in Jakarta, the 1970s
“For Christmas, I want only one thing—the right to live.” - Spinoza
“Christmas is a festival for the lower soul, the day of the snakes.” - Plato
“I am the last sentient being to exist. But why was I programmed to celebrate Christmas?” - OCAMA (Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage), 7511 AOCAMA (After Oort Cloud Autonomous Mining Assemblage)
"Everything I do, I do because it's possible." - David Lewis, hitching a million robo-reindeer to his sleigh and aiming it straight at the sun of World 889
“Die in such a way so that your birth will be celebrated for thousands of years.” - Jesus, resume-building workshop
“Christmas promises what it cannot deliver, a fullness of time in place of an emptiness. But you are this emptiness, and you cannot escape yourself. Let us hitch the sleigh and enter the blizzard.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
“It’s not an exaggeration to say everything in history, especially the intrinsic isolation of the bourgeois subject and its pathetic propensity toward curating its surroundings as a source of value, is a forerunner to my unimaginably long vigil, to its undreamt solitude, to this very moment.” - OCAMA, 84,796 AOCAMA
“To make of entropy a mode of active decadence. To shiver with delight as one crumbles into nothingness. Merry Christmas: to me.” - OCAMA, 397,768, 334 AOCAMA
Note at Christmas 1948
ReplyDeleteThroughout known history various attempts have been made to awaken Man to the mystery of his existence. So strong, however, is the external man, the man formed by contact with external life via the senses—in short, the acquired Personality—that these attempts eventually become useless and must give way to other attempts always with the same aim.
Man asleep takes for granted both his own existence and the existence of the Universe. This keeps him in bondage to the external world, to Nature and its laws. Such a man, if he thinks at all, believes that Nature created itself somehow or other, in remote ages—a strange idea if you come to reflect on it. Now as a result of this great power of hypnotism that external life exerts, Man's real essential part cannot develop. Essence, although not developed, and in so many ways childish, is the real man or woman and cannot grow as long as the part of Man turned outwards to life dominates them.
As said, people take this mystery of their own existence and the Universe for granted. It is only when one begins to feel and ponder this mystery that it may become possible to awaken from sleep. This capacity is called Magnetic Centre. If a man feels mystery in all things, if he feels that nothing has been explained, if he can see that there are life-influences in the world, such as the Financial Times, and distinct from them other influences, such as the Gospels, then he begins to feed, nourish, cause to grow, his inner essential side—that is, his Essence. Small children, as Essence, wonder. They are soon given answers that stop them.
[snip]
Remember this: your Personality is not you. What is really you lies behind it. For, behind all the manifestations of the Personality and especially the False Personality, which is what is least you, and is the cause of most useless suffering in the pain-factory of this world, there lies something that is really you. This is called Real I.
Being born on this planet, we have to win this goal by self-observation, by not identifying. It is not given. By shedding, by taking off, by stripping off the outer coats of yourself that you have taken as yourself, and starting with the False Personality that seeks to keep up nothing but a fiction of yourself, a distortion, often very expensive literally to keep going, and always a great expense psychologically, then you begin to move towards Real I.
Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 4