There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
—Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
The imagination is a —
—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (via invisiblestories)
If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.
—Rudyard Kipling
One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
This struggle to live by my own truth is so difficult, so wearing. A terrible algebra, always.
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2 (via steve-kim)
If morality is a form of repression, then reason is repressive, and if reason is repressive, then man can become free only by becoming irrational, but once he becomes irrational, the only thing that drives him to act is his appetites, his impulses, and his passions. But once man is driven by his passions, he loses all control of his actions. Thus freedom of this sort, as the ancients rightly saw, becomes a form of slavery.
(…)
Now those who identify with their desires, people like Wilhelm Reich, do not see things that way, but all this means is that they do not see things correctly. If a horse gallops off toward a cliff with a man on his back, it is only in some analogous sense of the word to say that the man is riding the horse. The horse is in charge and will bring both itself and its “rider” to their deaths unless the man reasserts control. The same is true of unbridled passions, which also tend toward death as their ultimate end. Appetites belong to man only if he asserts rational control over them. If the opposite holds true, the man belongs to his appetites. Addiction is the only word which seems to convey this truth in our culture.
—E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi -– Sexual Liberation and Political Control (via heartmindawakening)
(Source: zerogate)
If the sun is shining, stand in it. Happy times are great, but happy times pass —they have to— because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning — a meaningful life… there are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.
The pursuit isn’t all or nothing — it’s all AND nothing.
—J. Winterson
bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.
—roland deschain, the dark tower iv: wizard and glass (stephen king, 1997). Definitely going to tag this somewhere in Toronto sometime soon
(Source: mandeelouwho)
The heart is the household divinity which, discharging its function, cherishes, nourishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action.
—William Harvey (via heartmindawakening)
