Ride the Tiger Quotes

“Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“It is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today's world, even at its problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would not be a stranger, is the world of Tradition.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“When a cycle of civilisation is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed. The essential thing is to not let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact, on a short chain. One should not become fixated on the present, and on things at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come about in the future. Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when "the tiger, which cannot leap of the person riding it, is tired of running".”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Ancient tradition has a saying: 'The infinitely distant is the return.' Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same direction is the statement that the 'great revelation,' acquired through a series of mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that 'no one and nothing 'extraordinary' exists in the beyond'; only the real exists. Reality is, however, lived in a state in which 'there is no subject of the experience nor any object that is experienced,' and under the sign of a type of absolute presence, 'the immanent making itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent.' The teaching is that at the point at which one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the same being valid for the perfection and 'realization' of the self. The cedar in the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, a flower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these 'natural' and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori. As mere facts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such they have an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of 'things being as they are.' The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: 'The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,' or: 'You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“there is no other civilization that can serve as support; we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as a counterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that the process of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phases with us in the West. Therefore it is not impossible that we would also be the first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves more or less in our current state, having abandoned—"superseded"—what they still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional forms of existence that attract us. The consequence would be a reversal of roles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit, would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command, very different from the material, techno-industrial leadership that it wielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a general leveling. This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may have been useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life; and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions,”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“They wolfed wolfly in the wolf den.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and for it not to be ordered by any higher principle, arranging their lives in the most bearable and least disagreeable way they can.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“The previous phase, limited in its extent, had been that of the Romantic hero: the man who feels himself alone in the face of divine indifference, and the superior individual who despite everything reaffirms himself in a tragic context. He breaks accepted laws, but not in the sense of denying their validity; rather, he claims for himself exceptional rights to what is forbidden, be it good or ill.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“For the present, there is just one point to be made. No god has ever controlled man. Divine despotism is a fantasy, and so is most of that to which, in the illuminist and revolutionary interpretation, the world of Tradition owes its ordering from above and its orientation toward the above, its hierarchical system, its various forms of legitimate authority and sacral power. No - the true and essential foundation of this whole system is the particular inner structure, the capacity of recognition, and the various inborn interests of a type of man who nowadays has virtually disappeared. Man, at a given moment, wanted to "be free." He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw off the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“I turn first to that characteristic complex caused by the interference between morality and sexuality, as well as that between spirituality and sexuality. The importance that has been attributed to sexual matters in the field of ethical and spiritual values, often to the point of making them the sole criterion, is nothing less than aberrant.

[...]

Even from such banal examples we can clearly see the contamination suffered by ethical values through sexual prejudices. I have already indicated the principles of a "greater morality" that, being dependent on a kind of interior race, cannot be damaged by nihilistic dissolutions: these include truth, justice, loyalty, inner courage, the authentic, socially unconditioned sentiment of honor and shame, control over oneself. These are what are meant by "virtue;" sexual acts have no part in it except indirectly, and only when they lead to a behavior that deviates from these values.

The value that was attributed to virginity by Western religion, even on a theological plane, relates to the complex mentioned earlier. It is already evident on this plane through the importance and the emphasis on the virginity of Mary, the "Mother of God," which is altogether incomprehensible except on the purely symbolic level. [...] So we can see that the sexual taboo was given a greater emphasis than life itself, and many more examples of this could easily be provided. But when, with a regime of interdictions and anathemas, one is so preoccupied with sexual matters, it is evident that one depends on them, no less than if one made a crude exhibition of them. On the whole, this is the case in Christianized Europe—and all the more so since positive religion lacks both the contemplative potential and the orientation toward transcendence, high asceticism, and true sacrality. The realm of morality has become contaminated by the idea of sex, to the extent of the complexes mentioned earlier.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Become yourself: an injunction addressed only to a few, and which to an even smaller number appears redundant. One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity to oneself, the absolute, autonomous law based on one’s own “being,” when it is formulated in general and abstract terms. Everything is subject to debate—a situation accurately exemplified by characters in Dostoyevsky, like Raskolnikov or Stavrogin. At the moment when they are thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse precisely because they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their real strength. Their freedom is turned against them and destroys them”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Il ne faut pas se faire d’illusions. L’Orient lui-même suit désormais la voie que nous avons prise, il succombe de plus en plus aux idées et aux influences qui nous ont conduits là où nous sommes, en se « modernisant », et en adoptant nos propres formes de vie « laïque » et matérialiste, si bien que ce qu’il conserve encore de traditionnel et d’authentique perd de plus en plus de terrain et se trouve repoussé dans une zone marginale. La liquidation du «colonialisme », l’indépendance matérielle que les peuples orientaux sont en train de s’assurer vis-à-vis des Européens, sont étroitement liées à une sujétion de plus en plus évidente aux idées, aux coutumes et à la mentalité «progressiste » de l’Occident.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“...a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Tampoco hay que despreciar el hecho que el índice de crecimiento demográfico es tanto más elevado cuanto más se desciende en la escala social, lo que constituye un factor suplementario de regresión.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“[...] le principe consistant à chevaucher le tigre. Il peut alors signifier que lorsqu’un cycle de civilisation touche à sa fin, il est difficile d’aboutir à un résultat quelconque en résistant, en s’opposant directement aux forces en mouve­ment. Le courant est trop fort, on serait englouti.
L’essentiel est de ne pas se laisser impressionner par la toute-puissance et le triomphe apparents des forces de l’époque. Privées de lien avec tout principe supérieur, ces forces ont, en réalité, un champ d’action limité. Il ne faut donc pas s’hypnotiser sur le présent ni sur ce qui nous entoure, mais envisager aussi les conditions susceptibles d’apparaître plus tard. La règle à suivre peut alors consister à laisser libre cours aux forces et aux processus de l'époque, mais en demeurant ferme et prêt à intervenir quand « le tigre, qui ne peut pas se jeter sur qui le chevauche, sera fatigué de courir ».”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order.

After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.)

The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“This saying of Nietzsche is well known: "Nicht fort sollst du dich pflanzen, sondern hinauf. Dazu helfe dir der Garten der Ehe." (Do not plant for the future but for the heights. May the garden of marriage help you in that.) It refers to the idea that today’s man is a mere form of transition whose only purpose is to prepare the birth of the "superman," being ready to sacrifice himself for him, and to withdraw at his arising. We have already done justice to the craze of the superman and this finalism that postpones the possession of an absolute meaning of existence to a hypothetical future humanity. But from the wordplay of Nietzsche’s saying, one can deduce the endorsement of a concept that marriage should serve to reproduce not "horizontally" (such is the meaning of fortpflanzen), simply breeding, but rather "vertically," toward the summit (hinauf pflanzen), elevating one’s own line. In fact, this would be the only higher justification of marriage and family. Today it is nonexistent, because of the objective existential situation of which we have spoken, and because of the processes of dissolution that have severed the profound ties that can spiritually unite the generations. Even a Catholic, Charles Peguy, had spoken of being a father as the "great adventure of modem man," given the utter uncertainty of what his own offspring may be, given the improbability that in our day the child might receive anything more than mere "life" from the father. I have already emphasized that it is not about having or not having that paternal quality, not only physical, that existed in the ancient family and that grounded his authority. Even if this quality were still present—and, in principle, one should assume that it could still be present in the differentiated man—it would be paralyzed by the presence of a refractory and dissociated material in the younger generation. As we have said, the state of the modem masses is by now such that, even if figures having the stature of true leaders were to appear, they would be the last to be followed. Thus one should not deceive oneself about the formation and education still possible for an offspring born in an environment like that of present society, even if the father were such in a more than legal sense.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“This is not all. Together with the absurdity proper to democratizing the marriage rite and imposing it on all, there is an inconsistency in Catholic doctrine when it claims that the rite, as well as being indissoluble, renders natural unions “sacred”—which represents one incongruence associating with another. Through precise, dogmatic premises, the “sacred” is here reduced to a mere manner of speech. It is well known that Christian and Catholic attitudes are characterized by the antithesis between “flesh” and spirit, by a theological hatred for sex, due to the illegitimate extension to ordinary life of a principle valid at best for a certain type of ascetic life. With sex being presented as something sinful, marriage has been conceived as a lesser evil, a concession to human weakness for those who cannot choose chastity as a way of life, and renounce sex. Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicism has tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicism has recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexual experience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate the inner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactly these terms that one should conceive of a concrete “sacralization” of the union and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite.

On the other hand, since the marriage rite has been democratized, the situation could not be otherwise even if the premises were different; otherwise, it would be necessary to suppose an almost magical power in the rite to automatically elevate the sexual experiences of any couple to the level of a higher tension, of a transforming intoxication that alone could lift it beyond the “natural” plane. The sexual act would constitute the primary element, whereas procreation would appear absolutely secondary and belonging to the naturalistic plane. As a whole, whether through its conception of sexuality, or through its profanation of the marriage rite as something put in everyone’s reach and even rendered obligatory for any Catholic couple, religious marriage itself is reduced to the mere religious sanction of a profane, unbreakable contract. Thus the Catholic precepts about the relations between the sexes reduce everything to the plane of a restrained, bourgeois mediocrity: tamed, procreative animality within conformist limits that have not been fundamentally changed by certain hesitant, fringe concessions made for the sake of “updating” at the Second Vatican Council.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Nevertheless, the issue of Catholic marriage deserves some additional theoretical and historical consideration to prevent ambiguity. Naturally in our case it is not the arguments of “free thinkers” that turn us against this kind of marriage.

Earlier I mentioned the contamination between the sacred and the profane. It is worth recalling that marriage as a rite and sacrament involving indissolubility took shape late in the history of the Church, and not before the twelfth century. The obligatory nature of the religious rite for every union that wished to be considered more than mere concubinage was later still, declared at the Council of Trent (1563). For our purposes, this does not affect the concept of indissoluble marriage in itself, but its place, significance, and conditions have to be clarified. The consequence here, as in other cases regarding the sacraments, is that the Catholic Church finds itself facing a singular paradox: proposals intending to make the profane sacred have practically ended up making the sacred profane.

The true, traditional significance of the marriage rite is outlined by Saint Paul, when he uses not the term “sacrament” but rather “mystery” to indicate it (“it is a great mystery,” taken verbatim—Ephesians 5:31-32). One can indeed allow a higher idea of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble union not in words, but in fact. A union of this type, however, is conceivable only in exceptional cases in which that absolute, almost heroic dedication of two people in life and beyond life is present in principle. This was known in more than one traditional civilization, with examples of wives who even found it natural not to outlive the death of their husbands.

In speaking of making the sacred profane, I alluded to the fact that the concept of an indissoluble sacramental union, “written in the heavens” (as opposed to one on the naturalistic plane that is generically sentimental, and even at base merely social), has been applied to, or rather imposed on, every couple who must join themselves in church rather than in civil marriage, only to conform to their social environment. It is pretended that on this exterior and prosaic plane, on this plane of the Nietzschean “human, all too human,” the attributes of truly sacred marriage, of marriage as a “mystery,” can and must be valid. When divorce is not permitted in a society like the present, one can expect this hypocritical regime and the rise of grave personal and social problems.

On the other hand, it should be noted that in Catholicism itself the theoretical absoluteness of the marriage rite bears a significant limitation. It is enough to remember that if the Church insists on the indissolubility of the marriage bond in space, denying divorce, it has ceased to observe it in time. The Church that does not allow one to divorce and remarry does permit widows and widowers to remarry, which amounts to a breach of faithfulness, and is at best conceivable within an openly materialistic premise; in other words, only if it is thought that when one who was indissolubly united by the supernatural power of the rite has died, he or she has ceased to exist. This inconsistency shows that Catholic religious law, far from truly having transcendent spiritual values in view, has made the sacrament into a simple, social convenience, an ingredient of the profane life, reducing it to a mere formality, or rather degrading it.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Although all this abnormal order of things is not of recent date, the characteristic fact of the bourgeois period is that it assumed the principal, dissociated, and autonomous characteristics of a "social morality"—precisely with the "virtuism" of which Pareto accuses it, which to a certain extent was no longer subject to religious morality. Now, it is exactly this morality with a sexual basis that is the principal object of the processes of dissolution in recent times. We hear of a "sexual revolution" supposed to remove both inner inhibitions and repressive social taboos. In fact, in today’s world "sexual freedom" is being affirmed ever more, as a current practice. But we have to consider this in more detail.

I must emphasize above all that the direction of the processes at work is toward a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex. Sex and women are instead becoming dominant forces in present society, an evident fact that is also part of the general phenomenology of every terminal phase of a civilization’s cycle. One might speak of a chronic sexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct, and art. Its counterpart is a gynocratic tendency, a sexually oriented preeminence of the woman that relates to the materialistic and practical involvement of the masculine sex: a phenomenon that is clearest in those countries, like the United States, where that involvement is more excessive.

[...]

The aspects of the crisis of female modesty are another part of this. Beside the cases in which almost full female nudity feeds the atmosphere of abstract, collective sexuality, we should consider those cases in which nudity has lost every serious "functional" character—cases which by their habitual, public character almost engender an involuntarily chaste glance that is capable of considering a fully undressed girl with the same aesthetic disinterest as observing a fish or a cat. Furthermore, by adding the products of commercialized mass pornography, the polarity between the sexes is diluted, as seen in the conduct of "modern" life where the youth of both sexes are everywhere intermingled, promiscuously and "unaffectedly," with almost no tension, as if they were turnips and cabbages in a vegetable garden. We can see how this particular result of the processes of dissolution relates to what I have said of the "animal ideal," as well as the correspondence between the East and the West. The primitive, erotic life so typical among American youth is not at all far from the promiscuity of male and female "comrades" in the communist realm, free from the "individualistic accidents of bourgeois decadence," who in the end reflect little on sexual matters, their prevalent interests being channeled elsewhere into collective life and class.

We can consider separately the cases in which the climate of diffuse and constant eroticism leads one to seek in pure sexuality, more or less along the same lines as drugs, frantic sensations that mask the emptiness of modern existence. The testimonies of certain beatniks and similar groups reveal that their pursuit of the sexual orgasm causes an anguish aroused by the idea that they and their partner might not reach it, even to the point of exhaustion.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“When a cycle of civilisation is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed. The essential thing is to not let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact, on a short chain. One should not become fixated on the present, and on things at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come about in the future. Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when 'the tiger, which cannot leap on the person riding it, is tired of running'.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“اﻹنسان، في لحظة من الزمن، أراد أن يكون حرا. وتم السماح له أن يكون كذلك، وسمح له أيضا أن يرمي اﻷغلال التي لم تقيده بقدر ما هي دعمته. ومن هناك أصبح من الممكن لﻹنسان أن يعاني تحت آثار تحرره، وتابع مسيرته في ذلك بصورة حتمية حتى وصل لحالته هذه حيث "مات اﻹله" أو كما قال بيرنانوس "اﻹله انسحب"، وأصبح الوجود أرضية للسخافة حيث كل شيء مباح.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“من الواضح جدا أن قاعدة الكون نفسا واحدة تعني أن الواحد يمكنه أن يتكلم عن طبيعة لائقة للجميع، مهما تكن، مثل شيء معروف ويمكن تمييزه. ولكن هذا يطرح إشكالية، خاصة في وقتنا الحاضر. قد يكون ذلك أقل صعوبة في المجتمعات التي لم تعرف الفردانية، المجتمعات التقليدية المنظمة عبر الجماعات و الطوائف حيث عوامل الوراثة، الولادة والبيئة أعطت اﻷفضلية لدرجة عالية من الوحدة الداخلية و تمايز السمات، وحيث الروابط تمت تقويتها وتغديتها بالتقاليد، اﻷخلاق، القوانين، وأحيانا بأشكال دينية أقل اختلافا. كل هذا إنقطع وجوده عند اﻹنسان الغربي، وتم التخلي عنه في الطريق إلى الحرية؛ لهذا الرجل الحديث في المتوسط متغير، متقلب، لايتخذ أي شكل حقيقي.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“يتكلم عن الرجل التقليدي:
شخصيته المميزة تصر على مواجهة مشاكل الرجل الحديث دون أن يكون هو نفسه رجلا حديثا؛ إنه ينتمي إلى عالم مختلف ويحافظ في نفسه على بعد وجودي مختلف. عكس الآخرين، مشكلته ليست البحث المأساوي عن اﻷسس ( في اﻷصل، هو يملكها)، ولكن أن يكون لخاصته إبانة وثبات في الحقبة الحديثة، في حياته هنا والآن.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“الرجل الحديث ليس حرا، بل وجد نفسه حرا في عالم مات فيه اﻹله."لقد تم تسليمه لحريته". ومن هنا تأتي أعمق معاناته. عندما يكون مدركا تماما لهذا، يستولي عليه الغم و بطريقة أخرى يظهر عنده من جديد إحساس عبثي بمسؤولية ما.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Dans une existence inauthentique, la recherche systématique de diversions, de succédanés et de tranquillisants, qui caractérise tant de "distractions" et de "divertissements" d'aujourd'hui, ne laisse pas encore pressentir à la femme la crise qui l'attend lorsqu'elle s'apercevra combien les occupations masculines, pour lesquelles elle a tant lutté, sont dépourvues de sens, lorsque s’évanouiront les illusions et l'euphorie que lui donne la satisfaction de ses revendications, lorsqu'elle constatera, d'autre part, qu'en raison du climat de dissolution, famille et enfants ne peuvent plus donner un sens satisfaisant à sa vie, ni homme ni sexe ne pourront signifier grand chose non plus, ne pourront plus constituer, comme ils le firent pour la femme absolue et traditionnelle, le centre naturel de son existence, et ne représentera plus pour elle qu'un des éléments d'une existence dispersée et extériorisée, allant de concert avec la vanité, le sport, le culte narcissique du corps, les intérêts pratiques et autres chose du même genre”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when "the tiger, which cannot leap on the person riding it, is tired of running.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“... if one succeeds in riding a tiger, not only does one avoid having it leap on one, but if one can keep one's seat and not fall off, one may eventually get the better of it.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul