“Appearance has more force than reality” - Plato The Republic

“Human nature can find no better helper than love.” Socrates

“Love is wishing good things for someone for that person’s sake.” Aristotle

“That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good & evil.” Nietzsche Beyond Good & Evil

“There is scarcely an passion without struggle... But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection and intelligence that binds me to this or that creature.” - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.” Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent

“Fooling people is even more delicious than shocking them.” - Simone de Beauvoir

“What an enigma is man ! - Yes, my friend, and that’s what made a very witty man say that it’s better to fuck him than to understand him.” - Marquis de Sade

“The fundamental task of intelligent living is that of examining the relative worth of varying and opposed values & of bringing about their most valuable combinations.” Merritt M. Thompson Homophile Ethics

“Ordinary living consists of the rhythm of desire-satisfaction, repeated endlessly.” Merritt M. Thompson Homophile Ethics

“The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.” - Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter & Forgetting

“whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.” - Herman Hesse Steppenwolf

"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of compulsive self importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved." - Weber

“Where the machine is

there is always an abyss and nothingness.” - Antonin Artauld

“In the mean-time, if one has to go mad, the tactic to learn in our society is one of discretion.” - D. G. Cooper Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry

“This terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine which ground to powder millions of poor wretches - outcasts of fortune whom philanthropists urged, by way of consolation, to sing psalms and recite verses of the Bible.” Huysmans Against Nature

“ ‘How can a great and wise civilisation have detroyed itself so completely?’

‘Perhaps‘, said Apollo, ‘by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.’ ” - W. M. Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Nobody wants to work.... If they do, it is only so that they might improve the conditions of their rest.” Deleuze and Guattari

“Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to become co-existensive with the fields of nature, history and sociality... a deliberate attempt to introduce machinic relations at every level; for example, unrestrained experimentation in genetic science, a further deterritorialisation of the organic structures and its reterritoriaslisation by technology.” - Deleuze and Guattari

“The sex-dope is provided, but always with a quick preliminary glance over the left shoulder at ‘morality’.” - Hoggart The Uses of Literacy

“Souls which may have had little opportunity to open will be kept hard-gripped turned in upon themselves, looking out with odd dark eyes like windows upon a world which is largely a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulation.” - Hoggart The Uses of Literacy

"In a society of an hundred thousand families, there will perhaps be one hundred who don't labour at all, and who yet, either by violence, or by the more orderly oppression of law, employ a greater part of the labour of society than any other ten thousand in it. The division of what remains, too, after this enormous defalcation, is by no means made in proportion to the labour of each individual. On the contrary those who labour most get least. The opulent merchant, who spends a great part of his time in luxury and entertainments, enjoys a much greater proportion of the profits of his traffic, than all the Clerks and Accountants who do the business. These last, again, enjoying a great deal of leisure, and suffering scarce any other hardship besides the confinement of attendance, enjoy a much greater share of the produce, than three times an equal number of artisans, who, under their direction, labour much more severely and assiduously. The artisan again, tho' he works generally under cover, protected from the injuries of the weather, at his ease and assisted by the convenience of innumerable machines, enjoys a much greater share than the poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and, who while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building."
--Adam Smith

“Bradley.... defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if anyone believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that’s philosophy.” Aldous Huxley Brave New World

“If God made anything better, he’d have kept it for himself.” W. S. Burroughs

“Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks withot knowledge, of things without parallel.” - Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

“What are these churches now if they are not the tombs & sepulchres of God?” Nietzsche The Gay Science

“A wise man proportions his beliefs to the evidence.” Hume Dialogues

“I can understand only in human terms.” - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“The awful ambiguity grinning over it all.” - Herman Hesse Steppenwolf

“How random is it actually? Don Juan says that nothing is random to a man of knowledge: everything he sees or hears is there just at that time waiting to be seen and heard.” W. S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night

“However little you withheld from Him, it would be too much if God existed; and however little you gave Him it would be too much again if He did not exist.” - Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations #261

“I had been very struck by Kierkegaard’s idea that a genuinley moral person could never have an easy conscience, and only pledges his or her liberty in ‘fear and trembling’ ” - Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse.” - Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter & Forgetting

“People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end & that behind all the joyous “onward & upward” slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.” - Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter & Forgetting

“Guilt is the price of feeling alive.” - Pierre Klossowski Nature as Destructive Principle

“Believe me: I’ve stayed up al night waiting for something. But this isn’t the same: this will creep up behind us, ... and we won’t be able to prepare for it... it isn’t natural to die.”- Sartre The Wall

“Define me by my mortality. By the incompleteness implicit in my passions. It would be an irrelevance to imagine this existence without these passions...” Robert Nye Falstaff

“Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” - Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

“The cold days pass quickly into endless nights. The dark solitude leads to an adrift isolation. Cold & dark like the depths of night clouded with water. Isolation of sleep takes the spirit and the feeling. We die as we dream - alone.” - J. Conrad Heart of Darkness

“Each moment appears only to bring on the moment after.” - Sartre, Nausea

“This moment, too, is the only one.” - Stanislav Ignacy Witkacy, The Madman and the Nun

“They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.” - Albert Camus The Plague

“There is no greatness without a readiness and capacity to withstand, absorb, and use to best purpose an immense quantity of pain. Greatness involves putting pain to work; goodness involved attempting to eliminate it.” Nietzsche paraphrased

“Where there is a stink of shit

there is a smell of being.” - Antonin Artauld

“ ‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’ The ultimate reassurance and the ultimate terror.” R. D. Laing “The Politics of Experience.”

“Tiz, a psychologist, asked me about a boy in a psychiatric prison who had cut off his mother’s head and roasted it in the oven. My reflections on this story were that perhaps he was hungry.” D. G. Cooper Death of the Family