“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

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

~ Frank Zappa

“This birth thing. And this death thing. Each one had it's turn. We entered alone and we left alone.

And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives. An incomparable sadness descended up on me. Seeing all that life that must die.

Seeing all that life that would first turn to hate, to dementia, to neuroses, to stupidity, to fear, to murder, to nothing - nothing in life and nothing in death.”

― Charles Bukowski

“The modern man builds shopping malls and factories; the medieval man built cathedrals and ancient man built temples. The former degrades and disfigures nature while the latter draw attention to its sacredness.”

— Ramon Elani

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

—Terence McKenna

“Cultures cannot change internally, but only in response to outside powers. This accounts for the hopelessness of the contemporary modern world. There will be no barbarian invasions. There is no force that can challenge it. There is nothing external to it. And so, unlike the Europeans of the fifth century, our modern world will irrevocably descend into death.”

—Ramon Elani

"I’ve always been a loner. I’ll be straight; I just don’t like most people—they tire me, mix me, jiggle my eyeballs, rob me, lie to me, fuck me, fool me, teach me, insult me, love me; but mostly they talk talk TALK until I feel like a cat reamed in the ass by an elephant."

--Charles Bukowski

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."

~ Lawrence Durrell

"There exists...a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself."

~ Emil Cioran

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.”

— Rollo May

“As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms.
To what end? To be free.
But free to what end?
To read books, to write books, to think."

—Paul Auster