“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

Tolstoy’s wife was a
nag
and one bitter cold
night
she started in on him
again
and he left the house to
escape her
and
caught the
pneumonia which
killed him.

then she wrote a
book
about
what a
son of a bitch
he
was.

~ Bukowski

"What a joy it is that life has no point! That means I can grant it one..."

--Constantin Noica

“I gave up before birth.”

— Samuel Beckett

"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity."

~ Vladimir Nabokov

In a dying culture, narcissism
embodies the highest attainment
of spiritual enlightenment.

— Christopher Lasch

"The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy there is no life, even if you have a dozen cars, six butlers, a castle, a private chapel and a bomb-proof vault.

Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please."

-- Henry Miller

“Let me tell you something. Happiness is bullshit. It's the great myth of the late 20th century. You think Picasso was happy? You think Hemingway was? Hendrix? They were miserable shits.

No art worth a damn was ever created out of happiness. I can tell you that. Ambition, narcissism, sex, rage.

Those are the engines that drive every great artist, every great man. A hole that can't be filled. That's why we're all such miserable assholes.”

-- Ed Harris, Kodachrome