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“Why is it that people seek recognition from others? In many cases, it is due to the influence of reward-and-punishment education.”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

“Believe it possible that you can float off the ground and fly by merely willing it. See what happens.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work. According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that's why he can't complete work and enter it for writing awards. But is that the real reason? No! It's actually that he wants to leave the possibility of "I can do it if I try" open, by not committing to anything. He doesn't want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn't want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection. He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuses like "I'm not young anymore" or "I've got a family to think about now”
― Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life, and Achieve Real Happiness

“The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premises, his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are stupid or vicious. It is a subtle weapon, because the person who wields it must have the imaginative power of seeing through the eyes of his opponent, of projecting himself into the other's mental world.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation