“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

"To awaken means to realize one's nothingness, that is, to realize one's complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one's complete and absolute helplessness... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself."

-- Gurdjieff

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

~ Eric Hoffer

"Now I wander among the ruins; I am lawless, full of hesitations, alone, and by accepting this, I have surrendered to my singularity and my flaws. After having lived my entire life in a sort of lie, I must create a truth."

—Albert Camus

"To ticket a doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have accomplished their mighty works."

--Miguel de Unamuno

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."

~ Hermann Hesse

“I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next."

— Emil Cioran

“Like everyone else who hasn’t been reduced to moronism by our commercial Boy Scout ethic, I like my friends, dislike my enemies and regard strangers with a tolerant indifference.”

— Edward Abbey

“If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.”

— Tom Robbins

“The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out…Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable.”

—D.H. Lawrence

Erich Fromm: “When people can’t handle God anymore, they turn to religion.”

Carl Jung: "One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God."

Kabir: "Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.”

Meister Eckhart: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

― Jean Cocteau

"We live in a fantasy world,
a world of illusion. The great
task in life is to find reality."

-- Iris Murdoch

Society tames the wolf into a dog.
And man is the most domesticated
animal of all.

~ Nietzsche

“the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone -- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design-- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.”

~ Jean Baudrillard

"They have lived lives of "systematic self-restriction," and the result is that the less you do the more you shrink back from the difficulties and the darings of life, the more you naturally come to feel inept, the lower is your self evaluation...

If one's life has been a series of "silent retreats," one ends up firmly wedged into a corner and has nowhere else to retreat.

This state is the bogging-down of depression. Fear of life leads to excess fear of death..."

~ Ernest Becker

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking - which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.”

-- Hunter S. Thompson