Quotes from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“The flow of the river is ceaseless; and its water is never the same.
The foam that floats in the pools
Now gathering, now vanishing
Never lasts long. So it is with man
and all his dwelling places on this earth.”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“Reality depends upon your mind alone.[34] If your mind is not at peace what use are riches?”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“Men of means have much to fear. Those with none know only bitterness. If you entrust yourself to the care of others you will be owned by them. If you care for others you will be enslaved by your own solicitude. If you conform to the world it will bind you hand and foot. If you do not, then it will think you mad. And so the question, where should we live? And how? Where to find a place to rest a while? And how to bring even short-lived peace to our hearts?”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“Reality depends upon your mind alone.[34]”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“Then, pilgrim, turn, thy cares forego; All earth-born cares are wrong: Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

“Ei kukaan voi omistaa kaunista näkymää eikä mikään estä siitä iloitsemista.”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House

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“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.”
― Bob Dylan, quote from Chronicles, Volume One

“I am used to hear bad men misuse the name of God, yet God exists.”
― Robert Bolt, quote from A Man for All Seasons

“..some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Fever Pitch

“...και οι δυο λένε Σ'αγαπώ για να διώξουν τον φόβο, για να πεισθούν από τα λόγια για τα έργα, για να βεβαιωθούν ότι έχει επέλθει η πολυπόθητη κατάσταση, για να ξεγελάσουν τους εαυτούς τους με την ιδέα ότι δεν έχει παρέλθει ακόμη. Πρέπει να φυλαγόμαστε από τέτοιες χρήσεις. Το Σ'αγαπώ δεν πρέπει να βγαίνει στον κόσμο, να γίνεται νόμισμα, εμπορεύσιμη μετοχή, να μας αποφέρει κέρδη.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

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