Quotes, Excerpts, Anecdotes.

Quote :

"There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions." [Baudelaire]

"...A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labour. The slave laboured under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible: the "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honour:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice! " -N

"Egalitarian Man has made himself godlike; even we who oppose him learn, see, and think in ways that serve him. Even the way we think about ourselves, down to the language we use to describe our ideas, serves him: he is a liberal, so we are anti-liberal; he is modern, so we are anti-modern; he is a feminist, so we are anti-feminist; he is democratic, so we are anti-democratic; he is a communist, so we are anti-communist; he is for immigration, we are against it; he is for diversity, we are against it; he is for equality, we are against it; he is for globalization, we are against it; he is for materialism, we are against that too. We seem to be a negation of everything he is. Egalitarian Man sets the vocabulary; we learn it and just say no to everything. Hence, he can portray himself as positive, and us as negative.

This means that if we are to play by our own rules, we have to develop our own way of communicating our ideas. This begins by developing our own terminology. We do not use the enemy’s words, let alone negations of those words. We do not say we are “inegalitarian”; we say we celebrate difference. What are the Lefties going to say? That they are anti-difference? And if they say they are anti-difference, does not that make them totalitarian? And if they are totalitarian, WILL THEY APOLOGIZE FOR THE GULAGS? We set the rules and we put them on the back foot." [Alex Kurtagic]

"The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society. Higher and higher taxes; the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace.
The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal, more immoral. The building of great armaments when the great enemy was within; the decay of individual responsibility. The decay of religion, fading into a mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide the people." [Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]

"So whoever worships another divinity than his Self, thinking: ‘He is one and I another,’ he knows not. He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods." [Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10]

"The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse." [Castaneda, Tales of Power]

"At certain existential peaks, just as heat is transformed into light, life becomes free of itself; not in the sense of the death of individuality or some kind of mystical shipwreck, but in the sense of a transcendent affirmation of life, in which anxiety, endless craving, yearning and worrying, the quest for religious faith, human supports and goals, all give way to a dominating state of calm. There is something greater than life, within life itself, and not outside of it. This heroic experience is valuable and good in itself, whereas ordinary life is only driven by interests, external things and human conventions." [Evola, Meditations on the Peaks]

"In the annihilation of the family the eternal traditions of the family are destroyed; in the collapse of traditions, lawlessness overcomes the whole family." [Bhagavad-Gita, 1.41]

"'Everything except language
Knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
Knows nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.'' [Les Murray, The Meaning of Existence]

"The real subject can exist only in the capacity of a subject that has been reconnected (subjet réel vs. subjet relié) - reconnected to particular heritages, to particular adherences. In other words, there cannot be a subject preceding its associations; no subject can exist to which some characteristics could be attributed outside all associations....

The category of 'people' cannot be confounded with language, race, class, territory, or nation alone. A people is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate. It is a reunion of the inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who, on the basis of their sense of common identity, develop the will to pursue their own history and give themselves a common destiny." [Alain de Benoist]

"In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave." [Mark Mirabello, Handbook for Rebels and Outlaws]

"Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from history into herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into happiness.'' [Yockey, Imperium]

"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven." [Friedrich Holderlin]

"I am not preaching anti-intellectuality, but extolling the licentiousness and chthonian violence of re-integration. The affliction which Indo-Europeans suffer from is entirely mental and subjective; they are chronically afraid of their own shadow in Jungian terms. If the civilisation which their ancestors created has any future at all then they must overcome their resistance to barbarism; they must o'erleap it on the altar of high culture.'' [Jonathan Bowden, Why I write]

"When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is anterior to reason. We do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest. In the cultural life of man, therefore, the fact of paramount importance about anyone is his attitude toward the world." [Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences]

"It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen. Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;—progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some of them;—to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling, through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the strongest kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title Wood-cutter; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk mainly of the latter,—misleading certain critics not a little; for no nation of men could ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out of that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good forest-feller,—the right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in every kind; for true valor, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate kind of valor that; showing itself against the untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the same direction have not we their descendants since carried it far? May such valor last forever with us!" [Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes]

"That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance of Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion, from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,—how strangely! I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows, grows;—like a Banyan-tree; the first seed is the essential thing: any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some sense, what we called "the enormous shadow of this man's likeness"? Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Creation and such like, with those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and the third man;—nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World." [Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes]

"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." [Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky]

"We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man." [Spengler]

perpetualburn wrote:

Quote :

"There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions." [Baudelaire]

"...A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labour.  The slave laboured under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible: the "doing" itself was something contemptible.  "Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honour:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice! " -N

Thanks; and the other way also:

"The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is "noble" in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the "system of free competition", on the other hand, the notions on life’s tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No "place" is more than a transitory point in this universal chase." [Max Scheler]

"The modernist thirst for originality makes the mediocre artist believe that the secret of originality consists simply in being different." [Nicolas Davila]

"No more war; no more markedness of races, peoples, states, or religions; no lawbreakers or adventurers; no conflicts owing to overlordship and otherness; no more hatred or settling of scores, only unending convenience through all millennia. Even today, where we are witnessing the end-phase of this trivial optimism, such sillinesses makes one bethink with dread the god awful boredom — the taedium vitae of the Roman Imperial age — which spreads over the soul merely by reading of such idylls, whereof even only a partial realisation would lead to murder and self-murder on a massive scale." [Spengler, Man and Technics]

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." [Camus]

"Chivalry is uneconomical; it boasts of penury. It says with Ventidius that "ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him." Don Quixote takes more pride in his rusty spear and skin-and-bone horse than in gold and lands, and a samurai is in hearty sympathy with his exaggerated confrère of La Mancha. He disdains money itself,—the art of making or hoarding it. It is to him veritably filthy lucre. The hackneyed expression to describe the decadence of an age is "that the civilians loved money and the soldiers feared death." [Inazo Nitobe]

"A sign which almost always accompanies the decadence of an aristocracy is the invasion of humanitarian sentiments and delicate "sob-stuff” which renders it incapable of defending its position. We must not confuse violence and force. Violence usually accompanies weakness. We can observe individuals and classes, who, having lost the force to maintain themselves in power, become more and more odious by resorting to indiscriminate violence. A strong man strikes only when it is absolutely necessary-and then nothing stops him. Trajan was strong but not violent; Caligula was violent but not strong." [Vilfredo Pareto]

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance" [G.K.Chesterton]

"What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money." [Spengler]

"For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution." [Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn]

"What do you despise? By this you are truly known."

"There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge."

"The mind can go either direction under stress- toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training."

"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero."

"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be."

- Dune: Book 2

Lovely. I just finished reading Book 2 of Dune.

Was always a freak for the first novel. So quotable!

Book 3 coming up soon!

Cold Weasel wrote:

I just finished reading Book 2 of Dune.

I just got around reading the Dune novel for the first time. I started a few years ago but I let myself get distracted. I like the take on religion in it too, besides all the other awesome things.