On Resistism Quotes

“Our objective as a realist is to maximize our worth, and our objective as a romanticist is to be foolishly youthful.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“The greatest form of retaliation is not loving your enemy but ignoring them.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Neutrals are free, unaffected and disengaged. Their presence alone flatly cancels the logic of power across the board due to their existential uselessness to both powerful and powerless. I at times question any difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘uselessness’ and have never succeeded in finding a satisfying answer. I believe the world has become complicated by the neutrals who never exposed their neutrality. Their disguised intention and unfathomable identity have dramatized the world by having others fear their uncertainty. Neutrals stand outside of boundaries of good and bad. They are true strangers. And probably, they are the true resistants.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“We are whom who admire”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Nonconformists, we are, unsolicited, unpredictable, unencumbered, unvested, daring and iconoclastic but not for the sake of destructive ruins but construction toward a better truth, a substantial truth, and innovation. Too much of independence of the nonconformists of unique mind is considered unfitting to the establishment of existing norms and institutions because they cannot be useful functionaries for social reinforcement. Yet, poetic outcasts are reframing the stretch of imagination toward metaphysical beauty and permanence—the greatness. We deliberately detach ourselves from the exasperations and desperations of the moment of mankind. We find it particularly useful to have a burning heart and causes for misgivings and finality…to fill the unlistening void and to chastise a comfortable livelihood.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“I am deeply convinced that perfection lies in excess of thoughts and excess of problems. These will devour me and break me down into indivisible particles. And in the belly of a monster where I am laid in the narrowest binary of doing or not-doing, being or not-being, I let my instinct to find the perfect answer.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“All men are born great but die on the way. But a virtuous never dies but once.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Two most pursuable things in life beyond happiness are beauty and virtue.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Of many living creatures, human has been endowed with an unbearable gift named Free Will to think, believe, and rationalize what is true in his mind, which empowers himself with a power to liberate his action in one direction or the other, resulting the free action depended on the decision of free will. The action is either physical or metaphysical. When an action is carried out by a free agent, the agent is the forbearer of his action, the totality of his action from its birth to termination, and moral responsibility. The autonomy of his thought carries the agency of accountability in his belief because a collection of beliefs and thoughts is the composition of what he is. By free will as faculty of free intellection and rationalization, no circumstances beyond control can deterministically harness an existential volition unfree and inauthentic, for a free will, as long as it is, is always capable and self-verifiable through metaphysical rejection and rebellion. It is the spirit of non-yielding. Free Will holds its worth by reserving the two options of yielding and unyielding—yielding can be either by will or unwill but non-yielding is necessarily by will—due to its indomitable character to resist against the force that subjects his being under possession and materiality of the creator. The end of Free Will is happiness by acceptance of what his choices have led under the limited conditions provided, bearing inherent worthiness from meaning in his existence.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Imagination is the weapon to fight off an impossibility.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“A farmer can toil harder when a respite is promised at the end of the day and a feat at the end of the year. In the same manner, a human can live ferociously because death is promised at the end. “Teacher, what do you mean by the feat and rest? What is the relationship between?” The teacher answers, “forgetfulness, of every labor and sweats, and of himself in that condition.” Winter becomes bearable by the presence of forthcoming greens, marriage by children, letters by knowledge, urban by nature and canticle by beauty.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“On the battlefield there is no distinction between royalty, nobility, and commons.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“We fail to subjugate a madman so we decide to butcher him out of society. Sanity is a different degree of madness, for what we believe as ‘normal,’ ‘average,’ and ‘polite’ are equally hideous and revolting to the madman on his account. People hate madman out of politic of thought and difference of perspective.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“There is no such thing as a true madman.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Feet on the ground, eyes to the stars, heart in union with the Superior.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Then, one demurs that essentially a society is entertained by the theatre of heroism, and in strict individualism of existence, without others, it is only a narcissistic struggle. There is no hero in a lonesome existence. A man lives in a shred and contradiction of duality between his splendid uniqueness out of nature with a grip of eternality and condemnable body of contemptible smallness, transient but delightfully comfortable to rot into the disappearance. This density and finiteness! Laughable yet strangely estimable quality of certitude from his inner drive in the making of his world. O this ambiguity, O this duality, O this weakness. O human! O human!”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“It is our goal and new poetics to disappear. We will not disappear into nothingness; we will disappear into everything. As we resist and resist hard, history will remember us.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“The inclination to act upon draws a contestation between the two competing self-interests between justification to act and justification to rest, between a law and a willingness.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Resistance is dauntless audacity of the lesser against the greater through a will to suffering—the essential quality of existing—because suffering most clearly evinces the will-power of the sufferer. History is the story of ‘I’ as observed and evaluated by ‘me.’ When the history is written by my hands, I will fear nothing and live as if I am the history.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Art is not a toy. It is a mirror of beyond”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Knowledge in one’s true individuality and selfhood can give him the irreducible fact of himself, and one’s perception of himself is everything of value.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“His primacy of self and willingness to perpetuate his will go beyond death and toward perfection.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“The resistant reasoning understands a revolt as a protester against the criminality of the universe—the crime of neglect and irresponsibility. To protest and revolt, we must exist because our existence is proof of its crime.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Yet, the existential intellection has disregarded the possibility that a coming-into-being as not a finality but a process and that it is a making of meaning from the ground zero, for we are incomplete beings. Being is nothing but containment of essence, and the precedent-will has to be taken a priori to coming-to-being. Because we are choosing to become a volitional being.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Will is nobler than truth”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Poetry is death and death is poetry.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“existing is value-making”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“Thus, I retain my heat in the wilderness, my will in the void.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“I rather aspire to be a tree that endures the whirling tempest than ears of rice that lower their heads.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism