“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

“As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change.”

-- Peter Wessel Zapffe

"Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world."

~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

“People are fucking nuts. This country is full of nitwits and assholes. Do you ever notice that? Oh, my goodness, yes. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Nitwits, assholes, fuck ups, scumbags, jerk offs and dipshits. And they all vote.”

— George Carlin

The more you live,
the less useful it
seems to have
lived.

~ Cioran

"Most of us are living far below our potential… We are creating this work, not because it has to be done, but because we are busybodies and do not know how to swim on the river of life.

I think it would be much, much better if people were told to be lazy, to shake the job, to be idlers, to enjoy, to relax... not care, not worry.

I don’t say to be quiet and do nothing. I don’t say that at all. But I say it should make sense, it should have meaning what we do."

~ Henry Miller

'The Madman knows that once God is dead, man must live like a god: man must go beyond the limits of his own being, leave his own nature behind and assume the burden, the risk, and the pleasure of divinity.'

– Octavio Paz

“Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.”

— Edward Abbey

“Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.”

— Camille Paglia

"Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial."

-- Edward Abbey

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”

― Erich Fromm

“If you didn't do anything that wasn't good for you it would be a very dull life. What are you gonna do? Everything that is pleasant in life is dangerous. Have you noticed that? I'd like to find the bastard that thought that one up.”

― Lemmy Kilmister