"...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

“Religions die when
they are proved to be true.
Science is the record
of dead religions.”

― Oscar Wilde

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”

― Soren Kierkegaard

“America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.”

― Henry Miller

“Everything is in decline, and always has been...One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.“

—Emil Cioran

“The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires. Our exhaustion interprets history, our breathlessness makes us hear the death rattle of nations...the curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing, now, but masks and ghosts. . . "

~ Emil Cioran

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. ”

― Edward Abbey

Eyes. Those damn
eyes fucked me
forever.

—Charles Bukowski

“A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable, unimplicated sun.”

― Llewelyn Powys

“And what is death but an emancipation from time?

That is of course only on condition that death really means death, not an entry into another consciousness or another sphere.

For Proust, the only real escape from life was into art and, through unexpected memory, into the golden moments of the past, always yielding a magic that is impossible in the present.

But for Beckett even art was not enough. He saw it as a trap to turn our eyes away from the realities of life and the true horror of our predicament: facing the horror was for him the only way to be really alive.”

— John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett

"Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent, regressed into idolatry. Man projects his power of love and of reason unto God; he does not feel them any more as his own powers, and then he prays to God to give him back some of what he, man, has projected unto God...Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry."

~Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

—John Waters

Most of them speak what they
have been taught, not what
they have learned.

-- Bukowski