Well happ'd on, brother-ranger of the brine!

A mixed bag of quotations today.



Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom. Oswald Spengler


A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire. Duc De La Rochefoucauld

Emil Cioran predicts the end of European civilisation

Vacillating instincts, corroded beliefs, obsessions, and anility: everywhere conquerors in retreat, rentiers of heroism confronting the young Alarics who lie in wait for Rome and Athens; everywhere paradoxes of the lymphatic. There was a time when salon sallies traversed whole countries, foiled stupidity or refined it. Europe, coquettish and intractable, was in the flower of her age; — decrepit today, Europe excites no one. Even so, certain barbarians await their chance to inherit the finery, impatient at her long agony.

The Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran, in Syllogismes d’Amerture (1952) - the English translation of the book is here. 

It's interesting that he said this before the Algerian War, when Algeria still constituted three departments of France.

Pessimism was to Cioran what daffodils were to Wordsworth or butlers to P.G. Wodehouse. Cioran even achieved the feat of being too pessimistic for Samuel Beckett. This broke up their friendship.

Carl Jung on good and evil

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Why I don't like International Women's Day

A week ago sunny weather arrived in time for Mărţişor. Time to walk
hatless and scarfless along Calea Victoriei in the spring
sunshine.

Romanians consider that spring starts on March 1 (Mărţişor) and men here
celebrate it by offering mărţişoare to women. A mărţişor is a trinket,
usually by peasants who come to Bucharest to sell them,
though some fortunate ladies receive expensive versions of mărţişoare
encrusted with gems.

If you failed to invite a lady for dinner on Mărţişor today you have a

second chance, because March 8th is International Women's Day. It is a day which, if it is noticed at all in the West, is marked by left-wingers and feminists. In Romania it is a very big thing but, after more than forty years of left-wing ideas and political correctness, it is simply about giving women presents and inviting them to dinner.

A very pleasant custom but, still, I dislike IWD because it is Marxist.

Quotations for the weekend

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger’s claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are. Nietzsche

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. Terry Pratchett