"Why am I taking seduction advice from a man whose idea of foreplay is to slam coins on the table and shout: 'Who wants to ride the big horse?'" "Because he knows best, Tinker."
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Ch. 6David Gemmell
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From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse." Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...
Jerry Fodor
If the famous Clementi, whom I found here (Italy) in the year 1766, and bought of his father for seven years, is not still a Catholic, the fault is not with me.—I assured the Pope I would not endeavour to convert him. Meeting him one Sunday when we were in the country, I asked him—" Why he did not go to mass" (there was a Catholic chapel about ten miles distant) : he said—" There was no horse."—" No horse! Why don't you take the grey horse?"—"O quello, Signore, scappa via.( O that one, Gentleman, run off. )"—" Take then the black poney."—" E quello casca subito.( And that one falls quickly.)" So what with the horse that fell, and the horse that ran away, I fear Signior Clementi attended mass as seldom as you do a sermon.
Peter Beckford
Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.
Robert M. Pirsig
There is a somewhat analogous situation with regard to the heterosexual seduction procedure in our Politically Correct times: the two sets, the set of PC behaviour and the set of seduction, do not actually intersect anywhere; that is, there is no seduction which is not in a way an "incorrect" intrusion or harassment — at some point, one has to expose oneself and "make a pass." So does this mean that every seduction is incorrect harassment through and through? No, and that is the catch: when you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and she decides retroactively, by her reaction, whether what you have just done was harassment or a successful act of seduction — and there is no way to tell in advance what her reaction will be. This is why assertive women often despise "weak" men — because they fear to expose themselves, to take the necessary risk. And perhaps this is even more true in our PC times: are not PC prohibitions rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process? Is not the seducer’s art to accomplish this violation properly — so that afterwards, by its acceptance, its harassing aspect will be retroactively cancelled?
Slavoj Zizek
"I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me."
After a pause full of intense thought on my part, I asked: "But if one hasn't always emotion. What then?"
"Do not paint," he quickly answered. "When I came in her to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted.Henri Matisse
Gemmell, David
Genet, Jean
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