Karol

“As a result of "love," man is able to hide his cowardly self-deception behind a smoke screen of sentiment. He is able to make himself believe that his senseless enslavement to woman and her hostages is more than an act of honor, it has a higher purpose. He is entirely happy in his role as a slave and has arrived at the goal he has so long desired. Since woman gains nothing but one advantage after another from the situation as it stands today, things will never change. The system forces her to be corrupt, but no one is going to worry about that. Since one can expect nothing from a woman but love, it will remain the currency for any need she might have. Man, her slave, will continue to use his energies only according to his conditioning and never to his own advantage. He will achieve greater goals, and the more he achieves, the farther women will become alienated from him. The more he tries to ingratiate himself with her, the more demanding she will become; the more he desires her, the less she will find him desirable; the more comforts he provides for her, the more indolent, stupid, and inhuman she will become — and man will grow lonelier as a result.”
― Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man

“Dorothy Norman invited me to dinner in New York.
There was a lady there from Philadelphia who was
an authority on Buddhist art. When she found out
I was interested in mushrooms, she said, “Have
you an explanation of the symbolism involved in the
death of the Buddha by his eating a mushroom?” I
explained that I’d never been interested in
symbolism; that I preferred just taking things as
themselves, not as standing for other things.
But then a few days later while rambling in the
woods I got to thinking. I recalled the Indian
concept of the relation of life and the seasons.
Spring is Creation. Summer is Preservation.
Fall is Destruction. Winter is
Quiescence. Mushrooms grow most vigorously in
the fall, the period of destruction, and the
function of many of them is to bring about the final
decay of rotting material. In fact, as I
read somewhere, the world would be an impassible
heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and
their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to
the lady in Philadelphia. I said, “The
function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old
rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
― Amos Tversky

“The patient fights being a winner because he is not in treatment for that purpose, but only to be made into a braver loser. This is natural enough, since if he becomes a braver loser, he can follow his script more comfortably, whereas if he becomes a winner he has to throw away all or most of his script and start over, which most people are reluctant to do.”
― Eric Berne, What Do You Say After You Say Hello?