“Ordinary man lives among phantasms; only the recluse dwells among realities… Anyone who does not turn his back on the contemporary world disgraces himself”

—Nicolás Gómez Davila

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important...they do not mean to do harm...they are absorbed in their endless struggle to think well of themselves.

- T. S. Eliot

Society often forgives
the criminal; it never
forgives the
dreamer.

― Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

— Oscar Wilde

"A genius may sleep within me, but a fool is awake."

Edgar Allan Poe

“To learn, to come to understand things, can be the greatest of human pleasures, and the only one that will never be exhausted.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”

—Giacomo Leopardi

"In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of 'sadism' it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds."

~ Bukowski

In a dying culture, narcissism
embodies the highest attainment
of spiritual enlightenment.

— Christopher Lasch

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."

~ Lawrence Durrell

“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.”

—George Perkins Marsh

“We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. A secretion of sensory experience and feeling. Programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, nobody is anybody.”

—Rust Cohle, True Detective