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

“Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few
powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate
themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.”

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Born on this day in 1749)

“The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of modern life, sucking up
the blood and the life. There is hardly an original thought or original
utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition of stale, stale ideas.”

—D.H. Lawrence

"The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to become more
passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity.

No longer does man think in personal values, following more his own conscience
and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the values brought to him by
mass media.

Headlines in the morning paper give him his temporary political outlook, the
radio blasts suggestions into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe
and passive fixation."
--Joost  Meerloo

“We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and
sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few
months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other
world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And
through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...”
—Tom Wolfe

“Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that
he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become
empty and lost its meaning.”

― Erich Fromm

Man’s biological weakness
is the condition of human
culture.

— Erich Fromm

"If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind."

- Carl Jung