“The whole modern world is at war with the nature of man, and it calls this war ‘progress.’ It breaks the tools of the soul and then wonders why the soul no longer works.”

— G. K. Chesterton

‘The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.’

– D. H. Lawrence

“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”

~ Georgia O’Keeffe

Everywhere I go is beauty,
trees illuminated
street lights glowing in the darkness
I want to run up to strangers and kiss them
but there is too much noise
men kill each other
I’m sick and tired of seeing sad faces
stop that bastard machine
everyone is God and Holy
a spike is ripping at my throat
I smell a fragrance of a rose
everywhere I go is beauty.

~ Jack Micheline

Thoreau has a message to all the longevity-obsessed hypochondriacs out there.

“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”

― David Lynch

"We civilized people are all in a state of conflict, constantly struggling to harmonize the opposing demands of culture and nature, of ego and body, of duty and pleasure. For all of us the struggle is painful, and for some of us it is hell...

With people, it is a general rule that the more elaborate the facade, the greater is the inner emptiness."

-- Dr. Alexander Lowen

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life.

The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices.

American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

—D.H. Lawrence

The eye should learn
to listen before
it looks.

― Robert Frank

“Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.”

― Jacque Fresco

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”

—Thomas Bernhard

“When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.”

— Emil Cioran

"Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts — but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is."

-- Joseph Campbell

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”

― Mikhail Bakunin

I believe that primitive man was closer to the artistic temperament than to the scientific one. His work was more creative than productive. He made things not only for use but to express his personality and his religious beliefs. Every product was a work of art.

-- Dr. Alexander Lowen

“In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.”

—Nicolas Gomez Davila

"...the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,' and what he sees is essentially chaos...he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn't know it is sick."

— Colin Wilson

“The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.

Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed — he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship.”

—Erich Fromm

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

—Edward Abbey

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”

— Albert Camus

"There's beauty and poetry everywhere, still, in this fabricated, war-torn world we've created for ourselves. If you have the eyes to see through the reductive facade and beyond the machine, you come to realize, as Keats did, that the poetry of the earth is never dead. Despite it all."
-- Erik Rittenberry