Introspectium — Philosophy & Psychology

“I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.” ~Bob Kaufman

"They never live. They are like the sheep in the fields, that have their noses to the ground, and anticipate only the thrill of increase." -- D.H. Lawrence

We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice. —Henry David Thoreau

"Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing." ~ Ernest Becker

"Americans are attached to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They're TV-hypnotized. TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth Century culture's disease is the inability to feel the reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotions over symbols, but in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead." ~ Jim Morrison

"But as life goes on...all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a [human], and he or she usually tries to win a following for his or her particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula, (a denial of death.) -- Ernest Becker

“We live in a habitat of unrealities—not of earth, air, water, and wildlife—and cradling illusion trounces grim logic every time.” -Thomas Ligotti

“After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion.” — Emil Cioran

“We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him—the delight in life.” ― Ryszard Kapuściński

“When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.” —Michel Houellebecq

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.” —C. Wright Mills

“I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy. Philosophers have no good news for you at this level. I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!” ― Slavoj Žižek

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?” —Friedrich Nietzsche

"Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia." ~ William Burroughs

"The wicked act is a transfer onto others of the degradation that one carries within oneself." —Simone Weil

"A large part of the evil that man unleashes on himself and his world stems not from a wickedness in his heart, but from the way he was conditioned to see the world and to seek satisfaction in it. He blindly follows out his unconscious urges in the frantic activity of daily life, and gets his satisfaction and his self-esteem. He fits himself into the bureaucratic-industrial machines of our day and gives his uncritical allegiance to the nation states that run these machines. He is part of an objectified structure, an ant doing his small part reflexively in a huge anthill of delegated power and authority. He follows orders, keeps his nose clean, and gets whatever satisfactions his character structure has equipped him to seek." — Ernest Becker