Noraxis Korzaleth

"Axis of none"

Emil Cioran

"From fractured families, a child emerges who dedicates themselves to the truth, and in searching for that truth, becomes lost."
"Man starts over again every day, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."
"Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself."
"The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I do not know where that elsewhere is."
"Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal, less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting them."
"When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What is your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down."
"To have committed every crime but that of being a father."
"What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification."
"One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world."
"Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who do not suffer, time flows, so that they do not live in time, in fact they never have."
"Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me."
"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."
"Read day and night, devour books-these sleeping pills-not to learn but to forget."
"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world."
"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser."
"There are two poisons in man: wisdom and rebellion."
"Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us."
"If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason."
"As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name."
"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live. Moreover, the only one."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
"The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."
"One learns to fly only by falling into the deepest abysses."
"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it, one gets through many a dark night."
"The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."
"Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman-a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that make unhappy marriages."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct them to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings-always darker, emptier and simpler."
"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."
"Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you."
"The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?"
"One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure."
"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."
"There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth."
"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

Arthur Schopenhauer

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
"They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice, that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every person has a more unassailable title than to their own life and person."
"When we read, another person thinks for us-we merely repeat their mental process."
"Man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills."
"Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness."
"A high degree of intellect tends to make a person unsocial."
"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see."
"We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor."
"What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them."
"The cheapest sort of pride is national pride."
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
"Great people are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude."
"No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose."
"He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?"
"Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame."
"The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy."
"The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it."
"It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else."

Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

"No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought-it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts."
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."
"A man is not called wise because he talks and talks again; but if he is peaceful, loving and fearless then he is called wise."
"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change."
"Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded."
"Even as a solid rock is unshaken by the wind, so are the wise unshaken by praise or blame."
"Attachment leads to suffering."
"Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else."
"An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind."
"Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most."
"There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path."
"If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another."
"There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed."
"In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true."
"In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you."
"It is the mind of man, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways."
"Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth."
"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without."

Heraclitus of Ephesus

"Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse."
"Give me one man from among ten thousand if he is the best."
"Much learning does not teach understanding."
"One's character is their destiny."
"We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play."
"The awake share a common world, but the asleep turn aside into private worlds."
"Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep."
"War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free."
"The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts."
"How can you hide from what never goes away?"
"To get everything you want is not a good thing. Disease makes health seem sweet. Hunger leads to the appreciation of being full-fed. Tiredness creates the enjoyment of resting."
"What are men? Mortal gods. What are gods? Immortal men."
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and it is not the same man."
"Nature loves to hide."
"Dogs bark at what they do not understand."
"Because it is so unbelievable, the truth often escapes being known."
"All things come into being by conflict of opposites."
"Life has the name of life, but in reality, it is death."
"The road up and the road down is one and the same."
"Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive."

Crates of Thebes

"What wealth is to the rich, philosophy is to the poor."
"I have no need of a city that needs walls more than virtue."
"Those who fear poverty are already poor."
"Honor is the shadow cast by ignorance."
"Cities are full of what is unnecessary and empty of what matters."
"Most people are slaves to what they think they own."
"Live according to nature, not convention."
"The crowd mistakes noise for wisdom because silence is uncomfortable."
"I live as if every place is my home, and therefore I am never homeless."
"The beggar is freer than the king who guards his throne."
"I carry nothing, so nothing carries me."
"To need little is to resemble the gods more than kings do."
"Desire is a tax imposed by imagination."
"If you depend on anything outside yourself, you are already divided."
"The wise man does not obey applause or insult."
"Possession multiplies worry faster than comfort."
"The banquet is often the funeral of reason."
"Those who worship status misunderstand weightlessness."
"What the crowd calls shame is often nature corrected by itself."
"Custom is a soft chain worn willingly."

Diogenes of Sinope

"Of what use is a philosopher who does not hurt the feelings of anybody?"
"In the house of a rich man, there is no place to spit but his face."
"It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little."
"It takes a wise man to discover a wise man."
"Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?"
"The mob is the mother of tyrants."
"As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task."
"The art of being a slave is to rule the master of one."
"It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
"No man is hurt but by himself."
"Blushing is the color of virtue."
"Bury me on my face, for in a little while everything will be turned upside down."
"When I am among people, I am alone; when alone, I am among people."
"I have nothing, therefore I lack nothing."
"Other dogs bite their enemies; I bite my friends to save them."
"Law is a net: it catches the small, the large break through."
"The sun too penetrates the privies, but it is not polluted by them."
"There is only the difference of a finger between a wise man and a fool."
"We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less."
"He has the most who is most content with the least."

Johann Kaspar Schmidt (Max Stirner)

"Where the world comes in my way-and it comes in my way everywhere-I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you."
"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."
"Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?"
"The people of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."
"I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything."
"Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses, the nation comes to 'its bloom'! The individuals have died 'for the great cause of the nation,' and the nation sends some words of thanks after them, and has the profit of it. I call that paying a kind of egoism."
"I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"
"I love men too-not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no commandment of love."
"The moral person is necessarily narrow in that they know no other enemy than the immoral person."
"I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours."
"To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled."
"The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him."
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime."
"If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more."
"Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook."
"Crimes spring from fixed ideas."
"It is only through the flesh that I can break the tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him that he hears himself wholly."
"The critic is not an owner, because he still struggles with ideas as with powerful strangers, as the Christian is not the owner of his 'bad desires' as long as he has to fight them; for the one who battles against vice, vice exists."
"Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority."
"Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken."

Peter Wessel Zapffe

"To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house."
"Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness."
"Every social unit is a large, rounded attachment system, built on the solid beams of basic cultural ways of thinking. The ordinary man manages with these shared cultural beams, his personality almost builds itself. Our personality has stopped developing, and rests on inherited cultural foundations: God, the church, the state, morality, destiny, the laws of life, the future."
"Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world."
"The human yearning is not merely marked by a 'striving toward', but equally by an 'escape from.'"
"A deer may stand and stare into the black barrels of a rifle and feel no more than a slight uneasiness."
"To bear life, we must protect ourselves from the consciousness of what life is."
"Knowledge opens wounds that knowledge cannot heal."
"Jesus must have been a psychopath."
"The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence."
"The oak breaks the vase."
"One should not think; it is merely confusing."
"The meaning of life is concealed by the necessities of life."
"The secret of enduring existence is to be sufficiently deceived."
"Culture is the attempt of humanity to forget."
"Know yourselves. Be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye."
"A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness."
"The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who does not seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer."
"We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness."
"Each new generation asks, 'What is the meaning of life?' A more fertile way of putting the question would be, 'Why does man need a meaning to life?'"

Philipp Batz (Mainlander)

"God has died, and his death was the life of the world."
"The kingdom of heaven after death, nirvana and absolute nothingness are one and the same."
"The movement of the cosmos is the movement from over-being to non-being. The universe, however, is the disintegration into multiplicity, that is, into egoistic individualities arrayed against each other. Only in this struggle of essences, which before were a simple unity, can the original essence itself be destroyed."
"The animal basically follows its impulses, which are limited to hunger, thirst, the need to sleep and everything related to mating; it lives in a narrow sphere. To the human being, on the other hand, life comes to him through reason, in the form of wealth, women, honor, power, fame, etc., which fuels his will to live, his yearning to live. Reason makes satisfaction, artificially, a refined enjoyment. Thus death is detested with all the soul of one and the mere mention of such a word tormentingly contracts the hearts of the majority, and the fear of death turns into anguish of death and despair, when human beings cast their eyes upon it."
"The will, illuminated by knowledge, turns toward its own extinction."
"The highest moral act is the negation of life."
"Everything in the universe is unconsciously a will to death. This will to death is, above all in the human being, hidden in its entirety by the will to live, because life is a means to death, which presents itself clearly for even the most feeble-minded individual: we die unceasingly, our life is a slow agony, death daily overpowers every human being until, finally, it extinguishes with a breath the light of life in each one of us."
"He who does not fear death is the only one who can do something for others, bleed for others, and has, at the same time, the only happiness, the only desirable good in this world: undisturbed peace of heart."
"The universe is the rotting corpse of God who killed himself."
"Consciousness reveals not meaning, but the failure of existence to justify itself."
"The philosopher must look at the world without consolation."
"Hope is a metaphysical misunderstanding."
"The will, ignited by the knowledge that non-being is better than being, is the supreme principle of morality."
"All human beings must first of all be fed up with all the pleasures that the world can offer, before mankind can be ripe for redemption. Since their redemption is their destiny, they must be satiated, and such satisfaction is only brought about when the social question is resolved."
"The world is not created; it is undone."
"Nature can fully be fathomed; only the origin of the world is a miracle and an unfathomable mystery."
"Religion exists for two reasons: to control human behavior and to give every human a grip in the storm of life."
"When I am unconscious, I could not care less whether I lie in a palace or a horse stall."
"Redemption is annihilation."
"Every striving is a disguised fatigue of being."

Ernst Junger

"I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in their depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer."
"The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly."
"We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war."
"The anarchist, as the born foe of authority, will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less. The anarch, on the other hand, has appropriated authority; he is sovereign. He may like, dislike, or be indifferent to whatever occurs in them. That is what determines his conduct; he invests no emotional values."
"In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high."
"Today only the person who no longer believes in a joyful ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment."
"The egalitarian mania of demagogues is even more dangerous than the brutality of men in gallooned coats."
"Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history."
"One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians castrate the Good Lord."
"Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways."
"The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one."
"How can one explain this trend towards a more colorless and shallow life? Well, the work was easier, if less healthy, and it brought in more money, more leisure, and perhaps more entertainment. A day in the country is long and hard. And yet the fruits of their present life were worthless compared to a single coin of their former life: a rest in the evening and a rural festivity. That they no longer knew the old kind of happiness was obvious from the discontentment which spread over their features. Soon dissatisfaction, prevailing over all their other moods, became their religion."
"A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well."
"The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file."
"Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy."
"We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle."
"History is merely an occasion, never a goal."
"It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage."
"In my experience, I have found that creativity demands a vigilant mind, which is weakened by the influence of drugs."
"Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are."

Paul-Michel Foucault

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they do not know is what what they do does."
"Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are."
"Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions-to define, classify, control, and regulate people."
"A critique does not consist in saying that things are not good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based."
"Visibility is a trap."
"Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility."
"The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes."
"What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?"
"I do not feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."
"If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick: these three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal, and being sick are, in fact, very different, but have been reduced to the same thing."
"Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting."
"What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But could not life of everyone become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
"Where there is power, there is resistance."
"Curiosity evokes 'concern'; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential."
"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think."
"In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating."
"The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness."
"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
"The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements."
"Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism."

Eugene Thacker

"A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance born not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time."
"What if depression-failure of reason to achieve self-mastery-is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works 'too well,' and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings?"
"Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility."
"In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer-if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: 'Does not like to play with others.'"
"Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future."
"In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part."
"What is repulsive about children is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults-whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things do not go their way."
"There is no surer sign of pessimism than an overly-optimistic person."
"Kierkegaard famously wrote 'my sorrow is my castle.' Unfortunately not all of us have as much space."
"There will always be someone who will see the futility of your actions. There will always be someone who is irritated by what you do, whatever you do."
"Whenever it occurs, however it occurs, pessimism has but one effect: it introduces humility into thought. It undermines the innumerable, self-aggrandizing postures that constitute the human being. Pessimism is the humility of the species that has named itself, thought furtively stumbling upon its own limitations on black wings of futility."
"What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse."
"Whether we can 'save' the planet is one question-whether the planet needs saving is another."
"Would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view?"
"Two kinds of pessimism: 'The end is near' and 'Will this never end?'"
"The last word of philosophy is loneliness."
"We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness."
"The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or tears of Schopenhauer); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or laughter of Nietzsche); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or sleep of Cioran)."
"The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us."
"A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it."

Byung-Chul Han

"The complaint of the depressive individual, 'Nothing is possible,' can only occur in a society that thinks, 'Nothing is impossible.'"
"Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, voters of today have no real interest in politics-in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to 'deliver'. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers."
"Contemporary society is no longer the disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories of Foucault. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer 'obedience-subjects' but 'achievement-subjects.'"
"In social networks, the function of 'friends' is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity."
"What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results."
"Under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression."
"Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention."
"Today, we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; 'betweens' and 'between-times' are lacking."
"Concern for the good life, which also includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival."
"Happiness is the proof that time can accommodate eternity."
"One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom."
"Depression severs all attachments. Mourning differs from depression above all through its strong libidinal attachment to an object. In contrast, depression is objectless, and therefore undirected."
"Big Data has announced the end of the person who possesses free will."
"Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama-only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall in love would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love."
"Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty-emotion, play and communication-comes to be exploited."
"The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts."
"Depression, which often culminates in burnout, follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out."
"If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available."
"The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator."
"Sameness is more violent than otherness."

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great people must, I think, have great sadness."
"To go wrong in your own way is better than to go right in the way of someone else."
"It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently."
"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."
"If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, do not bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh."
"The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward."
"Nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it."
"It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them."
"To love is to suffer, and there can be no love otherwise."
"I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there-that is living."
"The world says: 'You have needs-satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Do not hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder."
"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. I talk nonsense, therefore I am human."
"The soul is healed by being with children."
"The more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."
"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
"If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself."
"The cleverest of all is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month."
"Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient, and practical person."
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
"It is better to be unhappy and know the worst than to be happy in a paradise of fools."

Fernando Antonio Nogueira de Pessoa

"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from the dream of someone else."
"And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living."
"The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur."
"To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think."
"We all have two lives: the true, the one we dreamed of in childhood and go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin."
"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street."
"To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet."
"The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."
"Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory, or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave."
"I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory."
"I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided."
"My past is everything I failed to be."
"We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It is our own concept-our own selves-that we love."
"I have always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I am not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect."
"Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse."
"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."
"We worship perfection because we can not have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect."
"Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality-it is all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I am attending here is a show with another set. And the show I am attending is myself."
"When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour, I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping."
"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it."

Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast... be happy about your growth, in which of course you cannot take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your faith or joy, which they would not be able to comprehend."
"Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Live in the question."
"We welcome the new year, full of things that have never been."
"Only someone who is ready for everything, who does not exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."
"Every angel is terrifying."
"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."
"If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator, there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the sounds of the world-would you not still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?"
"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries-on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust."
"Do not be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you."
"I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone."
"No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger."
"I have faith in nights."
"I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future."
"Truly to sing, that is a different breath."
"This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before it can fly."
"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go."
"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."

Albert Caraco

"We are too many to live, but never enough to suffer and die."
"Death is not terrible; life is terrible, but we see things literally and figuratively upside down. The philosopher is the one who puts everything back in its proper place."
"Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it is a luxury of the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common person."
"Every child believes in its parents: that seems to be the first mistake, for they are usually not gods but ordinary people, and a child will never reach adulthood unless they see through this deception. The free man must be unfaithful to his roots; otherwise, he becomes a servant."
"It is life itself that I despise, not my existence; it is the principle, not its application, that could not have been better, given the circumstances."
"According to Gnosis, the universe is the prison of the species and is virtually embraced by fate, which is reminiscent of Sartre despite all the differences in expression. We enter the world through a gate that requires no explanation: we are cast out by women. We emerge from the womb and are thrust into something we did not choose, which is essentially the concept of thrownness of Heidegger. Our mothers cast us into the world, and we awaken as prisoners. When our eyes open, we find ourselves in chains. Our existence is like the cave of Plato, where we perceive only the shadows of things."
"In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holiness being absolute hellishness. That is why our Saviors are of no avail, their remedies being too strong for the common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner."
"We, who are not satisfied with empty words, consent to disappear, and we rejoice in our fate. We did not choose to be born, and consider ourselves fortunate to have nowhere to outlive this life, which was imposed upon us rather than given-a life full of sorrows and pains with dubious or harmful pleasures."
"With each turn of the wheel, the cities we inhabit advance imperceptibly towards each other, aspiring to merge into an absolute chaos of noise and stench. With each turn of the wheel, the price of land rises, and in the labyrinth that devours free space, the revenue from investments builds hundreds of walls, day after day. Since money must work and the cities we inhabit must progress, it is still legitimate for their houses to double in height with each generation, even if they lack water every two days. The builders only seek to escape the fate they are preparing for us by fleeing to the countryside."
"The world we live in is hell moderated by nothingness, where man, refusing to know himself, prefers to sacrifice himself like an animal species that has become too numerous-similar to swarms of locusts and armies of rats-believing that it is more sublime to perish, to perish innumerable times, than to finally reconsider the world he inhabits."
"It is because life itself is inhuman that people are not human."
"If there is a God, chaos and death will appear among its attributes. If God does not exist, it changes nothing, for chaos and death will be self-sufficient until the end of time."
"Every one of us dies alone and dies whole."
"Life is no longer sacred from the moment the living become too numerous. The lives of surplus men are no more valuable than those of insects, and soldiers killed in war are no different in the eyes of those who command them."
"We live for death, love for death, and give birth and toil for death. Our works and days now follow one another in the shadow of death. The discipline we adhere to, the values we uphold, and the plans we make all lead to one end: death."
"We strive towards death like an arrow towards its target, and we never miss. Death is our only certainty, and we always know that we will die, no matter where, when, or how. The idea of eternal life is nonsense, eternity is not life, death is the rest we seek, life and death are intertwined, and those who demand something else ask for the impossible and will earn nothing but smoke."
"Happiness rarely leads us to intellectual adventures. Writers and artists, not to mention philosophers, are usually dissatisfied with themselves or the world."
"For me, nothingness has a charm that the abortions that populate this place could never have and never will have. I thank heaven that I live here; leaving this world does not take any effort."
"The fact that we suffer does not necessarily imply that pain is meaningful; quite the contrary! It is always pointless to endure pain, but our vanity refuses to admit it, and therefore builds castles in the air to amuse itself with illusions, which is also called metaphysics."
"Who are the most wicked of men? It is the optimists."

Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard

"I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself."
"You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you."
"After all, there is nothing but failure."
"The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable."
"Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world."
"We can only exist by taking our minds off the fact that we exist."
"Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent."
"Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think."
"Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is."
"We see so much sadness if we care to look."
"Our libraries are, so to speak, prisons where we have locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement."
"I have often observed that people who throughout their lives have been judged repulsive and distasteful are spoken of after their death as though they had never been repulsive and distasteful. This has always struck me as tasteless and embarrassing. When someone dies, their death does not make them a different person."
"What is ridiculous about human beings is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous."
"We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid."
"You get a name, and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years, you are always walking in the woods."
"We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death."
"Instead of committing suicide, people go to work."
"Nothing but disaster follows from applause."
"We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing."
"Whoever cannot laugh does not deserve to be taken seriously."

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
"From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent."
"To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest."
"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."
"I never ask a person what their business is, for it never interests me. What I ask them about are their thoughts and dreams."
"Religion is still useful among the herd-that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is ineradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else."
"Pleasure to me is wonder-the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
"Creative minds are uneven, and even the best of fabrics have their dull spots."
"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane."
"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
"No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace."
"Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity."
"Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood."
"I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me."
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths of the world be left alone."
"No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity."
"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life."
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity, but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
"It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within."

Franz Kafka

"I am a cage, in search of a bird."
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?"
"Evil is whatever distracts."
"The meaning of life is that it stops."
"I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones."
"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
"Do not bend; do not water it down; do not try to make it logical; do not edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
"I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: 'Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.' Perhaps we do not love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we do not have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much."
"I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face."
"Written kisses do not reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts."
"Most men are not wicked. They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers."
"My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication-it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness-it is all that I have-and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well."
"Kill me, or you are a murderer."
"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
"I usually solve problems by letting them devour me."
"He is terribly afraid of dying because he has not yet lived."
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."
"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think."
"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."

Thomas Ligotti

"This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really 'out there' cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately-imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live?"
"Sometimes you just have to keep some distance between yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human."
"Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls-while we scream and perish, history licks a finger and turns the page."
"There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Did not they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it is the same old lesson: everything in this life-I repeat, everything-is more trouble than its worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West."
"For the rest of the organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death-and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying-and nothing else. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are-hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones."
"The only value of this world lay in its power-at certain times-to suggest another world."
"I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine."
"Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It is like network television. I am your local cable access station."
"What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours."
"In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life."
"Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering."
"No one in a productive society wants you to know there are ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated."
"Those who suffer intolerably learn to hide their afflictions, both necessary and unnecessary, because the world does not run on pain time but on happy time, whether or not that happiness is honestly felt or a mask for the blackest despondency."
"Every human activity is a task for killing time."
"We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe."
"A well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of the humanity of a person, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be."
"The sinister, the terrible never deceive. The state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror."
"Poe and Lovecraft-not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka-were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of 'outsider artists.' That's where the future development of horror fiction lies-in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction."
"We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs humans."
"If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else."

Shuji Tsushima (Osamu Dazai)

"Living itself is the source of sin."
"The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like-no thanks."
"When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I could not write a novel, people said I could not write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering."
"I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again."
"It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it."
"The weak fear happiness itself."
"Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance."
"To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting."
"I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven."
"All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? I do not know."
"As long as I can make them laugh, it does not matter how, I will be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably will not mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky."
"That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell: Everything passes."
"Man has language, knowledge, principles, and social order, but do not all the other animals have them too, granted the difference of degree? Perhaps the animals even have religions. Man boasts of being the lord of all creation, but it would seem as if essentially he does not differ in the least from other animals."
"They scolded us for not having any real hopes or real ambitions, but if we were to pursue our true ideals, would these people watch and guide us along the way?"
"My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no."
"Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?"
"The more I feared people, the more I was liked, and the more I was liked, the more I feared them."
"There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes."
"I am told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women."
"You can be sure of one thing: a man is got to fake just to stay alive"

Oguz Atay

"There is a window opposite my bed. The walls of the room are completely empty. How did I live ten years in this house? Did it never occur to me to hang a picture on the wall? What did I do? No one even warned me. And so, in the end, I became a meaningless person. My end has come. Out of fear of hanging a bad picture, I never hung any picture; out of fear of living badly, I never lived at all."
"The worst part is, I never learned how to say no. 'Stay for dinner,' they said: I stayed. Yet one does not stay. They insist a little; you hesitate a little. In the end, you get up and leave. But to take every word seriously, to be bound by honor in that way-it destroyed me, it broke me."
"My head is full of broken glass, doctor. That is why every movement of my mind hurts my thoughts, do you understand?"
"If one day you will forget me, if one day you will leave me and go, then do not exhaust me in vain; do not pull me out of my cave for nothing. Do not strip me of my habits, especially my habit of solitude. Do not unsettle me. This time I have left nothing behind. I gathered my bowl and comb and came. Whatever I had, I laid it all out. If you leave me, I will turn into a fish out of water. I will become like a poor villager who, once made a sergeant, can no longer return to labor."
"Good things happen suddenly; they do not keep a person waiting this long. From delayed, lingering excitements only bad things come out. Or nothing comes out at all."
"It was no longer possible to start everything again. Even if I wanted to, it was impossible. Since I had forgotten where I left off, starting from the beginning would require certain abilities; for example, being born under better luck."
"I have become so accustomed to staying at home that when I step outside, it feels like I am no longer in a real world. Everything outside the house feels the same, as if all people resemble each other."
"I feel so sorry for myself; because of this, I never find the opportunity to feel sorry for others."
"According to a philosopher who later became a waiter, or a waiter who later became a philosopher, people resemble mixed salad."
"Rich people possess the luxury of caring about nothing, of getting excited about nothing; therefore they live long lives."
"Fake versions of the 'I understand you' gaze have spread in the world; it has become very difficult to distinguish the real from the fake. 'I understand you, no need for words,' or 'do not pay attention to them, just trust my eyes,' these looks are mostly nothing but the formula: 'I need someone to get through the day.'"
"How can I convince her that I lived all this time together with her? That even while living as if I had forgotten her, I was thinking about her? She would not understand; she would be deceived by appearances, she would not understand. Because I met someone else, she would think this new relationship made me forget everything. Yet I remember everything."
"Do not think too much. Descartes may come to existence when he thinks, but you perish and vanish when you think."
"'When are you free?' he said. Always. Of course I did not say this to him. Those who are always free are not respected."
"Big hearts, for some reason, tend to be very fragile."
"People who live alone have their own entertainments that begin and end within themselves."
"Reading books does not stop the greengrocer from cheating me, no matter what."
"You must understand me. Because I am not a book; because after I die, no one can read me. I am obliged to be understood while I am alive."
"Make me tea. Let everything settle on its own. Let us slowly undress. Let us not live in fear of losing something. Let us not be seized by 'what will happen' anxiety. Let time handle everything. Let this idea not frighten us. Let us enter the same river once more. Do not hurry; tea brews on its own... Let us not suffocate in the small rushes of daily life, not be left breathless. A person loses themselves afterwards."
"Some people must reveal certain things not with their lives, but with their deaths."

Eugene Ionesco

"Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I would be a politician."
"Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination."
"My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking it, 'Why? Why?' So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips."
"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."
"That is how we stay young these days: murder and suicide."
"It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."
"The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them."
"Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."
"I did not mean you were stupid. It is just that you are not logical, which is not the same thing at all."
"I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding."
"Every work of art (unless it is a pseudo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary, it fertilizes them."
"The most implacable enemies of culture-Rimbaud, Lautreamont, dadaism, surrealism-end up being assimilated and absorbed by it. They all wanted to destroy culture, at least organized culture, and now they are part of our heritage. It is culture and not the bourgeoisie, as has been alleged, that is capable of absorbing everything for its own nourishment."
"I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous."
"The critic should describe and not prescribe."
"It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality."
"Truth has only two sides, but it is the third side that is the best."
"If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper."
"We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated."
"Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end, there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things."
"It is not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me; it is mankind."

Samuel Barclay Beckett

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
"Dance first. Think later. It is the natural order."
"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
"The end is in the beginning."
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
"Do we mean love, when we say love?"
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
"Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, and does not make clear."
"All life long, the same questions, the same answers."
"If you do not love me, I shall not be loved. If I do not love you, I shall not love."
"How hideous is the semicolon."
"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather, you must think of them, for if you do not, there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
"Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made."
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."
"If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window."
"The only sin is the sin of being born."
"My mistakes are my life."
"You are on Earth. There is no cure for that."

Antoine Maria Joseph Paul Artaud

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea shining in his head frightened people and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."
"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."
"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
"Without sarcasm, I sink into chaos."
"This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome. No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the bourgeoisie."
"You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary person does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that people refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both."
"When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom."
"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."
"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me; I shall bring it into my own life."
"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed."
"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape."
"Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards culture."
"It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius."
"There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel."
"Society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness."
"All writing is rubbish. People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish. The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today."
"All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it."
"I, myself, spent nine years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat."
"I would like to write a book which would drive people mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality."
"Those who live, live off the dead."

Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Where friendship blooms, life is reborn."
"The simple minded know many things that the wise ignore."
"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."
"I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away."
"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
"If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere."
"It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning."
"To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life."
"If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm, but that is a lie. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity."
"There is safety in the very heart of danger."
"Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it."
"To understand blue, you must first understand yellow and orange."
"When I have a terrible need of-shall I say the word-religion,then I go out and paint the stars."
"Someone has a great fire in their soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way."
"The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides, and in its depths, it has its pearls too."
"Close friends are truly the treasures of life. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves."
"I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process."
"There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."
"I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?"
"That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter."

Nikola Tesla

"If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world."
"With ideas, it is like with dizzy heights you climb: At first they cause you discomfort and you are anxious to get down, distrustful of your own powers; but soon the remoteness of the turmoil of life and the inspiring influence of the altitude calm your blood; your step gets firm and sure and you begin to look for dizzier heights."
"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
"Inventors do not have time for married life."
"Of all things, I liked books best."
"The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains."
"What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."
"Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
"Most people are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves."
"It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations."
"We crave for new sensations, but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences."
"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
"To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine."
"Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it."
"The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of nature and our conceptions and views are modified."
"Today the most 'civilized' countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education."
"The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then the new sense of pity of man began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit."
"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter-for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way."
"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
"The greatest barrier to discovery is not ignorance, but the conviction that nothing remains to be discovered."

William James Sidis

"Any momentary condition of the universe may be regarded either as the cause of all future conditions of the universe or as the effect of all past conditions."
"Everything seems to be perfectly explicable in terms of physical laws."
"Fame is a tax imposed on ability."
"The ordinary citizen imagines the universe to be simpler than it is because practical existence requires such an assumption. One cannot conduct the daily affairs of life while constantly contemplating the immense complexity underlying even the most familiar phenomena. Science itself progresses by a similar simplification, constructing provisional systems which are useful precisely because they ignore a great deal. The danger arises only when these convenient approximations are mistaken for reality itself and defended with the same zeal that earlier generations reserved for theology."
"I am against the social organization under which the capitalist has the power of life and death over the worker."
"Life has no origin; it has always existed and only changes through evolution."
"Many people seek truth as a lawyer seeks evidence: only after deciding upon the verdict."
"What we call impossible is frequently a confession about the limits of our habits."
"Most education consists of learning what others have already concluded. Thought begins when that process becomes insufficient."
"The popular conception of intelligence appears to consist chiefly in the rapid acquisition of facts already accepted by the contemporaries. Yet it is precisely this agreement with the contemporary age that renders a mind useful to society and comparatively useless to discovery."
"A civilization may be measured not by the truths it professes, but by the questions it permits to remain open."
"If there is any lesson to be drawn from scientific progress, it is not that mankind advances steadily toward final truth, but that each generation acquires a somewhat improved vocabulary with which to describe the inadequacies of its predecessors."
"The desire to discover exceptional men appears to arise less from admiration of intellect than from a hope that the complexity of the world may somehow be reduced to a handful of remarkable persons, thereby sparing the rest of humanity the inconvenience of thought."
"When a man becomes a symbol, people cease to notice whether he exists."
"What we call disorder may in many cases be merely the appearance presented by a system whose principles of arrangement exceed the limits of our present observation."
"An opinion acquires an undeserved dignity when it survives long enough to be called tradition."
"A theorem does not become more true because a thousand professors repeat it."
"A contradiction in nature is often a contradiction in vocabulary."
"The desire for certainty has probably retarded knowledge more than ignorance itself. Ignorance, at least, is capable of inquiry, whereas certainty commonly considers inquiry an impertinence."
"Everything that happens in the reverse universe can be described in terms of the physical properties of matter as we know them."
"The ideal life is one of solitude."

Theodore John Kaczynski (Unabomber)

"Society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible, because when an individual does not fit into the system, it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust them to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good."
"The conservatives are fools: they whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you cannot make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values."
"A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the 'fulfillment' that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole, or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf, or stamp-collecting."
"History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants."
"There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow the orders of our employer. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as employees of someone else."
"Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for the ability of an individual or lack of it. Thus if a person is 'inferior' it is not their fault, but the fault of society, because they have not been brought up properly."
"The concept of 'mental health' is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress."
"Those who are most sensitive about 'politically incorrect' terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman, or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any 'oppressed' group but come from privileged strata of society."
"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying the internal state of a person in such a way as to enable them to tolerate social conditions that they otherwise would find intolerable."
"The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government."
"Psychologists use the term 'socialization' to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society."
"The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not."
"Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more than a very limited extent."
"The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think 'unclean' thoughts."
"Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know that they want to rebel, but they do not know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the system is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, issues of women, poverty, sweatshops, the whole laundry-bag of 'activist' issues."
"Life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them 'sublimate' their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."
"In modern industrial society, only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple obedience."
"Up to a point, having fun is good for you. But it is not an adequate substitute for serious, purposeful activity. For lack of this kind of activity people in our society get bored. They do not realize that what they really lack is serious, practical, meaningful work-work that is under their own control and is directed to the satisfaction of their own most essential, practical needs."
"It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences."
"There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is."