Jason Pickles > Jason's Quotes

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The hooting of the owl with its tender wing is more familiar to me than the crowing of the cock. I prefer the strings to the woodwinds. Intermission: that is the darkness. The light feels like a vague scratching; it is malaise rather than pain. I am glad to sink back into darkness.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current....”
― Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Book of Two Friendships

“The shadowy side of real life is ignored, and Western Christianity provides us with nothing which can be used to interpret it. Thus the young men of the West are unable to deal with the mixture of light and shadow of which life really consists; they have no way of linking the facts of existence to their preconceived notions of absolutes.”
― Miguel Serrano

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Do you know why I have so patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw with terror and rapture subjects dreamed by me and described by him, twenty years earlier. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE”
― Otto Rahn, Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“When the human voice is reduced to being no longer a song, a word, or a cry, but the articulation of the unnamable itself, it is natural that there should be no other sound than the grinding of ice in the polar regions, the light, intermittent crackling of silk in the highest zones of the atmosphere, at the moment when the aurora borealis unfurls its strange, cold spangles. Majesty does not tolerate other eyes than these hard crystals”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
― Georges Bataille, Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.”
― Georges Bataille

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille

“In what will survive me
I am in harmony
with my annihilation.”
― Georges Bataille

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”
― Georges Bataille

“Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak”
― Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

“Our dreams recover what the world forgets.”
― James Hillman, Animal Presences

“What door is opened into soul through our wounds.”
― James Hillman

“The deepest subjectivity is not personal.”
― James Hillman, Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
― David Benatar , Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of children or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and resources if they do not have and rear children. My anti-natalist view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become, even if not having those children runs counter to the interests of those who would have them.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“I saw the tears of the oppressed—
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: New International Version

“Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”
― William S. Burroughs