“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

All we are not
stares back
at what we
are.

—W. H.  Auden

"This human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit
conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem
that lost freedom if they work at it hard enough."

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with
any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious
mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the
understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness.”

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

“But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad
disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false
individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all
asserting their own wholeness.”

― D.H. Lawrence

“Christians still haven't understood that God is further from people than people
from him. I imagine a God bored beyond the edges of these people who only know
how to ask, a God who are exsperated by the triviality of his creation, a
disgust of earth and heaven.”

— Emil Cioran

“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

― P.J. O'Rourke

I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a
Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself with me that I can no longer call myself
a man, a woman, an angel, or even a pure Soul.

Love has befriended me so completely it has turned to ash and freed me of every
concept and image my mind has ever known.

--Hafez

We look at the world once,
in childhood. The rest
is memory.

—Louise Gluck

“I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather
die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally
wrong happens here.

I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis, along with quite a few other mistakes,
that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the
twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”

—Werner Herzog

“For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are
housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on
top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence
that does not even merit our pity.”

— Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Novel

"The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little
town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody
else's business"

—Marshall McLuhan, 1967.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them
the power to pull ours.

~ Aldous Huxley

The great American philosopher and psychologist, William James, died on this day
in 1910.

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is
not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our
belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the
fear in our minds.”

“It’s okay, girl, we’ll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then,
what you got to lose but the losing? We’re fallen angels who didn’t believe that
nothing means nothing.”

— Jack Kerouac