Man cannot live without such untruths. He cannot bear life without measuring reality by purely invented fictional systems such as philosophy, astrology and religion. [...] Man had originally been free, but he had bricked himself into beliefs, madly constructing Zoroastrian observatories, Greek and Roman temples, Egyptian tomb pyramids and Christian cathedrals. He chose to erect an architecture of fear and awe, whose very foundation is the terror that death might lead to nothing more than oblivion.

Philosophers are no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, sly spokesmen for their ideas which they baptise ‘truths’. Philosophers are snake oil salesmen of the soul. Their doctrines amount to edicts imposing self-tyranny upon human nature. Philosophy always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is glorification of universalisation. It is imposition. It seeks to make all existence exist only after its own image.

As for science, it is no better. The conclusions of the knowledge-microscopists provide no more truth than do the philosophers. The meaning of science is not religion. Yet science, somehow, is becoming substituted for religion. The modern world is mistaking scientific theory for moral dogma.

Distrusting all system-builders, Nietzsche steadfastly refuses to build a system for us. He loves to contradict himself in the realm of ideas, and to force us into the position of the free spirit who is independent of him.
To establish whether one is ready for independence one must not cling to anything, not even a sense of one’s own detachment. Few are made for such independence. It is the privilege of the tightrope walkers, those who are daring to the point of recklessness.

Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.

- Walden, by H. D. Thoreau

لكنّ المرءَ قد وصلَ به الحال إلى أنْ يتضوّر جوعًا، ليس بسبب حاجتِه لما هو ضروريٌ في الحياة، بل بسبب رغبَتِه بما هو كمالي.

- والْدِن، لـِ هنري ديفيد ثورو

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How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.’

— Untimely Meditations

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler.

- The Joyful Wisdom

But thus I counsel you my friends: mistrust all in whom the drive to punish is strong!

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I think in different voices. Sometimes, I just can't find the fucking voice. My thoughts become mute.

Maybe I should think in sign language

You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy.

What you are drawn to is the first rapture of love. You know how to drown and hide yourself in a dreamy, love-intoxicated clairvoyance. All around yourself you spin the finest spider’s web and then lie in wait. But you are not a child, not a waking consciousness, and the look in your eye means something else; but for you that is enough.

To steal your way into people, that’s where you have a truly great gift, I do not deny it, or at the same time that it is a proper entertainment to hear you recount the results and to witness your uncontained joy every time you can bring some really fresh observation to the  market. But frankly your psychological interest lacks seriousness and is more like hypochondriacal curiosity.

You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.

- Either/Or, by Soren Kierkegaard

She sat opposite a mirror in which you could see her. She cast a shy glance at it without guessing that your eye had already taken up residence there; she blushed when your eye met hers. Things like that you preserve as accurately as possible and register just as quickly, just half a minute even in the worst weather, as you know.

- Adventure time

Mike and the pimento sandwich, again

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