Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

Crowds

Crowds

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

Charles Baudelaire

I'm not cynical. Just experienced.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects

Part 3

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." --George W. Bush, Fort Benning, Ga., Jan. 11, 2007

Our fearless leader .... Part 2

"Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gas? ... That's interesting. I hadn't heard that." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

Our fearless leader ....

I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree with them. - George Bush

There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.

Danny Kaye (1913 - 1987)

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings

Evan Esar

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
-Goethe

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.

Even on the road to hell a flower will make you smile

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.