“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.

Alphonse Karr

I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.

Charles Bukowski

People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

- Jim Carrey

Mike Shiner:
Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.

Note on Riggan's dressing room mirror:
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
― Slavoj Žižek