“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

“It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective [psychosis] and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.”

~ Carl Jung

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”

—Yukio Mishima

The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding.

The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.

--Ernest Becker

Old age, after all,
is merely the punishment
for having lived.

— Emil Cioran

"As many have noted, the mass of men and women lead lives today of unquiet desperation.

A frantic busyness ("business") pervades our society wherever we look—in city and country, among young and old and middle-aged, married and unmarried, all races, classes, sexes, in work and play, in religion, the arts, the sciences, and perhaps most conspicuously in the self-conscious cult of meditation, retreat, withdrawal.

The symptoms of universal unease and disease are apparent on every side."

-- Edward Abbey

“Open your eyes. Look. See why it smells so bad. Nourish your discontent. Cultivate negative self-esteem. Elevate self-loathing to a spiritual practice. Proceed on the hypothesis that everything you are is a lie and everything you know is wrong and try to disprove it.”

— Jed McKenna

Plato is boring. In reality, my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian...

Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently, he takes refuge in the ideal.

-- Nietzsche

“To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.”

―Bertolt Brecht

“Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better."

—Emil Cioran

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."

~ Gore Vidal