Quotes, Excerpts, Anecdotes.

"Every word, every thought,
and every emotion comes back to one core problem: life is
meaningless. The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and
expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead,
no matter what, even if it kills us".--Mitchell Heisman

"Are you a God?" they asked the Buddha. "No," he replied. "Are you an angel, then?" "No." "A saint?" "No." "Then what are you?" Replied the Buddha, "I am awake.""

Quote :

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

   "Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."


"If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage. I've seen it with the Indians."

   "l'm sure you have," said Mustapha Mond. "But then we aren't Indians. There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things–Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own."

   "What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial."

   "But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning."

   "You'd have a reason for chastity!" said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words.

   "But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."

   "But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …"

   "My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is."

--Aldous Huxley; Brave New World

" The fool speaks 10,000 words, yet says nothing. The wise man says nothing, yet speaks ten thousand words".

He fnord wrote an fnord interesting trilogy.

"People whose temperament is balanced between reason and heart take a long time to mature."

"If someone is making us feel reverence and compassion towards him, at the same time, then his power over us is without bounds."

M.v.E.-E.

" The highest specimens of the human race are not those
of lamb-like disposition, but those in whom the soul of
the lion predominates-in whom angry passions rage. They
are not men who conform easily to rules, regulations, laws.
The ideal man is ever a man of rebellious and ungovernable
nature; he whom no law can reign over and no master terrify. The word obedience is not in his vocabulary. He looks with scorn upon the petty rules ond petty idols of the petty millions-but knowing that he is in a dangerous minority he thinks and acts and says nothing-not even to his friend. In him is the spirit of the lion. He prowls. He masters others and is not mastered."

"An affected laugh shows lack of self-respect in a man and lewdness in a woman." - Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
-Dante

Lies are heard everywhere, and no one has the power to speak against them.
- William Luther Pierce

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
- B. Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack.

My health is actually quite normal, but my soul is very sensitive and is filled with longing for good friends of my own kind. Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me, and I shall be cured. [...]
- F. Nietzsche

Share a tent with gypsies, you wake up in a field of shit.
- Ukrainian proverb [with variations amongst different Nations.]

"Equality" is the pursuit of the lowest common denominator, and its pursuit is the destruction of excellence.
- David Lane

One basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there.
- R. Steiner

The eye was made by the light, for the light, so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light.
- Goethe

"Toward the good conscience.-- It is probable that the greatest human beings were in actuality the most child-like, but also the most courageous; who, by virtue of their courage, found the greatest beauty in emblazoning all their lives with hope's plaintive colors, their greatest happiness in the bountiful enthusiasm of desire. The misfortune is, that in time one of their hopes must be realized, one of their desires attained, in which case their good conscience about things becomes poisoned by reality, which forms only the lowly dregs of a wine that has long since run dry and, in relation to their ardent dreams about life, must always corrupt them. Hence, the great commandment of Epicurean morality to throw off all the dregs of reality, which of course means to throw off reality itself, to dwell silently in one's little garden all life long. A Stoic, possessed by an opposite nature, and perhaps also by an opposite courage; incapable of hoping and desiring with a good conscience, without the birth and death pangs of expectation and dissappointment, aims to so wholly indwell in reality that he forgets how to desire and to hope completely, but with the same final aim as an Epicurean: to maintain a good conscience, only with respect to bearing the truth. These are both quite violent methods toward securing a peaceful breast; have we developed no subtler means of reconciling the ideality and actuality of man, of taming the heart than- Epicureanism and Stoicism?" ['Parodites']

More from the Dune series.  This is from God Emperor of Dune:

"I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is
delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?"
-The Stolen Journals

Radix Journal recently had a fun discussion about the Dune universe with Greg Johnson:

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“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

“Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. … I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”

=Aldo Leopold

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Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections wrote:

1. Universal Morality. A man who cannot climb a tree will boast of never having fallen out of
one.

11. The Adversaries. Life and spirit are two completely primordial and essentially opposed
powers, which can be reduced neither to each other, nor to any third term.

12. Body and Soul. One thesis has guided all of our enquiries for the past three decades or so:
that body and soul are inseparably connected poles of the unity of life into which the spirit
inserts itself from the outside like a wedge, in an effort to set them apart from each other; that is,
to de-soul the body and disembody the soul, and so, finally, to smother any life that this unity
can attain.

I wonder about that spirit...

Shut up, Jane!

Jane has got only one man in her life that she listens to after her father died.
And she's not good at shutting up, as far as I can tell.
She's also not in the women's-lib union.
...
too bad for you