James > James's Quotes

“It's my motto for life. 'Walk slowly; drink lots of water.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“...reality is always plural and mutable.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger - Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

“Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God

“We all see only that which we are trained to see.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers

“Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers

“Reality is what you can get away with.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With

“The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“Of course there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Leviathan

“The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“The hoodlum-occultist is “sociopathic” enough to, see through the conventional charade, the social mythology of his species. “They’re all sheep,” he thinks. “Marks. Suckers. Waiting to be fleeced.” He has enough contact with some more-or-less genuine occult tradition to know a few of the gimmicks by which “social consciousness,” normally conditioned consciousness, can be suspended. He is thus able to utilize mental brutality in place of the simple physical brutality of the ordinary hooligan.

He is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar.

He is stupid because spending your life terrorizing and exploiting your inferiors is a dumb and boring existence for anyone with more than five billion brain cells. Can you imagine Beethoven ignoring the heavenly choirs his right lobe could hear just to pound on the wall and annoy the neighbors? Gödel pushing aside his sublime mathematics to go out and cheat at cards? Van Gogh deserting his easel to scrawl nasty caricatures in the men’s toilet? Mental evil is always the stupidest evil because the mind itself is not a weapon but a potential paradise.

Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them.

Genuine occult initiation confers “the philosopher’s stone,” “the gold of the wise” and “the elixir of life,” all of which are metaphors for the capacity to greet life with the bravery and love and gusto that it deserves. By throwing this away to indulge in spite, malice and the small pleasure of bullying the credulous, the mindwarper proves himself a fool and a dolt.

And the psychic terrorist, besides being a jerk, is always a liar and a fraud. Healing is easier (and more fun) than cursing, to begin with, and cursing usually backfires or misfires. The mindwarper doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to think he’s omnipotent.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think. I detect the aroma of this pleasant vice in most philosophers, and a happily married logicians is almost a contradiction in terms. So many sages have regarded Woman as temptress because fornication often leads to marriage, which usually leads to children, which always leads to a respectable job and pretending to believe the idiocies your neighbors believe. The hypocrisy of the sages has been to conceal their timid onanism and call it celibacy.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God