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Alex Vile

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“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: books, life, limits

20370 likes

“The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

tags: ambiguity, words

16 likes

“In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

79 likes

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.”
― Friedrich Neitzsche

2505 likes

“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

tags: civilization, exploitation, philosophy

145 likes

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