Stephen Hawking quote

"However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope."

Rebecca West quote

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."

Transference - The Outdated Map

Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment. Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth.
- The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Alan Watts quotes

"People, your friends, all sorts of people, will do their utmost to persuade you that you're missing something. Because they're missing something, and they think they're getting it through a certain way. And therefore, to assure themselves, they'd like you to do it too."

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"When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique."

Viktor E. Frankl quotes

One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over and done, as if he had already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remote-out of reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life, that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world.

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This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

- Man's Search For Meaning

William S. Burroughs quote

"I deplore brutality", he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct."
- Naked Lunch

Philip K. Dick quote

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
- A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly - written for the screen and directed by Richard Linklater

Aldous Huxley quote

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

- Brave New World Revisited

Bill Hicks quote

Here's what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace.

Noam Chomsky quote

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favour of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favour of freedom of speech, that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

J. Krishnamurti quotes

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

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Questioner: “Sir, what do you want us people here in this world to do?”

Krishnamurti: “Very simple, sir. I don’t want anything. That’s first. Second, live, live in this world. This world is so marvellously beautiful. It is our world, our earth to live upon, but we do not live, we are narrow, we are separate, we are anxious, we are frightened human beings, and therefore we do not live, we have no relationship, we are isolated, despairing human beings. We do not know what it means to live in that ecstatic, blissful sense. I say one can live that way only when one knows how to be free from all the stupidities of ones life. To be free from them is only possible in becoming aware of ones relationship, not only with human beings, but with ideas, with nature, with everything.”

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“Understanding of the self only arises in relationship in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things, to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action.”

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“Can there be a feeling without thought? Can you ride a feeling without directing it, seeking to change it, calling it good or bad? Try it.”