“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

"The role which the artist plays in society is to revive the primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed for the illusion of living in comfort… It is not the most comfortable life in the world but I know that it is life, and I am not going to trade it for an anonymous life in the brotherhood of man—which is either sure death, or quasi-death, or at the very best cruel deception."

~ Henry Miller

“An empty man is full of himself.”

— Edward Abbey

Love breaks my bones
and I laugh.

~ Bukowski

“Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing.

We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.”

— John Steinbeck

"Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life. Psychologically the automaton, while being alive biologically, is dead emotionally and mentally. … Behind a front of satisfaction and optimism modern man is deeply unhappy; as a matter of fact, he is on the verge of desperation."

— Erich Fromm

"We use most of our powers to extend life. In so doing, we succeed only in reducing life to survival. We live in order to survive.

The mania for health and optimization is a reflexive response to the lack of being. We try to compensate for the absence of being by extending bare life, and in doing so we become desensitized to life's intensity.

We confuse it with increased production, performance and consumption, but these are merely forms of survival."

--Byung-Chul Han

"Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity.

Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer. In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form.

Apparently, the ascendancy of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form. One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is."
-- Byung-Chul Han

“Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”

—Giacomo Leopardi

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

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.”

― John Gray