Brayden Olson

“The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present

“...the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
― Shakespeare, Hamlet

“You err first of all in the assumption that the intellectual cannot assume a personal character. You should not think that. The point at which you go wrong is in your estimation of the things of the mind, in general. You obviously think they are too feeble to engender conflicts and passions comparable for sternness with those real life brings forth, the only issue of which can be the appeal to force. All’ incontro! The abstract, the refined-upon, the ideal, is at the same time the Absolute—it is sternness itself; it contains within it more possibilities of deep and radical hatred, of unconditional and irreconcilable hostility, than any relation of social life can.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Only he who has the courage to be absolutely negative has also the power to create something new”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings