“I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant's explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word "sublime" to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant's epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver's head hurt. Machu Picchu isn't just beautiful, it's sublime.”

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

“Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.”

“Immanuel Kant""Noch wal”

“Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.”

“Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.”