119 Quotes by Timothy Morton

It’s ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.

The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.

The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.

In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colors on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? “A beautiful way to die” – to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.

Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery.

I call this double truth of a thing its fragility, the inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.

The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal of the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don’t know. When we share it with other, it’s as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with knowing look. But it’s impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such.

A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.

We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.