“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

Nietzsche saw our predicament early on when he remarked:

“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

“Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder."

~Werner Herzog

"A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future...

To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future."

-- Christopher Lasch

“Never confuse movement with action.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.”

― Ivan Illich

“We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.”

— Nicolas Berdyaev

I must go home periodically
to renew my sense
of horror.

—Carson McCullers