Dionysian Quotes & Sayings

The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which ... lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life. — Alain Danielou

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation - the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline. — Peter De Vries

Happy Hour: a depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature. — John Ralston Saul

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy. — William H Gass

When, after a long life, it falls out
That he takes on a form he had sought
And every word carved in stone
Grows its hoarfrost, what then? Torches
Of Dionysian choruses in the dark mountains
From when he comes. And half of the sky
With its snaky clouds. A mirror before him.
In the mirror the already severed, perishing
Thing.
— Czeslaw Milosz

Mine is an enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flame that sets my vital exuberance ablaze, that mocks at any theoretical, scientific or moral prison. — Renzo Novatore

People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin
a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox. — Robert A. Heinlein

This kind of anarchic, Dionysian love doesn't give a shit about commitments or institutions; it smashes our illusions about what kind of people we are, what we would and would not do, exposing the difference between what we want to want and what we really want. We may choose friendships based on common interests and complimentary qualities, but our reasons for falling in love are altogether more irrational, projections of our most infantile wants and pathology. — Tim Kreider

Assuming that rapture is nature's play with man, the Dionysian artist's creative activity is the play with rapture. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all. — Isadora Duncan

Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds ... But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values. — Laura Riding

The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees
its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian. — Robert A. Heinlein

In my experience, depth of work consists of two components. The first is recklessness; the second is discipline. Dionysian; Apollonian. Passion;reason. — Steven Pressfield

Do you think it's a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic DIonysian-type reveling? It's not. — David Foster Wallace

Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis that holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but never releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence. — Franklin Foer

[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian. — Bjork

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself. — Terence McKenna

Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths; under his yolk stride panthers and tigers. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The command 'become hard! ', the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature. — Friedrich Nietzsche

You've got to be prepared for the names they are going to call you compared to your male peers ... You will be a floozy and a slattern. He will be virile and a ladies' man. You will be a freakshow, a retching wretch, a sloppy drunk. He will be charismatic, vainglorious, a ferocious drunk and Dionysian. You will be indiscriminate and desperate. He will be generous, tortured and driven. — Courtney Love

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. — Aldous Huxley

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? — Rob Bell

Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it's set further apart. It has a special place. People who are familiar with painting and photography and drama and dance, and so on, cannot talk so easily about music. And yet, as Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, music is potentially the most accessible art form because, with the Apollonian and the Dionysian coming together, it makes a — Edward W. Said

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I call dionysian — Friedrich Nietzsche

In his treatise on the battles between the gods underlying ancient Dionysian theatre, the young Nietzsche notes: 'Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them.' Similarly, an anthropology of the practising life is infected by its subject. Dealing with practices, asceticisms and exercises, whether or not they are declared as such, the theorist inevitably encounters his own inner constitution, beyond affirmation and denial. — Peter Sloterdijk

You know the classification of cultures into 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian. — Robert A. Heinlein

The Dionysian is no picnic. — Camille Paglia

A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction. — Friedrich Nietzsche