"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

“We are an exceptional model of the human race.

We no longer know how to produce food.

We no longer can heal ourselves.

We no longer raise our young.
We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon.

We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us.
We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived.

But when the lights are off we are helpless.

We cannot move without traffic signals.

We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby.

We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life.

And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.

We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand.

We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”

— Charles Bowden

“…every innovator, every individual with a fresh vision or a larger vision of life, automatically destroys the existent moral code—in favor of spirit. But his disciples soon establish a new moral code, one just as rigid as the preceding one, forgetting that the spirit will again break the vessel which contains it.”

~ Henry Miller

“You desire to live 'according to nature'? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud of words! ... while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders!" 

— Nietzsche

"A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better. What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?"

~ Hunter S. Thompson

“Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

--Chuck Palahniuk

“Everything is your fault if you're any damn good.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”

—Lionel Trilling

“Today, everyone wants to be someone, loud; everyone wants to be authentic, be different to other—thus everyone is like everyone else. I miss the nameless.”

--Byung-Chul Han

"Throughout all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal.

Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal.

To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practice the same trade."

--John Gray, The Silence of Animals

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

― Boris Pasternak

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there..."

-- Jack Kerouac
📸 Erik Rittenberry

"There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't."

~ William Faulkner