Hunter Payne’s Reviews > The Red Book: Liber Novus > Status Update

“Too many still seek outward… but still too few seek inward, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tries to abolish the old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his own inward state those precepts… which he preaches… instead of always expecting those things of his fellow men.” (See footnote)

“If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”

“…But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation.” (See footnote)

“If you give up your self, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish to others and thus you deceive others.”

“…so you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It’s is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.”

“It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you…”

“Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.”

“As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning.”