"In general, when faced with a choice, go with the option that will increase your self-respect." - Luca Dellana
"I'm not incurious but my curiosity has a gag reflex." - Steve Albini
"A small dose of irrationality may be an effective vaccine against greater irrationality conducted in the name of rationality." - Zohar Atkins
"It appears to me that it [sin] is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so rare. They are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into higher spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes, on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint." - Arthur Machen
"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning round in a circle of insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can only be one thing that is serious for him – to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious." – G.I. Gurdjieff
"There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities." - Ursula K. Le Guin
"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature — the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society — it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there." - Susan Sontag
"A samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine." - Yukio Mishima
"The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself." - William Burroughs
"Or there’s the mind-numbing booorrredom of modern life, its total absence of adventure, mystery and surprise. Once again, this is a requirement of the machine, which cannot operate in an environment of unpredictable danger or irrational ineffability. Everything which does not fit, which cannot be rationalised into a discrete thing, which cannot, thereby, be managed, must be levelled out by a machine system. Everyone feels the pain of living in a boring dystopia, right the way up the ladder, but all who work within the system are helpless to do anything about it, because allowing things to go haywire, allowing the kind of free spontaneity which leads to the wild, adventurous uncertainty we all (despite ourselves) crave or allowing people to work slowly and carefully to create mysterious fractal beauty; all this disrupts the rational ordering of society, sending ripples of fear through the boring monsters who own and manage it. This is why everyone everywhere, with astonishingly few exceptions, looks as if they are stuck in a traffic jam." - Darren Allen
"People who speak the truth are unlikeable because the truth is unlikeable. The truth is, at least to the self, annoying, disturbing, hurtful and, in extremis, absolutely horrifying. It is disorienting to read or hear of it; indeed that is how you know it is the truth. It can be, at least to the self, positively agonising to experience reality, so one can hardly be expected to find reading about it reassuring. If it is, you can be certain that you are not actually encountering anything of real value, but a sop, something said in order to gain approval, to reassure you and to make you feel good." - Darren Allen