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1 " In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique. "
― Niklas Luhmann , Art as a Social System
2 " The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing. "
― Judith Butler , Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
3 " Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself. "
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Ethics of Ambiguity
4 " Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape. "
