Ryan

“Yes,' Montriveau went on in an unsteady voice, 'this Catholic faith to which you wish to convert me is a lie that men make for themselves; hope is a lie at the expense of the future; pride, a lie between us and our fellows; and pity, and prudence, and terror are cunning lies. And now my happiness is to be one more lying delusion; I am expected to delude myself, to be willing to give gold coin for silver to the end. If you can so easily dispense with my visits; if you confess me neither as your friend nor your love, you do not care for me! And I, poor fool that I am, tell myself this, and know it, and love you!”
― Honoré de Balzac, The Duchesse De Langeais

“Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.

Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.

But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“His [Francisco Goya's] debt to the Christianity of the eighteenth century is contained in the idea that politics was just adopting from the Gospels: the conviction that man has a right to justice. Such a statement would seem utterly conceited to a Roman, who would doubtless have looked upon the Disasters as we look upon photographs of the amphitheatre...But if Goya thought that man has not come onto the earth to be cut to pieces he thought that he must have come here for something. Is it to live in joy and honour? Not only that; it is to come to terms with the world. And the message he never ceased to preach, a message underlined by war, is that man only comes to terms with the world by blinding himself with childishness.”
― Andre Malraux

“Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy.”
― Charles Olson, Collected Prose