new books: katsushika hokusai, niccolò machiavelli, immanuel kant

i got three new books this evening:

a book on katsushika hokusai art

katsushika hokusai wave

“at one hundred, i may reach a level of divine understanding, and if i live a decade beyond that, everything i paint-every dot and line-will be alive. i ask the god of longevity to grant me a life long enough to prove this true.”

inspiring, japanese are such ocds. is it the food or the geography or both? food is influenced by geography but is geography influenced by food? if people ate read meat only i am sure they would get so crazy and blow up mountains just for the sake of it. anyway, hokusai is interesting. weird porn.

prince by niccolò machiavelli

prince slaughter painting art

“as a prince, it is best to be both feared and loved. but if you have to choose between the two, it is better to be feared than loved.”

good to read, should be easy to read, but who cares, niccolò does not sound very convincing…

critique of practical reason by immanuel kant

immanuel kant

“speculative reason could only exhibit this concept (of freedom) problematically as not impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely lest the supposed impossibility of what it must at least allow to be thinkable should endanger its very being and plunge it into an abyss of scepticism.”

if i knew what the hell he was talking about i could comment… this book seems to be important and i tried to read it when i was like 16. took me like an hour for half a page and i gave up. i could read bunch of other serious stuff but this kant stuff was and is still impossible. i read somewhere like 12 people only could understand what the hell he wrote about when it was published.

i hope i have a wider audience than that.

you can read it online at project gutenberg. let me know if you figure it out. i need help!