Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives.

How can one who has always been mad go mad?

Undertakings based on an inner tenacity have to be mute and obscure; one has only to declare or glory in them and it all appears silly, without meaning, even petty.

If a computer glitch erases your work, it's a chance to start over with a clean slate.

If someone hurts you, It's a chance to practice forgiveness.

If something is hard, its a chance to get stronger.

Damn, Afrika Bambaataa. What a legend. RIP 💔

The trouble with lessons from history is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion...and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.

How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?

"My soul?" replied Virginia. "I sold it a long time ago for a kilo of truffles. Go ask Igname the Boar for it."

That is 14 too many.

A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

It might indeed be nice if we were all little bubbles of pure reason floating on the stream of time; but we aren't. We are rational beings, but we are also sensual, emotional, appetitive, ethical beings, driven by needs and reaching out for satisfactions which the intellect alone cannot provide.

Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy, and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination to me is next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy.

Choose to be happy

Happiness, the Stoics tell us, comes from within. It's a choice. As Seneca put it: "Everything hangs on one's thinking...A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is."

Lying snowblind in the sun
Will my ice age ever come?

All of it together, all voices, all goals, all yearnings, all sufferings, all pleasures, all good and evil—the world was everything together. Everything together was the river of events, was the music of life.

Weiter! Weiter! Du bist berufen!

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

One had to find it, the primal source in one's own self, one had to make it one's own! Everything else was seeking, was detour, was confusion.

Pipilotti Rist, "Ever Is Over All," Zurich, 1997, video/audio installation.

"Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?"

You're filled with so much life and death and potential for change.

We've got boatloads of peas that are on the high seas from Atlanta to Holland to pay for the tulips that were shipped to Geneva to pay for the cheeses that must go to Vienna M.I.F.

I think you always had a feeling
Like you knew it all along
I kept believing I was never meant to be
But maybe I just had it wrong

In a world that isn't ours
In a place we shouldn't be
For a minute
Just a minute
We made it feel like home

So many monstrous events were occurring that he was no longer positive which events were monstrous and which were really taking place.

He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed.

In the rebel's universe, death exalts injustice.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I tried to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

Inigo went back into his mind.

The dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever.