Jason > Jason's Quotes

“...Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty.”
― Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.”
― Colin Wilson

“Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.”
― Tasha Alexander, A Fatal Waltz

“Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
― Voltaire

“Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace. ”
― Voltaire

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
― Voltaire

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
― John F. Kennedy

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.”
― William James

“The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
― William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.”
― Eric Bentley

“Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.”
― Charles Hart, The Phantom of the Opera: Sheet Music Piano/Vocal

“What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things--from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies--which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.”
― Eric Bentley

“Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Surely some of you have felt the same way that I do. You have turned sullenly from those thousands of glowing, perfect teeth lighting the American landscape and slouched to the darkness—the half-lighted room, the twilight forest, the empty café. There you have sat and settled into the bare, hard fact that the world is terrible in its beauty, indifferent much of the time, incoherent and nervous and resplendent when on certain evenings, when the clouds are right, a furious owl swooshes luridly from the horizon. You feel that sweet pressure behind your eyes, as if you would at any minute explode into hot tears. You long to languish in this unnamed sadness, this vague sense that everything is precious because it is dying, because you can never hold it, because it exists for only an instant.”
― Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”
― Morris Berman, A Question of Values

“For me, a certain sign of quality or class in art is that when I read, see or listen to something, I suddenly get an acute, clear feeling that somebody's formulated something which I've experienced or thought; exactly the same thing but with the help of a better sentence or better visual arrangement or better composition of sounds than I could ever have imagined. ... It's a description, an image which deeply concerns you, which deeply moves you and is your image.”
― Krzystof Kieslowski