"I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps."
— John Dos Passos

"...the new world, the communo-bourgeois, sermonizing, Tartuffian, automobilistic, alcoholic, gluttonous and cancerous world has only two anxieties: ass and bank account...""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

""To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. "
— Charles Bukowski

"there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace"
— Charles Bukowski

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"Bad taste makes more millionaires than good taste."
— Charles Bukowski

"Great art is horseshit, buy tacos."
— Charles Bukowski

"I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat."
— Charles Bukowski

"This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful."
— Charles Bukowski

"you have to die a few times before you can really
live."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

""I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"It is not truth that matters, but victory."
— Adolf Hitler

"By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise."
— Adolf Hitler

"I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it."
— Knut Hamsun (Hunger)

"He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living."
— Mervyn Peake

"THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
— George Orwell

"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
— Ram Dass

"I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. "
— Walt Whitman

"The real war will never get in the books."
— Walt Whitman

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The formula ‘two and two make five’ is not without its attractions."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

"
— James Thurber

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)

"Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Bend Sinister)

"Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you."
— Laozi

"Stop thinking, and end your problems."
— Laozi

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich."
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions."
— Confucius

"The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?"
— Confucius

"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."
— Confucius

"If what one has to say is not better than silence, then one should keep silent."
— Confucius

"To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right."
— Confucius

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
— Confucius

""The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.""
— Confucius

"Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others."
— Confucius