Quote Collection #1

‎”The Absolute without parts (Adharma) is the Creator. Ignorance is the same as knowledge. Ishvara, the Lord is the Cosmos. The eternal is the same as the transitory. Knowledge is identical with the absence of knowledge. Adharma is Dharma. This is liberation.” –Kaula Upanishad

“The anxiety we carry with us,
all our broken dreams,
the inexplicable cruelty,
the fear of death,
the painful insight into our earthly condition…
have worn out our hope of a divine salvation.
The cries of our faith and doubt against the darkness and the silence are terrible proof of our loneliness and fear.”

-Persona, Bergman

‎”Because you love cremation grounds, I have made one of my heart so that you Black Goddess of the Burning Grounds can always dance there. No desires are left, Ma, on the pyre for the fire burns in my heart, and I have covered everything with its ash to prepare for Your coming. As for the Conqueror of Death, the Destructive Lord, He can lie at Your feet. But You, come, Ma dance to the beat; I’ll watch you with my eyes closed.” -Ramlal Dasdatta

‎”Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” –Thomas Jefferson

‎”Mind absorbed in sense objects is the cause of bondage, and mind detached from the sense objects is the cause of liberation.”
–(Amṛta-bindu Upaniṣad 2)

“Every battle is won before it is ever fought.” –Sun Tzu

“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words ‘Be still’. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so’. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?”
― Ramana Maharshi

“…We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is… this nostalgia is responsible for… eroticism in man.” — Georges Bataille

Molti nemici. Molto onore.

“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

“I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow…Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bends and beings.”
— Julia Kristeva

‎”For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy.” — Bhagavad-gītā 6.6

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror.” –Thomas Ligotti

“Consider the fact that no matter how many planets and stars are reflected in a lake, these reflections are encompassed within the water itself; that no matter how many universes there are, they are encompassed within a single space; and that no matter how vast and how numerous the sensory appearances of samsara and nirvana may be, they are encompassed within the single nature of mind”
— Dudjom Lingpa

“A yogi, who is in union with the Supreme Being, sees every being with an equal eye because of perceiving the omnipresent Spirit abiding in all beings, and all beings abiding in the Supreme Being.” –Bhagvadgita(6.29)

What is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows it. If you really love, a woman or a man, you don’t idealize him or her. Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points, and, nonetheless, the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living, but you see perfection in imperfection itself. And that is how we should learn to love the world. –Zizek

‎”But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, the matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.

I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.” –Zizek

“All I see is death, everywhere, everything I see.
I find myself obsessed, to see death is all that I need.
My eyes keep bleeding red, everything is now a part of me.
I’m in the company of death, and all death wants is to hear you scream.”
-Razakel

“Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!”
― Marquis de Sade

”Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity…. Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.” –Marquis de Sade

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give us what we desire; it tells us how to desire.”
— Slavoj Žižek

“It is absurd then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there’s no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcizing it as a spectacle.”
—Jean Baudrillard

“There is a saying in one of the _Upanishads_, ‘The narrow blade of a razor is this: it’s a narrow, difficult path.’ And the problem is that this is the real power of the left hand path of following your bliss instead of instructions. You are following the lead of your emotion and of your vitality; but the head has to be there all the time because you are on a narrow ridge and in danger of falling off. This is to say, letting too much of the torrent of energy come through will blow it.

There is nothing right or wrong when you are on the left hand path, but there is imprudent and prudent action. Do you see what I mean? Because while you are beyond good and evil, as soon as your step out of society, you can lose your life. Life is a dangerous path.”

– Joseph Campbell, _An Open Life_

‎”Liberation is our very nature. We are that. The very fact that we wish for liberation shows that freedom from all bondage is our real nature. It is not to be freshly acquired. All that is necessary is to get rid of the false notion that we are bound. When we achieve that, there will be no desire or thought of any sort. So long as one desires liberation, so long, you may take it, one is in bondage.” –Sri Ramana Maharshi

‎”You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

–Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5

“Reality, it traps us in a monotonous deadning cicle. Engufs our dreams and desires with innumerable obstacles that are laced with cruel irony. We try to shadow these inescapable truths with such lies as cinema, used as a shield of escape, a colding to shelter us from the ceaseless hardships thrown in your paths. Certain films can attempt to absorb our negative energy in a hope that perhaps they can keep our darkest emotions at bay, but unfortunately flickering light can only pacify our demons for so long. Human reality will eventually rear its ugly head, far more horrific than any film can attempt to portray”
— Subconscious Cruelty

“I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.” –Voltaire

“The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.” —Baudelaire

“It is said of the nihilist that ”to him, nothing is sacred”. He might reply that at least he does not sanctify the lie, the common compulsory living-lie; be it expressed as optimism about civilisation or as the falsettos and tightened throats of those who must hide the disconcerting facts to children, so these are not frightened witless even at the outset.” – Zapffe

“For humans can perceive that each individual being is an ephemeral eddy in the flow of life, subjected to brute contingencies on his or her way to annihilation. Yet only rarely do persons lose their minds through this realisation, as our brains have evolved a strict regime of self-censorship – better known as `civilisation.'” – Gisle R. Tangenes, summarizing the philosophy of Zapffe

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. (Thomas Hobbes)

Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep. (Benito Mussolini)

“Essentially, the left-hand path is then the path of non-union with the objective universe. It is the way of isolating consciousness within the subjective universe and, in a state of self-imposed psychic solitude, refining the soul or psyche to ever more perfect levels. The objective universe is then made to harmonize itself with the will of the individual psyche instead of the other way around.

Where the right-hand path is theocentric (or certainly alleocentric–“other centered”), the left-hand path is psychecentric or soul/self-centered. Those within the left-hand path may argue over the nature of this self/ego/soul, but that the individual is the epicenter of the path itself seems undisputed. An eternal separation of the individual intelligence from the objective universe is sought in the left-hand path. This amounts to an immortality of the independent self consciousness moving within the objective universe and interacting with it at will.” –Stephen Flowers

“Ladies and Gentlemen! You’ve read about it in the papers! Now witness, before your very eyes, that most rare and tragic of nature’s mistakes! I give you: the average man. Physically unremarkable, it instead possesses a deformed set of values. Notice the hideously bloated sense of humanity’s importance. Also note the club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism. It’s certainly not for the squeamish, is it? Most repulsive of all, are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is placed upon them… they snap.

How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational environment? I’m afraid the sad answer is, “Not very well.” Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random, and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this… any other response would be crazy!” –The Joker

“Freedom is based on the anarch’s awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. “A leap from this bridge will set me free.”
― Ernst Jünger

“Satan, the receiver of transcendent souls and corrupted bodies, instills in followers two directly opposite qualities; at one end an urge to rise above all human and physical needs and appetites, to become all soul and no body, all spirit and no mind, and at the other end a desire to sink beneath all human codes of behavior, and to wallow in a morass of violence, lunacy and excessive physical indulgence. But it is the lower end of Satan’s nature that men fear, which is why Satan, by whatever name, is seen as the Adversary.”

–The Process Church of the Final Judgement

“I feel no hunger for death; I simply hunger not to be.”
–Antonin Artaud

“For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
— Antonin Artaud

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. –Chesterton

“But all of that, all of those ideas are adopted lessons about how it should be. The ego is what’s happening. The ego is just being ego. Thinking is just being thinking. There is only being. There is just being. There’s nothing else. There’s nobody that’s running that. There’s no destiny, there’s no God, there’s no plan, there’s no script, there’s nowhere to go because there is only timeless being.

Being is totally whole just being. And it is alive and fleshy and sexy and juicy and immediately this; it’s not some concept about ‘there’s no-one here’. It’s not some concept about ‘there’s nowhere to go’. It is the aliveness that’s in that body right now. There is pure beingness, pure aliveness. That’s it. End of story.” –Tony Parsons

“..the certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation”. –Emil Cioran

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself. (Martin Heidegger)

Each new generation asks – What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be – Why does man need a meaning to life? (Peter Wessel Zapffe)

“A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, “Why is there so much suffering?”

Suzuki Roshi replied, “No reason.”

― Shunryu Suzuki

“There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain.” –Tony Parsons

“Oh, yes! Fill the churches with dirty thoughts! Introduce honesty to the White House! Write letters in dead languages to people you’ve never met! Paint filthy words on the foreheads of children! Burn your credit cards and wear high heels! Asylum doors stand open! Fill the suburbs with murder and rape! Divine madness! Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets! Laugh and the world laughs with you!” –The Joker

The Six “Nails” of Tilopa:

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may arise.
Let go of what is happening now.
Let go of examining.
Let go of trying to control.
Let the mind rest in its natural state.

“It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?”–The Joker

“Obsessive use of meditative disciplines or perennial study of scripture and philosophy will never bring forth this wonderful realization, this truth which is natural to awareness, because the mind that desperately desires to reach another realm or level of experience inadvertently ignores the basic light that constitutes all experience.” –Tilopa

“In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark. I laughed and blew it out.” –The Joker

We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness. –Zapffe

The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn’t seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer. –Zapffe

“There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain.”

— Tony Parsons

“I will follow you wherever you go. I love your pain. There are deep worlds that we touch each time we sink, each time we are devastated. There are extreme depths that we reach only when dying.”
— Anaïs Nin

“There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh …”
— Antonin Artaud

“I’ve never understood why passion, which doesn’t discriminate against anything, would bother about the gender of its victims.”
— Natalie Clifford Barney

“Those who do not put their soul in their flesh are unworthy of life.” –Natalie Clifford Barney

“And why not love, love which, every day, leaves us unsatisfied?” –Natalie Clifford Barney

“..the certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation”. –Cioran

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.” —- Antonin Artaud

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”
— Antonin Artaud

” Making friends is a necessity shopping, making enemies is an occupation of an aristocrat. ”
-Henry Montherlant

“My outlook is that it’s a damn shame that organic life ever developed on this or any other planet, and that the pain that living creatures necessarily suffer makes for an existence that is a perennial nightmare. This attitude underlies almost everything I’ve written.” –Ligotti

“Rot your way back to us, you freak of creation. Rot your way out of this world. Come home to a pain so great that it is bliss itself. You were born to be bones not flesh. Rot your way free of that skin of mere skin.”
—Thomas Ligotti

“The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn’t seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer.” –Peter Wessel Zapffe

“Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.” –Peter Wessel Zapffe

“We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.”
–Peter Wessel Zapffe

‎”Liberals insist particularly on the idea that individual interests should never be sacrificed to the collective interest, the common good, or the public safety, concepts that they regard as inconsistent. From this idea it follows that only individuals have rights, while communities, being only collections of individuals, have none of their own.” —Alain de Benoist

“Psychopaths… people who know the differences between right and wrong, but don’t give a shit. That’s what most of my characters are like.”
― Elmore Leonard

” We have Understood nothing of life until we have Understood That it is one solid confusion. “–Henry de Montherlant

“We are nearly all Voltaririans in the cafe, that is to say sceptics and scoffers, but come one of those great events in life, before the white dress of a first communicant or the black cloth of mourning, we return to the idealism of our fathers, vanquished by the eternal need to establish an indestructible link between the generations: a religion.”
-Frederic Le Play

‘Dirt’ may be defined as ‘matter out of place.’ The poached egg on your plate at the breakfast table is not dirt; the poached egg on the floor of the Reading Room at the British Museum is. Dirt is matter that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confounds categories and mixes up form. —Anne Carson

“Society is indeed a contract. The state is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” –Edmund Burke

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“For it is death that most violently represents the strange state in which a non-subject, a stray, having lost its non-objects, imagines nothingness through the ordeal of abjection. The death that ‘I’ am provokes horror, there is a choking sensation that does not separate inside from outside but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely.”
–Julia Kristeva

“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. Nothing else affects me. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.” — Anaïs Nin

“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul.” –Giovanni Gentile

“The reason you hate me is that I am a constant reminder of the capacity for evil that resides within you.”

“You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.”
― Édouard Levé

“When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.”
–Henry Miller

“It is true there are two forms of totalitarianism; difference in causes and consequences, but both being dangerous. Totalitarianism in the East imprisons, persecutes and kills the body, but it leaves hope. Totalitarianism in the West creates happy robots. Such totalitarianism ‘air-conditions hell’ and kills the soul.” –Alain de Benoist

“NOW the most difficult thing in the world in connection with history, and the rarest of achievement, is the seeing of events as contemporaries saw them, instead of seeing them through the distorting medium of our later knowledge.”
–Hilaire Belloc

“Those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.”
– Jacques Lacan,

“I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.”
― Anaïs Nin

“A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.” –Bataille

“But if you say: “How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?” then I say: “How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?””
— L. Wittgenstein

‎”All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. ‘
–Nietzsche

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

‎”The victorious ones have said
That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.
For whomever emptiness is a view,
That one has accomplished nothing.”
—-Nagarjuna

“You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
–Walker Percy

“You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…

You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.”
― Édouard Levé

“To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.”
―Natalie Clifford Barney

“There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.”
―Natalie Clifford Barney

“Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”
―Natalie Clifford Barney

“The wisdom of non-differentiation is superior to the wisdom of differentiation, but it could not be achieved without the wisdom of differentiation. Therefore the wisdom of differentiation should precede the wisdom of non-differentiation.” –László András

“Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.”
― Georges Bernanos

“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
― Franz Kafka

“You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.”
― Édouard Levé

“They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. ”
― Walker Percy
“There is not the slightest difference
Between cyclic existence and nirvana.
There is not the slightest difference
Between nirvana and cyclic existence.”
–Nagarjuna

“When consciousness becomes clear and the senses are detached from matter, one experiences fearlessness within the material body and detachment from the material mind.” –Uddhava Gita

“The cause of bandha and moksha (bondage and liberation) is our own minds. If we think we are bound, we are bound. If we think we are liberated, we are liberated. . . . It is only when we transcend the mind that we are free from all these troubles.” ― Swami Satchidananda

“One becomes like that which is in one’s mind — this is the everlasting secret.” –Maitri Upanishad

‎”There’s nothing special about being born. Not a thing. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing. So why live? You think you were wanted? Who wanted you? So what is your reason for living? Tell me.” –Johan Liebert

“They worshiped the dragon, for he has given authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’ The only thing that can defeat the beast, would be a monster more fearsome than the first.” –Hans Schuwald

“From her scowling brow, Kali sprang forth, frightful of countenance and armed with sword and noose, bearing a strange skull-topped staff, adorned with a garland of skulls, and clad in a tiger’s skin.

Her emaciated flesh appalling, her mouth gaping, her lolling tongue horrifying, her sunken eyes glowing red, she filled the four quarters of the sky with her roars.

Swiftly falling upon the great asuras in that army, she slew and devoured those hosts of gods’ foes.” –Devimahatmya

‎”Without a profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated — without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there could only be a revolting utopian sentimentality.” –Bataille

“There is in some cases a psychic need to loose evil upon the world, and all of us carry within us a desire for death. You fear the panther, yet you’re drawn to him, again and again. Couldn’t you turn to him as an instrument of death?” –Cat People (1942)

“You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite Being and then weep that you are but a finite creature. Then you take up this or that sadhana to transcend the nonexistent limitations. But if your sadhana itself assumes the existence of the limitations, how can it help you to transcend them?” –Sri Ramana Maharshi

“Solitude is in the mind of man. One might be in the thick of the world and maintain serenity of mind; such a one is in solitude. Another may stay in a forest, but still be unable to control his mind. He cannot be said to be in solitude. Solitude is a function of the mind. A man attached to desire cannot get solitude wherever he may be; a detached man is always in solitude.” –Sri Ramana Maharshi

“The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.” ― Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

“A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.” –Crowley

A man should surrender the personal selfishness which binds him to this world. Giving up the false self is the true renunciation. – Ramana Maharshi

“Truth is one, the wise call it by many names” –Rig Veda

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats

“We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.”
—Emil Cioran

Though I know I should be wary
Still I venture someplace scary
Ghostly haunting I turn loose.
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, BEETLEJUICE!!!!!!!

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Liberation is our very nature. We are that. The very fact that we wish for liberation shows that freedom from all bondage is our real nature. It is not to be freshly acquired.

All that is necessary is to get rid of the false notion that we are bound. When we achieve that, there will be no desire or thought of any sort.
So long as one desires liberation, so long, you may take it, one is in bondage.”

–Sri Ramana Maharshi

“Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.”

—Rorschach

“To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.” –Bodhidharma

“Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.”
― Huang Po

Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself.

Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others.

No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.

–Dogen Zenji

“If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.”
― Dogen Zenji

Seeker: “Teach me the way to liberation.”

Zen master: “Who binds you?”

Seeker: “No one binds me.”

Zen master: “Then why seek liberation?”

“Just as a man shudders with horror when he steps upon a serpent, but laughs when he looks down and sees that it is only a rope, so I discovered one day that what I was calling “I” cannot be found, and all fear and anxiety vanished with my mistake.” —Buddha

Bodhidharma: You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas” without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha. This mind is the buddha” says the same thing.

Beyond this mind you’ll never find another Buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature the absence of cause and effect, is what’s meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a Buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind’, but such a place doesn’t exist.

“The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Act as if everything depended on you; trust as if everything depended on God.”
― St. Ignatius of Loyola

“One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

‎”Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty; for by working without attachment, one attains the Supreme.” ~Bhagvadgita,Chapter 3, Verse 19.

“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” –Catechism

“For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. ”
― H.P Lovecraft

“I’ve never understood why passion, which doesn’t discriminate against anything, would bother about the gender of its victims.”
—Natalie Clifford Barney

“She could not be saved. Her life was a long suicide. Everything turned to dust and ashes in her hands.”
—Natalie Clifford Barney

“Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.” –Natalie Clifford Barney

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not fine yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine
–Plotinus

‎”By the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world.”
—Swami Vivekananda

“Too long has idle talk made out of Distributism as something medieval and myopic, as if four modern popes were somehow talking nonsense when they said: the law should favor widespread ownership (Leo XIII); land is the most natural form of property (Leo XIII and Pius XII); wages should enable a man to purchase land (Leo XIII and Pius XI); the family is most perfect when rooted in its own holding (Pius XII); agriculture is the first and most important of all the arts and the tiller of the soil still represents the natural order of things willed by God (Pius XII).

—-Dorothy quoted Joseph T. Nolan from Orate Fratres on the support of Popes in their encyclicals for the CW position

‎”There is no difference at all between the Great formless Brahman and myself. It is only for the sake of the world that we appear as two. In absence of this manifested world, there is neither the male, female nor androgyny. Nothing in this world is devoid of me. I enter into every substance, and making Purusha the instrument. I do all the actions. I am the coolness of water, the heat of fire, the luster in the sun and also the soothing rays of the moon, which are but manifestations of my power.”

~ Goddess in Devi Bhagavatam Purana

‎”The Vendantic yogi never tires of stating that kaivalya, ‘isolation-integration,’ can be attained only by turning away from the distracting allure of the world and worshiping with single-pointed attention the formless Brahman-Atman; to the Tantric, however – as to the normal child of the world – this notion seems pathological, the wrong-headed effect of a certain malady of intellect. (…) ‘I like eating sugar,’ as Ramprasad said, ‘but I have no desire to become sugar.’

Let those who suffer from the toils of samsara seek release: the perfect devotee does not suffer; for he can both visualize and experience life and the universe as the revelation of that Supreme Divine Force (shakti) with which he is in love, the all-comprehensive Divine Being in its cosmic aspect of playful, aimless display (lila) – which precipitates pain as well as joy, but in its bliss transcends them both.”

—Rohan Bastin

“Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy — by one, or more, or all of these — and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”
–Swami Vivekananda

“I do not wish for women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said.”
–Marginalia by Edgar Allan Poe

“The greatest sin is to think yourself weak”
― Swami Vivekananda

Because Thou lovest the burning ground,
I have made a burning ground of my heart –
That Thou, Dark One, haunter of the burning ground,
Mayest dance the eternal dance.
Nought else is within my heart, O Mother:
Day and night blazes the funeral pyre:
The ashes of the dead, strewn all about,
I have preserved against Thy coming,
With death-conquering Mahakala ‘neath Thy feet
Do Thou enter in, dancing Thy rhythmic dance,
That I may behold Thee with closed eyes.

-Bengali Hymn to Kali

“The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“I am verily like the cat sitting on the edge of an ocean of milk, hoping to lap it all up.” –Kamban

“Hate no one, no matter how much they’ve wronged you. Live humbly, no matter how wealthy you become. Think positively, no matter how hard life is. Give much, even if you’ve been given little. Keep in touch with the ones who have forgotten you. And forgive those who have wronged you, and do not stop praying for the best for those you love.” – Imam Ali ibn Abi Taleb

‎”It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light. First, believe in this world, that there is meaning behind everything. Everything in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil, think that you do not understand it in the right light. Throw the burden on yourselves!” -Swami Vivekananda

“Philosophy becomes tortured thinking. Thinking that devours itself—and continues intact and even flourishes, in spite (or perhaps because) of the repeated acts of self-cannibalism. In the passion play of thought, the thinker plays the roles of both protagonist and antagonist. He is both suffering Prometheus and the remorseless eagle who consumes his perpetually regenerated entrails.”
– Susan Sontag

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag

“I am the thread that runs through all these pearls,” and each pearl is a religion or even a sect thereof. Such are the different pearls, and God is the thread that runs through all of them; most people, however, are entirely unconscious of it. -Swami Vivekananda

“Many times I have been in the jaws of death, starving, footsore, and weary; for days and days I had no food, and often could walk no further; I would sink down under a tree, and life would seem to be ebbing away. I could not speak, I could scarcely think, but at last the mind reverted to the idea: ‘I have no fear nor death; never was I born, never did I die; I never hunger or thirst. I am It! I am It! The whole of nature cannot crush me; it is my servant. Assert thy strength, thou Lord of lords and God of gods! Regain thy lost empire! Arise and walk and stop not!’ And I would rise up, reinvigorated; and here I am today, living!

Thus, whenever darkness comes, assert the reality and everything adverse must vanish. For after all, it is but a dream. Mountain-high though the difficulties appear, terrible and gloomy though all things seem, they are but Maya. Fear not, and it is banished. Crush it, and it vanishes. Stamp upon it, and it dies.” -Swami Vivekananda

After every happiness comes misery; they may be far apart or near. The more advanced the soul, the more quickly does one follow the other. What we want is neither happiness nor misery. Both make us forget our true nature; both are chains–one iron, one gold; behind both is the Atman, who knows neither happiness nor misery. These are states, and states must ever change; but the nature of the Atman is bliss, peace, unchanging. We have not to get it, we have it; only wash away the dross and see it. -Swami Vivekananda

“Brer Rabbit hollered out, ‘Born and bred in the briar patch. I was born and bred in the briar patch!’

And with that he skipped out just as lively as a cricket in the embers of a fire.”

“As for the word “Hare” (pronounced huh-ray), it’s a call to Krishna’s divine energy. Just as the sun shines forth to us through its energies like heat and light, the Supreme reveals Himself through His multitude of energies. If the Supreme is the source of everything, then whatever we see–and even what we don’t see– belongs to the energy of the Supreme.”

‎”The world is illusory; Brahman alone is real. The world is of the nature of magic. The magician is real but his magic is unreal.” –Sri Ramakrishna

“There is only one sin. That is weakness. When I was a boy I read Milton’s Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that soul that never weakens, faces everything, and determines to die game.”

– Swami Vivekananda

Do not believe anything because it is said by an authority, or if it is said to come from angels, or from Gods, or from an inspired source. Believe it only if you have explored it in your own heart and mind and body and found it to be true. Work out your own path, through diligence.” – Gautama Buddha

“That in which there is no question of form or formlessness, of beyond form and attributes, of transcending even the beyond – that alone is worthy of human aspiration.” — Sri Anandamayi Ma

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― George Gordon Byron

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton

“Irrationality presides over the birth of love. The sensation of melting is also present, for love is a form of intimate communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation. Isn’t love specificity and universality all at once? True communion can only be achieved through an individual. I love someone, but since she is the symbol of everything, I partake of the essence of everything, unconsciously and naively.” –E.M. Cioran

“The experience of the tantric yogi is like this:
The outer world is seen as a sacred mandala circle,
And all living beings seen as divine beings.
All experiences become transformed
Into blissful primordial awareness;
And all of one’s actions become spiritual,
Regardless of how they conventionally appear.
Every sound that one makes
Becomes part of a great cosmic song.”
–Gendun Gyatso

“But if, through fundamental misperception of reality, the individual enters into the confusion of dualism, primordial consciousness, which is in fact the source of all manifestation (even of dualistic consciousness and, in fact, of all phenomena), itself becomes obscured. The individual’s deluded mind then mistakes the manifestations of its own pure, innate primordial awareness for an external reality existing separately from itself, which it endlessly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempts to manipulate, trying in vain to bring an end to the continual underlying sense of dissatisfaction and unease which is the inevitable experience of the obscuration of pure awareness. The experience of underlying dissatisfaction (or ‘dukha’ in Sanskrit) that unavoidably arises with a deluded mind, continues, no matter how ‘successful’ the individual becomes in dealing with his or her world in materialistic terms, until the individual regains the experience of the primordial state.” — Namkhai Rinpoche

“All that effort, all that energy, to annihilate the ego… and it’s not there in the first place. There’s nothing to strive for and there’s nothing to get rid of. We need only to stop creating the self in our minds in each moment. To be in the moment free of concept, free of image, free of clinging. To be simple and easy. There’s no struggle or tension in that invisibility, in that effortlessness.”

–Joseph Goldstein

Say unto thine own heart: “I am Mine own Redeemer.”

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Thucydides

* [And God] said: “What has kept thee from prostrating thyself when I commanded thee?”
**Answered [Iblis]: “I am better than he: Thou hast created me out of fire, whereas him Thou hast created out of clay.”

“Its better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
― Emiliano Zapata

‘Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes.’
-Cioran

“But the Greater Good always strikes me as being a cunt-hair shy of the Greater God, and I lack the imagination to believe in either.”
Chip Smith

“My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.”
— Emil Cioran

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. … Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”
–John Muir

“Of all manly enterprises, I admire that of the person who breaks the law imposed by others and establishes his own law.”
–Gabriele d’Annunzio

“Whoever becomes a lamb, will find a wolf to eat him.”
–Vilfredo Pareto

“It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.”
–Heraclitus

“When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.”
–E. M. Cioran

“The man who is alone, who stands on his own feet, who is stripped bare, who asks for nothing and wants nothing, who has reached the apex of disinterestedness not through blind renunciation but through excess of clear vision, turns to the world which stretches out before him as a burned prairie, as a devastated city —a world in which no churches, asylums, refuges, ideals, are left—and says: “Though you promise me nothing I am still with you, I am still an atom of your energies, my work is part of your work; I am your companion and your mirror as you march on your merciless way.”
— Giovanni Papini

Liminal Cinema

~ Musings on cinema, existence, and observation.

Quote Collection #1

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