Jay > Jay's Quotes

“Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.”
― Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul

“The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions—what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment.”
― Slavoj Žižek, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse

“Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.”
― Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism

“The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation—becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure—as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“Those, then, who want to find themselves at the starting point of a truly free philosophy, have to depart even from God. Here the motto is: whoever wants to preserve it will lose it, and whoever abandons it will find it. Only those have reached the ground in themselves and have become aware of the depths of life, who have at one time abandoned everything and have themselves been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has been lost, and who have found themselves alone, face-to-face with the infinite: a decisive step which Plato compared with death. That which Dante saw written on the door of the inferno must be written in a different sense also at the entrance to philosophy: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ Those who look for true philosophy must be bereft of all hope, all desire, all longing. They must not wish anything, not know anything, must feel completely bare and impoverished, must give everything away in order to gain everything. It is a grim step to take, it is grim to have to depart from the final shore.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.”
― Vilfredo Pareto

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

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate”
― Julius Evola

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hand, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.”
― Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”
― René Guénon

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else's equal, 'At bottom we are all herd and mob.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”
― Martin Heidegger

“What could be more alien to the "they", lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the "nothing"?”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
― Nick Land

“Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner.”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia