The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization

—Herbert Marcuse

“Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.”

― Nick Cave

"The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty...More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.

-- Lev Shesto

"Reading of course can easily be nothing more than a way to kill time; but if it is calculated and intense, it is a steady extension of one's life.

If life is measured by consciousness, one whose mind is full lives longer than one whose mind is empty — just as one who is awake 18 hours a day lives longer than one who sleeps away every 12 hours.

You can add to life by adding to the quantity of conscious moments through reading."

-- Jacques Barzun

“I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.”

-- Henry Miller

“Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.”

— Terence McKenna

“Creativity is a funny thing. When we’re inventing something, we’re more vulnerable than we’ll ever be. Eating and sleeping mean nothing… To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed. Not necessarily violent and ugly, just unfriendly and distracted. You’re self-sufficient and you stay focused.”

- Bob Dylan

“The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.”

— Martin Heidegger

"Many people ... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal."

~ Richard Taylor

“We should not be surprised, therefore, when we look back over the great conflicts that have torn the world apart since the Enlightenment, to discover that optimists have been far ahead of pessimists in their expressions of anger, and that the great crimes – the Holocaust and the Gulag included – should be laid, in the end, at the doors of those who were drunk on false hopes.”

- Roger Scruton

“Currently we’re witnessing the final act of the mad, incendiary project of a totally wired world, of the reckless belief that 24/7 availability of electrical power to a planet of 8 billion people was achievable without the disastrous consequences now occurring everywhere.”

—Jonathan Crary

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

— G. K. Chesterton, born on this day in 1874

"We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter."

~ Bukowski

"You will learn at your own expense that in the long journey of life you will encounter many masks and few faces."

—Luigi Pirandello

"There is no more certain way to ensure that a catastrophe will come to pass than to propose reforms to avert it... Humanity's evils can only be cured by catastrophes. Man has never known how to renounce at the right time."

-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.”

—James Hillman

“The only thing people regret is
that they didn’t live boldly enough,
that they didn’t invest enough heart,
didn’t love enough.
Nothing else really counts at all.”

~ Ted Hughes

The purpose of a writer
is to keep civilization
from destroying
itself.

― Albert Camus

"We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die."

—R. D. Laing

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

—Charles Bukowski

I know that I have died before—
once in November, once in June.
How strange to choose June again,
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies . . .
New York City will not mind.
At night the bats will beat on the trees,
knowing it all,
seeing what they sensed all day.

--Anne Sexton