Notable Quotable 323

Sep 06, 2024

Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

- Ursula K. Le Guin

...he who has independent ideas is hated by the mass[es].

- Shang Yang

Being allowed to choose between the political “left” and the political “right” provides the people with exactly as much power and freedom as allowing them to choose between death by hanging and death by firing squad.

- Larken Rose

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

- Simone Weil

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

Clarity is freedom. Know what is important to you and it will grant you the freedom to ignore everything else.

- James Clear

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.

Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me… So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly.

- Aldous Huxley, Island

The need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed is matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another. It is a dispersion in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised... These are the inevitable results of an ever more pronounced materialization, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles.

- René Guénon

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

- T.S. Eliot