"As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most
needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can
do without, and of how to get along without it."

~ Wendell Berry

"The human soul is an abyss of viscous darkness, a well whose depths are rarely
plumbed from the surface of the world. No one would love themselves if they
really knew themselves and thus, without vanity, which is the life blood of the
spirit, our soul would die of anaemia."

-- Fernando Pessoa

"Jack London drinking his life away while
writing of strange and heroic men.
Eugene O’Neill drinking himself oblivious
while writing his dark and poetic
works.

now our moderns
lecture at universities
in tie and suit,
the little boys soberly studious,
the little girls with glazed eyes
looking
up,
the lawns so green, the books so dull,
the life so dying of
thirst."

~ Charles Bukowski

I started out with nothing
and I still got most
of it left.

~ Tom Waits

those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.

—Charles Bukowski

"Throughout all his writings, Berry simply asked: How should human beings live
well in a place? In the global mayhem of a corporatized world, Berry remained a
fierce defender of local communities and an advocate for returning economic
self-determination to the people.

'You can best serve civilization,' he writes, 'by being against what usually
passes for it.'"

Ernest Becker: "Adler was right to say that the mentally ill all have a basic
problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent
lives; they are hyper–fearful of life and death."

Paul Tillich: “Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.”

Carl Jung: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

Sigmund Freud: “Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of
it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a
lioness her young.”

Life is nothing but a competition
to be the criminal rather
than the victim.

-- Bertrand Russell

It's going to be September now
for many years to come,
many hearts adjusting to
that strict September drum.

I see the ghost of culture with numbers on his wrist
salute some new conclusion that all of us have missed.

So let's drink to when it's over,
and let's drink to when we meet.
I'll be waiting on this corner
where there used to be a street.

— Leonard Cohen

"To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder
of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary,
the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite."

—Novalis

“Man today, wearing the mask of a giant, has become a weak, helpless being
dependent on the machines he made, and hence on the leaders who guarantee the
proper functioning of the society that produces the machines, dependent on a
well-functioning business, frightened to death of losing all the props of being
"a man without rank and without title," of just being, of being challenged by
the question "Who am I?"

--Erich Fromm

"We use most of our powers to extend life. In so doing, we succeed only in
reducing life to survival. We live in order to survive.

The mania for health and optimization is a reflexive response to the lack of
being. We try to compensate for the absence of being by extending bare life, and
in doing so we become desensitized to life's intensity.

We confuse it with increased production, performance and consumption, but these
are merely forms of survival."

--Byung-Chul Han

“SAINT PAUL — We can never punish him enough for making Christianity impolite,
for saddling it with the nastiest traditions of the Old Testament: intolerance,
brutality, provincialism.

How indiscreetly he meddles in matters which are none of his business and of
which he has no understanding at all.

His remarks on virginity, abstinence, and marriage are nothing short of
disgusting.

Accountable for our religious and ethical prejudices, he has determined the
norms of our stupidity and multiplied those restrictions which still paralyze
our instincts.”

— Emil Cioran

“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”

― Thomas Merton

"Language and science are abbreviations of reality; art is an intensification of
reality."

— Ernst Cassirer

I sit here
At the window
Waiting for you
To come jogging past
In your crucifix uniform
You remind me of myself
Perhaps (I wonder aimlessly)
I could comfort you
I love the furrows between your eyes
And the ravages of anxiety
Across your clenched expression
You have the new face
The coming face
The face of no objective experience
And you have chosen the path of muscle
Toward your sorrow
How private you are
In the minds of everyone
I salute you
Brave spirit
Who has swallowed so much
And tasted so little.

— Leonard Cohen