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

“In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man
is bound to create a scandal.”

― Edward Abbey

“The contentment of innumerable people can be destroyed in a generation by the
withering touch of our civilization."

--Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human
body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every
human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic
passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our
factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

—Thomas Merton