Mike

“Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“…the association of two, or more, apparently alien elements on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works

“To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.”
― Emil Cioran, History and Utopia