Sierra Golf

“- even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.”
― Thomas De Quincey 1785-1859

“The inherited sense of being a higher type of creature with higher claims already makes such a man fairly cold and leaves his conscience at rest: we all, indeed, lose all feeling of injustice when the difference between ourselves and other creatures is very great, and will kill a gnat, for example, without the slightest distress of conscience. Thus it is no sign of baseness in Xerxes (whom even the Greeks depict as being outstandingly noble) when he takes a son from his father and has him dismembered because he has expressed fearful and ominous misgivings about the whole campaign they are engaged on: in this instance the individual is disposed of like an annoying insect: he is too lowly to be allowed to go on upsetting a world-ruler. Indeed, no cruel man is so cruel as he whom he has misused believes; the idea of pain is not the same thing as the suffering of it. The same applies to the unjust judge, to the journalist who misleads public opinion with petty untruths. Cause and effect are in all these cases surrounded by quite different groups of thoughts and sensations; while one involuntarily presupposes that doer and sufferer think and feel the same and, in accordance with this presupposition, assesses the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Character is not what people do, it is the things people do when they think no one is watching.”
― Exurb1a, Poems for the Lost Because I'm Lost Too

“Everything habitual draws an ever tighter net of spiderwebs around us; then we notice that the fibres have become traps, and that we ourselves are sitting in the middle, like a spider that got caught there and must feed on its own blood.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate