S > S's Quotes

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which
he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the 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 bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for
data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the
universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit.”
― Diane Harvey

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
― E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
― William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“Words are animals, alive with a will of their own”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I don't have to have faith, I have experience.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.”
― Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Time is the moving image of eternity.”
― Plato

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell

“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Garion,' she said very calmly, 'the universe knew your name before that moon up there was spun out of the emptiness. Whole constellations have been waiting for you since the beginning of time.'
I didn't want them to, Aunt Pol.'
There are those of us who aren't given that option, Garion. There are things that gave to be done and certain people who have to do them. It's as simple as that.'
He smiled rather sadly at her flawless face and gently touched the snowy white lock at her brow. Then, for the last time in his life, he asked the question that had been on his lips since he was a tiny boy. 'Why me, Aunt Pol? Why me?'
Can you possibly think of anyone else you'd trust to deal with these matters, Garion?'
He had not really been prepared for that question. It came at him in stark simplicity. Now at last he fully understood. 'No,' he sighed, 'I suppose not. Somehow it seems a little unfair, though. I wasn't even consulted.'
Neither was I, Garion,' she answered. 'But we didn't have to be consulted, did we? The knowledge of what we have to do is born into us.”
― David Eddings, Sorceress of Darshiva

“Once you have met a true human being, let him not disappear from the horizon of your heart.”
― Rumi

“the night of thought is the light of perception.”
― Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism

“Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear?
Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet
deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long
night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children
are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and
hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Beware the man of a single book.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.”
― Saint Thomas Aquinas

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci