"We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism... attention
to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone
very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be
sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the
condition of dis-ease.

And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse
as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz,
experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.

What do all these things have in common?

They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is
trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or
showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or
violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because
it's an impulse to re...

I gave up drinking once --it was the worst afternoon of my entire life.

- Humphrey Bogart

"You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your
face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's
absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and
the career."

~Paul Newman

"A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally
shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and
mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than
enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman."

~Carl Jung

"To be spared from the dangers of technology, its users would have to be both
wise and just. But this is fantasy. Technology can never be anything other than
a means of facilitating the very worst of human qualities."

--Ramon Elani

“What more profound illustration of the soullessness of technology than a world
where people rot away while staring at their phones?

A world where all meaning is created by human interpretation will necessarily
become a world of incoherence and despair. We sowed a diseased seed and now we
reap a poisoned harvest.”

—Ramon Elani

"If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the
company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either
gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.”

― Mikhail Bulgakov

“When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are
miserable. Thinking of happiness as a project, they look for fulfilment at some
future time. The present slips by, and anxiety creeps in. They dread their
progress to this future state being disrupted by events. So they turn to
philosophy, and nowadays therapy…”
— John Gray

“The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a
concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the
world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world.”

—Gilles Deleuze

If one is not aware, then one becomes shoddy, middle-class, mediocre.

The root meaning of that word mediocre is “going halfway up the hill,” going
halfway up the mountain, never reaching the top of it. That’s mediocrity.

That is, never demanding of ourselves excellence, never demanding of ourselves
total goodness or complete freedom—not freedom to do what we like, that is not
freedom, that is triviality, but to be free from all pain of anxieties,
loneliness, despair, and all the rest of it.

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a trickle of suspicion in the
bloodstream, and all those eyes, one by one, will open to the world, will see
its horror as it has never been seen before.”

—Thomas Ligotti

"Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to
ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are
converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of
this world."

~ Cioran

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look
forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

—G. K. Chesterton

“Let us leave modern men to their ‘truths’ and let us only be concerned about
one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”

- Julius Evola

"Antisocial tech billionaires inject the blood of teenagers in a demented bid to
live forever. It is a new secular puritanism. These longevity bros trade the
profound depth of life for its mere length. They are terrified of death, yet
terrified to actually live. It must stop."

-- Christopher Gage
…

“We love ourselves to the point of idolatry; but we also intensely dislike
ourselves — we find ourselves unutterably boring.

Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshipped self, there is in
all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately
expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to
self-transcendence.

It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga —
to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.”

— Aldous Huxley

“I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy
man.”

—William Faulkner

"The conscious life... is no more than a masquerade for death: there is a living
unconscious life. If only we would shut our eyes: if only we were all struck
blind, and things vanished from our sight: we should marvel that we fought and
lived for shallow, visionary, peripheral nothingnessess. We should find reality
in the darkness."

-- D.H. Lawrence

"I’m simple, I’m not profound. My genius stems from an interest in whores,
working men, streetcar drivers—lonely, beaten-down people.”

~ Bukowski

“Myth is a reflection of the deepest layers of the soul. It is a cosmic mirror
that shows us our place in the world and our connection with the transcendent.”

— Ernst Jünger

“Life is nothing but an occassional burst of laughter rising above the
interminable wail of grief.”

—Henry Roth