,
'The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else\'s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real.
Thomas Merton',
'We must do our duty at the prescribed time in order to believe in the reality of the external world. We must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise we are in a dream.
Simone Weil',
'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring, real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Therefore \'imaginative literature\' is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art-- and only genius can do that.
Simone Weil',
'The religious man is spoken of as one who does not need to take his stand in any relation to the world and to living beings, since the status of social life, that is define from the outside, is in him surpassed by means of a strength that works only from within. But in this idea of the social life two basically different things are combined—first, the community that is built up out of relation, and second, the collection of human units that do not know relation—modern man’s palpable condition of lack of relation.
You cannot both truly pray to God and profit by the world. He who knows the world as something by which he is to profit knows God also in the same way. His prayer is a procedure of enumeration heard by the ear of the void. He—not the “athiest,” who addresses the Nameless out of the night and yearning of his garret-window—is the godless man.
Martin Buber',
'Tourism, human cicrculation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally northing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.
Guy Debord',
'Those who’ve found less humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not give up their weapons, and prison won’t make them love society.
The Invisible Committee',
'There’s no reason to react to the news of the day, but to understand each information given as an operation carried out on a hostile battlefield full of strategies to decode, an operation aiming precisely to stir up some certain reaction or another among some group of people or another, and to see that operation itself as the real news contained within the apparent news. There’s no more reason to expect or wait for anything – to expect that it will all blow over, that the revolution will come, a nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To wait anymore is madness. The catastrophe isn’t coming, it’s here. We’re already situated within a civilization’s movement of collapse. And we have to take part in it.
The Invisible Committee',
'Modern mass culture, aimed at the consumer, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people\'s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.
Andrei Tarkovsky',
'It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.
Wilhelm Reich',
'He was a man obsessed with the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a large area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God\'s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite-- the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species-- a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary.
CS Lewis',
'If I prayed God that all people should approve of my conduct, I should find myself a penitent at the door of each one, but I shall rather pray that my heart may be pure toward all.
Amma Sarah',
'There was a hermit who was able to banish the demons. And he asked them: What makes you go away? Is it fasting? They replied: We do not eat or drink. Is it vigils? They said: We do not sleep. Then what power sends you away? They replied: Nothing can overcome us except humility alone.
Amma Theodora',
'Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Oswald Spengler',
'At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood, then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.
Oswald Spengler',
'Simpler things than God do not exist.',
'I admire the bull, the eagle, and man with such an intense adoration that it will certainly prevent me from ever becoming an ambitious person.
Vincent Van Gogh',
'Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind of another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on the battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
John Berger',
'Be moderate with your sleeping, for he who does not rise with the sun does not enjoy the day.
Cervantes',
'Abba Pambo asked Abba Anthony, ‘What ought I to do?’ and the old man said to him ‘Do not trust in your own righteousness do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.’',
'Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.
Abba Anthony',
'Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that, by thinking and poetizing, we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.
Martin Heidegger',
'Questioning is the piety of thought.
Martin Beidegger',
'The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Guy Debord',
'If there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.
Martin Buber',
'In today\'s predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.
Slavoj Zizek',
'The more men are freed from privation, the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are, the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.
Leo Tolstoy',
'Zui-Gan called out to himself every day, \'Master.\'
Then he answered himself, \'Yes, sir.\'
And then he added, \'Become sober.\'
Again he answered, \'Yes, sir.\'
\'After that,\' he continued, \'do not be deceived by others.\'
\'Yes, sir, yes, sir,\' he replied.
Mu-Mon-Kwan',
'If you love the wise and hate the ordinary, you will be sinking in the ocean of birth-and-death.
D.T. Suzuki',
'The time of the galaxies has nothing in common with the time of the butterfly, except that man observes both of them, and then invents a time to place them both in. But with this time, man, like no other animal, can tell the story of the creation of the world: Do you remember when the wood beat its wings like a butterfly on the first night of the world? Last night.
John Berger',
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