Skuzzmatazz > Skuzzmatazz's Quotes

“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

“Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.”
― Andy Warhol

“Hypocrisy is said to be the homage that vice pays to virtue,—decorum is the outward expression of that homage; and if this be so, we must acknowledge that vice has latterly grown very humble indeed.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.” These words of Jocko’s helped one listener—a drug addict—get sober after many failed attempts. The simple logic struck a chord: “Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher. Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“In 1997 I said they were dicks for voting Labour – but nobody was having it at the time. Three years later people are saying – ‘Oh, you were right there, Mark.’ It’s a waste of time, really, but I still do it. Nobody likes the bringer of bad news.”
― Mark E. Smith, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

“Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Becalmed

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The only real laughter comes from despair.”
― Groucho Marx, The Groucho Letters

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

“Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.”
― Aesop

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“we are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. i do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and i don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness”
― William S. Burroughs

“Reagan is talking about getting back to the old versions, but that's just this old politician horseshit. They've been saying it for a hundred years: "Back to the virtues that made America great and can make America great again!" It's not to be taken seriously, of course. Biologically speaking, the only direction you can't go, is back! It's impossible. It's a law.”
― William S. Burroughs, Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews

“In the end, I’m not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I have written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words… truths that rise up without warning, like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt the monster to the surface, to create a space, where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect… This is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.”
― Nick Cave

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”
― Émile Michel Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life.
I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Animal banished from life, man's condition is tragic, for he no longer finds fulfillment in life's simple values. For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.”
― Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.”
― Kenneth Rexroth

“who
is invisible enough
to see you”
― Paul Celan

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”
― Paul Celan

“How you die out in me:

down to the last
worn-out
knot of breath
you're there, with a
splinter
of life.”
― Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan

“Spring: trees flying up to their birds”
― Paul Celan

“To be lyrical you've got to stuff your ears up and keep other people out of your life- if you have one.”
― Alfred Chester, Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953-1966