Quotes "Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us hope it will not be generally known." "An embarrassing discovery, and the less said about it the better." Anonymous on evolution "The vast majority show themselves to be absolute slaves in choosing the kind of life lived by cattle." Aristotle "I tell it now to illustrate a difference between moods and the weather, their usual analogy; a day without weather is unthinkable, but for me at least there were frequently days without any mood at all. On these days Jacob Horner, except in a meaningless metabolistic sense, ceased to exist, for I was without a personality. Like those microscopic specimens that biologists must dye in order to make them visible at all, I had to be colored with some mood or other if there was to be a recognizable self to me." "Take a day job, preferably factory work, but not so simple that you are able to think coherently while working." "If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left; if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier. If neither of these applies, choose the alternative whose name begins with the ealier letter of the alphabet." John Barth "Since my mind has been engaged in the service of the lotus feet of Lord Krsna, and I have been enjoying an ever new transcendental humor, whenever I think of sex life with a woman, my face at once turns from it, and I spit at the thought." "Bewildered by the modes of material nature, the ignorant fully engage themselves in material activities and become attatched." Bhagavad Gita "Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remeber their misery no more." Proverbs 31, 6-7 "Rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." Romans 5 3-4 "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." "The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future." "I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints." "Sisyphus is the happiest man alive." "For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate." Camus "Decay is inherent in all compound things. Work out your own salvation with diligence." Buddha "It is a moral necessity to assume the existence of God." Descartes "He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this postive rationality his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly, that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself that men are still not piano keys." Dostoevsky "... Above all, remember that the door stands open. Do not be more fearful than children. But, just as when they are tired of the game they cry, "I will play no more," so too when you are in a similar situation, cry, "I will play no more" and depart. But if you stay, do not cry. ... Is there smoke in the room? If it is slight, I remain. If it is grievous, I quit it. For you must remember this and hold it fast, that the door stands open." Epictetus "Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist." Epicurus "I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way." Robert Frost "What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?" Goethe "I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure." "Wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain." "To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature." "He had thrown away a hundred times what in the world's eyes was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty." "As thousands of his like do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death was open to him at any moment." Hermann Hesse "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix." Sherlock Holmes "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." David Hume "The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is bound to be noticed." "Methinks I coud weep for an eternity for the fact that this misery exists." "For worldliness is precisely to ascribe infinite value to the indifferent." "I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, and everyone laughed and admired me-but I went away-and the dash should be as long as the earth's orbit-------------------and wanted to shoot myself." Kierkegaard "He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. He makes friends with people he does not really like and is rather cool to those with whome he would 'really' like to be friends." "He is constantly drawing attention to himself, and at the same time drawing attention away from his self." R. D. Laing "We also believe that all human activities, including the scientific, are funny." Timothy Leary "It is the vulgar masses that constitutues the world." Machiavelli "The results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad." "The nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself." "Faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian, for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State." Norman Mailer "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Karl Marx "God is dead." "What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?" "Nobody dies nowadays of fatal truths; there are too many antidotes for them." "Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning." "What is the ape to man? A ridicule, or a grievous shame. And that is just what man is to be to the Superman---a ridicule, or a grievous shame." "You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!" "Profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt." Nietzsche "My life as a young man can be described in a single phrase: it was a period absolutely wihtout hope.... My life at the time lay entirely in the grips of nihility and despair... My decision, then, to study philosophy was in fact - melodramatic as it might sound - a matter of life and death.... In the little history of my soul, this decision meant a kind of conversion." Keiji Nishitani "The question is complex and life is short." Protagoras "We know what we should do, but we do not do it. We prefer to remain not so much in our outer darkness, for the lights of wisdom blaze around us; but in a bemused euphoria of a material 'progress' that offers mankind a high standard of living in exchange for his spiritual freedom." Herbert Read "Man is condemned to be free." "Existence preceds essence." Jean-Paul Sartre "Consider, friend, as you pass by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, you too shall be. Prepare, therefore, to follow me." Scottish Epitaph "To mankind, mankind is holy." Seneca "I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes o the better lot is known to no one, except the god." "If it is a complete lack of perception, like a dreamless sleep, then death would be a great advantage." "...the unexamined life is not worth living." "...he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things." "Athens is like a sluggish horse and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life." "One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing." Socrates "Little Marie to us came, greeted us, and left again." Sophie's World, Marie's tombstone "Nothing is more to me than myself." "But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew - for such a one willl not go astray as far as this - we will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your face." "By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "it's bloom"! Max Stirner "Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." Dr Suess "Skepticism is an ability to place in antithesis, in any manner whatever, appearances and judgments, and thus-because of the equality of force in the objects and arguments opposed-come first of all to a suspension of judgment and then to mental tranquillity." Sextus "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Shakespeare "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao Tse-tung "When I no longer have a body, what trouble have I?" "When the worst student hears about the way He laughs out loud. If he did not laugh It would be unworthy of being the way." "In the pursuit of learning one knows more everyday; in the pursuit of the way one does less everyday." "To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty." "It is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life." "Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into practice.” Lao Tzu "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so." Artemus Ward "Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race." "In the vast indifference I invent meaning." "No sooner have I discovered something than I begin to doubt it and I have to destroy it again." "I do not know if I am a hangman or victim for I imagine the most horrible tortures and as I describe them I suffer them myself There is nothing that I could not do and everything fills me with horror.” Peter Weiss "I am sick of women who love me. Women who hate me are much more interesting." "You must not find symbols in everything you see. It makes life impossible." ""The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world it's own shame." Oscar Wilde "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Yeats