“Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.”

― Erich Fromm

"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.

The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.

The lover who never risks loving mocks romance.

The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself.

And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."

—Carl Jung

"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."

— Cassandra Clare

"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth."

— Mary Oliver

"You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?

--Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."

~ Gore Vidal

"Each of us was born with a certain amount of purity, which was destined to be perverted in contact with people."

— Emil Cioran

"There is a need for a new fantasy, it is not the time for new rules but for breaking rules. We do not need therapy, we need to burn the clinics.

We must go out, out into the stench, out in the frightening night on skid row, and hear the locust cries of our future...

We cannot simply suffer in silence, and spare ourselves the risks of joining into the frays of a sham world."

~ Charles Bowden

"When it was discovered that information is a business, the truth ceased to be important."

- Ryszard Kapuściński

“World history is nothing else
than a repetition of catastrophes
waiting for a final catastrophe.”
—Emil Cioran

“Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.”

― Carl Jung

"These people have never done anything but pretend to be something, while in reality they’ve never been anything: they pretend to be educated, but they’re not; they pretend to be artistic (as they call it), but they’re not; and they pretend to be humane, but they’re not, I thought.

And their supposed kindness was only pretense, for they were never kind.

And above all they pretended to be natural, and they were never natural: everything about them was artificial, and when they claimed—in other words, pretended—to be philosophical, they were nothing but eccentric, and it struck me again how repellent they had seemed to me..."

-- Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness... By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people”

~ Thomas Bernhard

“I think I always just wanted to live the art life. And for me the art life was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.”

— David Lynch

"The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification."

-- DH Lawrence

“Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world. ”

― Jack Kerouac

“In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.”

— Nietzsche

“Our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring.

None but the incorrigibly feckless any longer believe in taking the long view.

Saving is gambling, careers and pensions are high-level punts.

The few who are seriously rich hedge their bets.

The proles – the rest of us – live from day to day.”

~John Gray

“My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her.”

— Bob Dylan

"What nature or lovely illusions do we hope to find during a time in which all is civilized, all is reason and science and practice and artifice..."

~ Giacomo Leopardi

“The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude.”

— Emil Cioran