Author: Arthur Schopenhauer Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141921757 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books and many other themes is taken from Schopenhauer's last work, Parerga and Paralipomena, which he published in 1851. These pieces depict humanity as locked in a struggle beyond good and evil, and each individual absolutely free within a Godless world, in which art, morality and self-awareness are our only salvation. This innovative - and pessimistic - view has proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, directly affecting the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Wagner among others.
Author: James Richardson Publisher: Ausable Press ISBN: 9780967266893 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 126
Book Description
James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism."--Publishers Weekly "Not since the appearance of W. S. Merwin's translations and adaptations of aphorisms in Asian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet managed to put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom."--American Literary Review "No one theme or moral pervades these tesserae of specificity. Rather, Richardson's elegant compression invites the reader to fill in the blanks with personal experience... Richardson's knack for the quintessential, sustained for more than a hundred pages, left me satisfied yet hungry for more."-- Times Literary Supplement "Readers will be obsessed by this book; they will memorize passages, give copies to friends, proselytize. That's because Vectors so generously provides the best that poetry can offer. It is a masterpiece of practicality, beauty, and solace."-- Boston Review "James Richardson's Vectors... penetrates to the very heart of human nature. I stand looking in the mirror, alert to my own foibles, shaking my head as I tolerate what I know he knows about who I am."-- The Georgia Review "Almost every entry... introduces a new insight, provides a revelation, supplies a surprise... it is a book one wants to spend time with, a wonderfully friendly book, generous, witty and entertaining."-- Gulf Coast "Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends."-- Barrow Street "James Richardson's Vectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond-sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always, always, very shrewd. 'It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,' wrote Wallace Stevens. Vectors is a remarkable testament to such questing, vivid minding, as these aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, success, fear, shame, self-consciousness, love and friendship."--Laurie Sheck
Author: Walter Benjamin Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0547711166 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 419
Book Description
The towering twentieth century thinker delve into literature, philosophy, and his own life experience in this “extraordinary collection” (Publishers Weekly). A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. “This book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century’s fragments of shattered traditions.” —Time
Author: Georg Simmel Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226757854 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Published in 1918, The View of Life is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed diverse topics across his essayistic writings, which influenced scholars in aesthetics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, certain core issues emerged over the course of his career—the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms, and the nature and conditions of authentic individuality, including the role of mindfulness regarding mortality. Composed not long before his death, The View of Life was, Simmel wrote, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s Being and Time and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
Author: David Lazar Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496205189 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
In his third book of essays, David Lazar blends personal meditations on sex and death with considerations of popular music and coping with anxiety through singing, bowling, and other distractions. He sets his work apart as both in the essay and of the essay by throwing himself into the form's past--interviewing or speaking to past masters and turning over rocks to find lost gems of the essay form. I'll Be Your Mirror further expands the dimensions of contemporary nonfiction writing by concluding with a series of aphorisms. Surreal, comical, and urban moments of being, they are part Cioran, part Kafka, and part Lenny Bruce. These are accompanied by Heather Frise's illustrations, whose looking-glass visions of motherhood--funny and grotesque--meet the vision of the aphorist in this most unusual nonfiction book.
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer Publisher: The Floating Press ISBN: 1775417875 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
"These essays are a valuable criticism of life by a man who had a wide experience of life, a man of the world, who possessed an almost inspired faculty of observation. Schopenhauer, of all men, unmistakably observed life at first hand. There is no academic echo in his utterances; he is not one of a school; his voice has no formal intonation; it is deep, full-chested, and rings out its words with all the poignancy of individual emphasis, without bluster, but with unfailing conviction. He was for his time, and for his country, an adept at literary form; but he used it only as a means. "
Author: Shahin Khalilli Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 1329351916 Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 122
Book Description
""'Heart-Shaped Leaves' is a wry and witty collection of aphorisms and observations. It's a unique compilation, somewhat like W. H. Auden's 'Commonplace Book'..."" David Damrosch Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature Harvard University ""This little book 'Heart-Shaped Leaves' is not an academic work but the work of a man who looks at literature with a loving eye. Prof. Khalilli's commentaries and thoughts, some profound some less so, demonstrate his love of literature. He has collected his thoughts over many years of study but has never before committed them to paper."" Dr.F. Alexander Magill Ege University, Izmir.Turkey
Author: Brian Dillon Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1681372835 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.
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Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Author: James Richardson
Author: Walter Benjamin
Author: Georg Simmel
Author: David Lazar
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Author: Shahin Khalilli
Author: Eric Hoffer
Author: Brian Dillon