“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

“Modern man is comforted in ways that had never even occurred to people in ages
past.

We enthusiastically wait for the day when we need no longer even get out of bed
in the morning and all our needs and desires will be fulfilled with the push of
a button.

Needless to say, all this comfort does not provide us with happiness or meaning
or health. Modern man imagines that all this comfort is his reward for
harnessing the power of technology, when really it is his punishment.”

--Ramon Elani

"The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one
devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish
abyss lurks beneath."

~Peter Wessel Zapffe

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in
people taking themselves too seriously...Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept
that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way
lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

~ Tom Robbins