Lars Iyer Quotes & Sayings

Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can't therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don't live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems. — Lars Iyer

We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It would only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we agree. Only we should know. And we should follow them in secret. — Lars Iyer

As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W. - 'Look: the kraken of your idiocy'. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water. — Lars Iyer

It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it. — Lars Iyer

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come. — Lars Iyer

If a book doesn't make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it? — Lars Iyer

Everything begins when you understand that you, and you above all, are Max Brod: this, for W., is the founding principle. That you (whoever you are) are Max Brod, and everyone else (whoever that might be) is Franz Kafka. Which is to say, you will never understand anyone else and are endlessly guilty before them, and that even with the greatest effort of loyalty, you will betray them at every turn. — Lars Iyer

Once, it was possible to learn things, and to be shaped by your learning, he says. Once, to be a student meant to be formed by what you learned. To let it enter your soul. But today? We're drowning in openness, he says. In our sense of the possible. We're ready to take anything in - to learn about anything, and therefore about nothing. — Lars Iyer

I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester — Lars Iyer

Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. — Lars Iyer