There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits. The inner world can only be experienced, not described - Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestrial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestrial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see the earth wherever we turn.

Psychology is impatience.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

-Franz Kafka, Notebooks, October 19, 1917, "Wedding Preparations"

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

-Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.

-NYT

When Auden chose Ashbery’s first volume for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he wrote O’Hara a thoughtful rejection, saying, “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”

-NYT

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time— I doubt that I am a human being.

-Franz Kafka

[via 3 quarks daily]

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter [or email or facebook wall post] from them.

-Arthur Schopenhauer

When the birds are sleeping
That's when the trees sing

In your boat, tied to a tree
I hope you'll find the sea

-Seabear, 'I Sing, I Swim'

"No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

-Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project

I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own.

-James Baldwin

Michael Kenna: Silent World

[via Monoscope]

What did surgeons, artists, and CEO’s have in common? Most of them reported that they managed both their time and their attention. In surgery, in the studio, and in the time carved out to think through strategies and issues, these professionals reported shutting down the devices and endless inputs (email, phone, interruptions), at scheduled times, and claiming those moments to focus. In almost every case, these professionals reported experiencing “flow” (a la Csikszentmihalyi) in their work.

-Linda Stone, who coined the phrase “continuous partial attention”

[via 43 folders]
__________________________

In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation.

[Wikipedia]

I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness, and consolidates society.

-Samuel Johnson

Philip Glass Violin Concerto, mvt. I
[with time lapse video of Edinburgh]

The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the tiniest step upward, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security for myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the Negative, not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it. Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won't tolerate my having the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage bed, for example, even before it has been set up.

-Franz Kafka, 1922 Diaries

Max Brod, responding to Kafka's now-famous remark - "We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God's head" - explained to his friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and evil. "No," Kafka replied, "I believe we are not such a radical relapse of God's, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day." Playing straight man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly said: "Plenty of hope - for God - no end of hope - only not for us."

-Harold Bloom, Introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

A Little Fable

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.


-Franz Kafka

"They said it's okay to kill Jews: Jews represent a threat to our way of life, to our gene pool, to our values, and so on. They've justified their behavior completely. But, if you think it's okay, then why try to cover it up? Why try to conceal the fact that you're doing it?"

-Errol Morris


Seed Video Feature: Marc Hauser + Errol Morris (Highlights)
The evolutionary psychologist and the documentary filmmaker game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

In the summer of 1925, Werner Heisenberg was stricken with hay fever and having trouble with math. He asked his advisor for two weeks off and left for a barren island in the North Sea. He spent his mornings swimming and hiking, but every evening Heisenberg tried to describe atoms in a theory that included only what could be measured. One night, feverish with insight, he calculated until dawn. After Heisenberg put down his pencil as the sun began to rise, he walked to the tip of the island, confident he had discovered quantum mechanics.

-Seed Magazine, 'The Reality Tests: Do we create the world just by looking at it?'