“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

"In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of 'sadism' it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds."

~ Bukowski

The less there was of me,
the happier I got.

- Leonard Cohen

“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.”

—George Perkins Marsh

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

—Plato via Socrates

"Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made."

—Samuel Beckett

“Ordinary man lives among phantasms; only the recluse dwells among realities… Anyone who does not turn his back on the contemporary world disgraces himself”

—Nicolás Gómez Davila

“Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.”

— Terence McKenna

Society often forgives
the criminal; it never
forgives the
dreamer.

― Oscar Wilde

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important...they do not mean to do harm...they are absorbed in their endless struggle to think well of themselves.

- T. S. Eliot