Man's strongest temptation is the temptation of inertia.
- Albert Camus
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.
- Terence McKenna
Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.
-Archimedes
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship
-be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
-David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
- Alan Wilson Watts
Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.
- Alexis de Tocqueville
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Keats
Truth is revealed by removing things that stand in it’s light ... the artist creates not by building, but by hacking away
- alan watts, the wisdom of insecurity
Not “how” the world is, but “that it is”, is the mystery.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
green peace’ official stance on bitcoin:
“it’s super badass and pairs well with zero-emission nuclear power”
i feel so heard.
“The artist's work proceeds not from a finished imaginative experience to which the work of art corresponds, but from passionate excitement about the subject matter. ... The poet's poem is wrung from him by the subject which excites him."
- Samuel Alexander
The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will out last it.
- William James