abigail > abigail's Quotes

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“You really can't do anything about people's lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of the situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

“... it isn't the future but past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin: A Novel

“Men in general don’t know how to live: they have no true familiarity with life, and never feel entirely at ease in it, so they pursue different projects, more or less ambitious and more or less grandiose – generally speaking, of course, they fail and reach the conclusion that they would have been better off just living, but as a rule by that point it’s too late.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

“If an average man’s natural desire were to be a good husband and father, then their work would have been easy. But in early Rome, for example, bachelorhood had to be forbidden by law.[ix] The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.[x] Social liberals and feminists make the same mistake. They assume the problem is that men desire patriarchy and ownership over the wife and family, that men desire dominion over wife and children. They do not see these are, in part, methods some civilizations resorted to in order to induce men to accept the responsibilities of father and husband. Men deprived of patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of freedom that goes with family life.”
― Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy

“Nietzsche rejects this vision as "English." As Strauss points out, Nietzsche does not believe in "a science of morals which teaches the only true morality," and this specifically includes rational or utilitarian morality: rather for Nietzsche what is natural is only the binding or burdening of man to precisely unnatural and unreasonable laws. "Over and against the ruinous permissiveness of anarchism Nietzsche asserts that precisely long lasting obedience to unnatural and unreasonable nomoi is the ‘moral imperative of nature.' Physis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay, opposition of physis and nomos." Nietzsche's rejection of a rational morality is based on his rejection of a utilitarian morality; it is precisely the binding of man to arbitrary, even absurd laws, to laws which serve no particular benefit, that is the character of morality. Religion, premodern polytheism then, cannot emerge out of a utilitarian morality as in the model of Hume. Peoples themselves are the result of the founding acts of creative prophets; much as in Rousseau, Nietzsche believes such prophets or founders—legislators in the highest sense—are the origin therefore of mores and conventions by which peoples live. In this task the founder uses religion, but the religious experience of such founders, and by extension religious experience in general, is therefore not reducible to calculation of benefit or of self-interest.”
― Costin Vlad Alamariu, The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West