"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then." -- Blaise Pascal"I might have
made the most intelligent and penetrating remarks about the ramifications and the causes of my sufferings, my sickness of soul, my general bedevilment of neurosis. The mechanism was transparent to me. But what I needed was not knowledge and understanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and resolution, action and reaction, impulse and impetus." -- Herman Hess STEPPENWOLF
"How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became
for me more and more the real measure of value." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Yes, we know all about this aspect of the bettle-man. He thinks too much. Thinking has thinned his blood and made him incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. He envies simpler, stupider people because they are undivided." -- Colin Wilson THE OUTSIDER
"From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether
or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt--that is the whole question." -- Albert Camus
Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time--on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood, compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium--things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt
that such pain makes us "better"; but I know that it makes us more profound. --Nietzsche
"I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The
horror! The horror!'." "This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up -- he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression
of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth -- the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best -- a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things -- even of this pain itself." -- Joseph Conrad HEART OF DARKNESS
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow;
don't walk behind me, I may not lead; walk beside me, and just be my friend. --Camus
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live." -- Mark Twain
For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously. --Sartre
"I hate common humanity. This oafish crowd which tramples the ground whence my cloud-capped pinnacles might rise. I am tired of humanity- beyond
measure. Take it away. This gaping, stinking, bombing, shooting, throat-slitting, cringing brawl of gawky, under-nourished riff-raff. Clear the earth of them!" -- Professor Keppel in H.G. Well's "Star Begotten"
He tried to imagine that seeing a young couple parading on the street didn't mean anything, but it affected him. The opposite sex remained a mystery. He could not accept the idea that a woman might love him. He gazed in amazement at
empty-faceed men locked arm in arm with beautiful women; he felt the rift between these men's sexual nonchalance and his own hyper-sensitivity and vulnerability. All the more he turned to the typewriter and the ephemeral glories of intoxication. "Probably, I could have ended up not liking myself," he says, "but I was lucky. There was nothing wrong with me. It was other people who fell short, who didn't have true humanity." -- from Hank: the
life of Charles Bukowsky by Neeli Cherkovski
"What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality.... And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place.... the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.... and what he sees is essentially chaos." "I do not want the death of the senses. I want people to understand.
I cannot cry and shed tears over what I write, but I cry within me.... I am in a trance, the trance of love. I want to say so much and cannot find the words...." -- Colin Wilson THE OUTSIDER
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
And therefore is wing'd cupid painted blind.
Nor hath love's mind of any judgement taste.
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste.
And therefore is love said to be a child.
Because, in choice, he is so oft beguiled."
-Helena from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakesphere
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not
worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." -- Camus
"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said. -- Kafka
I must find a truth that is true for me. -- Soren Kierkegaard
I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you. -- Freidrich
Nietzsche
Tonight I stay at the summit temple. Here, I could pluck the stars with my hand. I dare not speak aloud in the silence, for fear of disturbing the dwellers of heaven. --Li Po
