Zac N > Zac's Quotes

“A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history, etc. And if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed… by means of the delusion.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

“Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo (Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet)!”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
― Nick Land

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
― Theodore Kaczynski

“Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.”
― Theodore Kaczynski

“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain - they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
― Carl Schmitt

“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”
― Carl Schmitt

“His cum was on the floor. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie. And it smelt good.”
― R.C Waldun

“That's when he realized, Academia was rather dark here in L'adademie.”
― R.C. Waldun, L'Académie

“The men of today boast of the ever growing extent of the modifications they impose on the world, and the consequence is that everything is thereby made more and more ‘artificial’…”
― René Guénon

“The quantitative degeneration of all things is closely linked to that of money, as is shown by the fact that nowadays the ‘worth’ of an object is ordinarily ‘estimated’ only in terms of its price, considered simply as a ‘figure’, a ‘sum’, or a numerical quantity of money; in fact, with most of our contemporaries, every judgment brought to bear on an object is nearly always based exclusively on what it costs. The word ‘estimate’ has been emphasized because it has in itself a double meaning, qualitative and quantitative; today the first meaning has been lost to sight, or what amounts to the same thing, means have been found to equate it to the second, and thus it comes about that not only is the ‘worth’ of an object ‘estimated’ according to its price, but the ‘worth’ of a man is ‘estimated’ according to his wealth.”
― René Guénon

“The “end of a world” never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.”
― René Guénon