“Because the narcissist has so few inner resources, he looks to others to validate his sense of self. He needs to be admired for his beauty, charm, celebrity, or power—attributes that usually fade with time. Unable to achieve satisfying sublimations in the form of love and work, he finds that he has little to sustain him when youth passes him by…

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

—Christopher Lasch

"If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation."

-- Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts.

“All these philosophies have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss, or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss.

In fact, neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body. Much of human life – and much of philosophy – is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.”

— John Gray

"The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to become more passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity.

No longer does man think in personal values, following more his own conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the values brought to him by mass media.

Headlines in the morning paper give him his temporary political outlook, the radio blasts suggestions into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe and passive fixation."

--Joost Meerloo

"The world is big and I want to
have a good look at it before
it gets dark."

~ John Muir

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”

― Jonas Mekas

"The machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonisation. The history of modernity is the history of the spread of the Machine mentality to all corners of the Earth...

Externally, we see the results in a chaotic climate, dissolving cultures, spiralling rates of extinction and infernal destruction of nature.

Internally, we see it in the loss of our stories, in our broken-hearted confusion about who and where we are.

Locally, we see it in the loss of our self-sufficiency and agency in the place where all human stories begin: the home."

--Paul Kingsnorth, "Against the Machine"

"We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason.

Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the "magic" of the world they lived in.

Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us."

-- D.H. Lawrence

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

― Karl Popper

"Ego forms emotional attachments to dreamstate elements in order to resist change and remain at the juvenile level of development, resulting in perpetual childhood and life in the herd...

Emotional attachment is how ego ties us to the eyes-closed, fear-based, halfborn, herd-level of perspective in which ego can exist. These attachments are the chains that bind us in Plato’s cave, but which are never locked.

The journey of awakening involves undoing these bindings so we can rise into progressively more lucid and less distorted levels of perspective. That’s the spiritual journey in a nutshell. All you really are is awareness, so it’s all about perspective.”

— Jed McKenna

The face you look out of
is never the face
your lover looks into.

~ Jim Harrison

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life — and only then will I be free to become myself. ”

~ Martin Heidegger

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

—Susan Sontag

Your pretty empire took so long to build,
now, with a snap of history's fingers,
down it goes.

-Alan Moore

"The man is, as it were, born deaf and dumb, and dedicated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study the art of solitude, yield as gracefulIy as he can to his destiny."

--Emerson

“Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

~Howard Thurman

"...your best men die in alleys
under a sheet of paper
while your worst men
get statues in parks
for pigeons to shit upon for
centuries."

— Bukowski

A nice reminder that everything you're worried about is ultimately insignificant.

“For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive…

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

— D.H. Lawrence

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."

- Milan Kundera

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

—Cesare Pavese