Knox Morris > Knox Morris's Quotes

“History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.”
― Joseph Schumpeter

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that....But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“You see what you choose to see, because all perception is a choice.
And when you cease to impose your meanings on what you see,
your spiritual eyes will open, and you will see a world free of judgment
and shining in its endless beauty.”
― Paul Ferrini

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

“We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It's a natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.
I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, "No, no, no, David, don't you take those drugs." I was pretty lucky.
Besides, far more profound experiences are available naturally. When your consciousness stars expanding, those experiences are there. All those things can be seen. It's just a matter of expanding that ball of consciousness. And the ball of consciousness can expand to be infinite and unbounded. It's totality. You can have totality. So all those experiences are there for you, without the side effects of drugs.”
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Mystery is the essential element of every work of art.”
― Luis Buñuel

“What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Of course, we are challenging nature itself...
and it hits back.
It just hits back. That's all.
And that's grandiose about it.
And we have to- to accept that
it is much stronger than we are.

Kinski always says it's full of...
erotic elements.
I don't see it so much erotic.
I see it more full of obscenity.
It's just-
Nature here is vile and base.
I wouldn't see anything erotical here.
I would see fornication
and asphyxiation...
and choking
and fighting for survival...
and growing and...
just rotting away.

Of course, there's a lot of misery.
But it is the same misery
that is all around us.
The trees here are in misery,
and the birds are in misery.
I don't think they- they sing.
They just screech in pain.

It's an unfinished country.
It's still prehistorical.
The only thing that is lacking is-
is the dinosaurs here.

It's like a curse
weighing on an entire landscape.
And whoever...
goes too deep into this...
has his share of that curse.
So we are cursed
with what we are doing here.

It's a land that God,
if he exists...
has-has created in anger.

It's the only land where-
where creation is unfinished yet.

Taking a close look at -
at what's around us...
there - there is
some sort of a harmony.
It is the harmony of...
overwhelming and collective murder.
And we in comparison to
the articulate vileness...
and baseness and obscenity...
of all this jungle -
Uh, we in comparison to that
enormous articulation -
we only sound and look like...
badly pronounced
and half-finished sentences...
out of a stupid suburban... novel -
a cheap novel.

And we have to become humble...
in front of this...
overwhelming misery and...
overwhelming fornication...
overwhelming growth...
and overwhelming lack of order.

Even the- the stars up here
in the-in the sky look like a mess.
There is no harmony in the universe.

We have to get acquainted to this idea that...
there is no real harmony
as we have conceived it.

But when I say this, I say this all
full of admiration for the jungle.

It is not that I hate it.
I love it.
I love it very much.
But I love it against my better judgement."

-Werner Herzog, "Burden of Dreams" (taken from the movie)”
― Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams

“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“Now then, in the earth these people cannot stand much church -- an hour and a quarter is the limit, and they draw the line at once a week. That is to say, Sunday. One day in seven; and even then they do not look forward to it with longing. And so -- consider what their heaven provides for them: "church" that lasts forever, and a Sabbath that has no end! They quickly weary of this brief hebdomadal Sabbath here, yet they long for that eternal one; they dream of it, they talk about it, they think they think they are going to enjoy it -- with all their simple hearts they think they think they are going to be happy in it!”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings