"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

“There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.”

— Anthony Bourdain

"Science will never be used chiefly to pursue truth, or to improve human life. The uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves. Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs – even if the result is ruin."

- John Gray

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely..."

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.

—William James