...the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement… What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement. Here is the extreme boundary of that principle that seeks relief not through extensity but through intensity.


-Søren Kierkegaard

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.

-Eckhart Tolle

You will find it absolutely necessary to leave the city. Urban living is spiritually suicidal.

-Timothy Leary

Giving others the freedom to be stupid is one of the most important and hardest steps to take in spiritual progress. Conveniently the opportunity to take that step is all around us every day.

-Thaddeus Golas

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

-Franz Kafka

When late in life, one sits under a tree and contemplates the glory of a natural scene, there are fewer besetting apprehensions that one is wasting time; lack of time, then is grimly recognized as the greatest poverty; every moment gleaned for leisure is realized as a splendid, priceless investment. If only this could be perceived earlier, how much greater would be the value of life's time.

-Calvin Rutstrum

The function of revolutions is to destroy the illusions that created them.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

To have opinions is the best way to escape the obligation of thinking.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

No Man’s life liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session

-Judge Gideon Tucker, formerly of the New York legislature

They who are already fallen into all that is odious, and shameful and miserable, cannot justify fear.

-Algernon Sydney 1680 in Discourses Concerning Government

God helps those who help themselves.

-Algernon Sydney 1680 in Discourses Concerning Government, later popularized in the 1757 Poor Richards Almanac by Benjamin Franklin. Contrary to Popular Belief, this phrase exists NOWHERE in the Bible.

Sydney was executed in 1683 for this very document.

Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.

- Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999. (Screenplay by Larry and Andy Wachowski.)

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

Tacitus

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus

All the scientists did when they went off into space and stomped around in their space boots was to tarnish a bit of the moon's splendour for millions of lovers and children on the earth.

-Masanobu Fukuoka

We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a 'movement' not to bring anything about.

-Masanobu Fukuoka

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

-Winston Churchill

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

-Count Leo Nicolaevitch Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life.

-Count Leo Nicolaevitch Tolstoy

If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

-Thomas Jefferson, 1789

13 And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:
15 And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables;
16 And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.

The Book of John Chapter 2:
The Holy Bible - King James Version

You may be right, I may be crazy, Hey! But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for.

-Billy Joel

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

-George Orwell

We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.

-Henry David Thoreau

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

-Thomas Jefferson

Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us...We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?

-Henry Miller

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt, from a speech entitled "Citizenship In a Republic" given at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910.

I told my pap and mam I was coming to the mountains to trap and be a mountain man. Acted like they was gut-shot. Says, "son, make your life go here. Here's where the peoples is. Them mountains is for animals and savages." I said, "Mother Gue, the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world." And by God I was right. "I ain't never seen 'em, but my common sense tells me the Andes is foothills, and the Alps is for children to climb! Keep good care of your hair! These here is God's finest scupturings! And there ain't no laws for the brave ones! And there ain't no asylums for the crazy ones! And there ain't no churches, except for this right here! And there ain't no priests excepting the birds. By God, I are a mountain man, and I'll live 'til an arrow or a bullet finds me. And then I'll leave my bones on this great map of the magnificent . . . "

-From Del Gue in Jeremiah Johnson

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

-Chuck Palahniuk via Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Don't just call me pessimist. Try and read between the lines.

-Tool

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

-Morpheus in ....ugh... The Matrix

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

-Zhuangzi

Common Sense is the collection of prejudices one aquires by age 18.

-Albert Einstein

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

-Franz Kafka