Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
― George E.P. Box

“Language is a virus from outer space”
― William S. Burroughs

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Bernard of Clairvaux

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”
― Thomas Ligotti , The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“There’s no reason to live, but there’s no reason to die, either. The only way we can still show our contempt for life is to accept it. Life is not worth the bother of leaving it. Out of charity, one might spare a few individuals the trouble of living, but what about oneself? Despair, indifference, betrayal, fidelity, solitude, the family, freedom, weight, money, poverty, love, absence of love, syphilis, health, sleep, insomnia, desire, impotence, platitudes, art, honesty, dishonor, mediocrity, intelligence – nothing there to make a fuss about. We know only too well what those things are made of, no point in watching for them.”
― Jacques Rigaut

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that’s performing the logic.”
― Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

“People not only don't know what's happening to them, they don't even know that they don't know.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“To live outside the law you must be honest.”
― Bob Dylan

“But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay