Philosopy Quotes

Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The Gnostic’s passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia – the love of Sophia – a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled “philosophy.

~ Zeena Schreck

Carpe DiemBy Edna StewartShakespeare, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman did it, why can't I?The words of Horace, his laconic phrase. Does it amuse me or frighten me?Does it rub salt in an old wound? Horace, Shakespeare, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman my loves,we've all had a taste of the devils carpe of forbidden food. My belly is full of mourning over life mishaps of should have's, missed pleasure, and why was I ever born?The leaf falls from the trees from which it was born in and cascade down like a feather that tumbles and toil in the wind.One gush! It blows away. It’s trampled, raked, burned and finally turns to ashes which fades away like the leaves of grass.Did Horace get it right? Trust in nothing?The shortness of Life is seventy years, Robert Frost and Whitman bared more, but Shakespeare did not.Butterflies of Curiosities allures me more.Man is mortal, the fruit is ripe. Seize more my darling! Enjoy the day.

~ Edna Stewart

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverse is, one has an ideological production). The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author…

~ Michel Foucault

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.

~ Michel Foucault

Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act _ an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.

~ Michel Foucault

It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author-function”, while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer_ it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor_ it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer_ but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.

~ Michel Foucault