Zeno > Zeno's Quotes

“If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Why do you like me more when I was prouder and wilder, more full of words, yet emptier?”
― Friedrich Hölderlin

“Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses

“What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?”
― Wyndham Lewis, Letters

“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]”
― Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

“Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales

“Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“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

“The legionary spirit is that fire of one who will choose the hardest road, who will fight to the death even when all is already lost.”
― Julius Evola

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

“Life must go on, even if it's no joke...just pretend to believe in the future.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, North

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”
― Sophocles

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath...a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
― F. T. Marinetti

“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

“It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.”
― Miguel De Cervantes, The Dialogue of the Dogs

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”
― Emil Cioran

“[A] nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
― Marshall McLuhan