"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

"Language created 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone and 'solitude'
to express the glory of being alone."

- Paul Tillich

"We want life. And we want the power of life. We want to feel the power of life
in ourselves. We're sick of being soft, and amiable, and harmless. We're sick to
death of even enjoying ourselves. We're a bit ashamed of our own existence. Or
if we aren't we ought to be. But what then?"

-- D.H. Lawrence

“Any time you pay somebody to tell you what to do you’re going to be a loser.
And this includes your psychiatrist, your psychologist, your broker, your
workshop teacher and your etc.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving
on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they
fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins
with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.”

—Bukowski

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,
To feel everything in every way,
To feel everything excessively,
Because all things are, in truth, excessive
And all reality is an excess, a violence,
An extraordinarily vivid hallucination.

— Fernando Pessoa

“A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to
look out.”

—G. C. Lichtenberg

"From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in
life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little,
owned little or nothing.
They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or
the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone.
They recognized only one kind of activity - creation…"

-- Henry Miller