Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
I am an anarchist because contemporary society is divided into two opposing classes: the impoverished and dispossessed workers and peasants who have created with their own hands and their own enormous toil all the riches of this earth; and the rich men, kings and presidents who have confiscated all these riches for themselves. Towards these parasitic capitalists and ruling kings and presidents there rose in me a feeling of outrage, indignation, and loathing, while at the same time I felt sorrow and compassion for the labouring proletariat who have been eternal slaves in the vice- like grip of the world wide bourgeoisie.
I am an anarchist because I scorn and detest all authority, since all authority is founded on injustice, exploitation and compulsion over the human personality. Authority dehumanises the individual and makes him a slave.
370 Discharging ill humor.-Any person who fails at something prefers to attribute this failure to the ill will of someone else, rather than to chance. His stimulated sensibility is relieved by thinking of a person and not of a thing as the reason for his failure; for we can revenge ourselves on people, but we have to choke down the injuries of chance. Therefore, when a prince has failed at something, his circle tends to designate some individual as the ostensible cause and to sacrifice that person in the interest of all the courtiers; for otherwise, the ill humor of the prince would be vented on all of them, since he cannot take any revenge on the goddess of fate herself.
351 Pangs of conscience after social gatherings. -Why do we have pangs of conscience after ordinary social gatherings? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in speaking of other people we have not spoken with complete truthfulness, or because we have kept silent where we ought to have said something, because we did not take an occasion to spring to our feet and run away, in short, because we have behaved in society as if we belonged to it.
632 Anyone who has not made his way through various convictions, but has instead remained attached to the belief in whose net he first became entangled, is at all events a representative of backward cultures precisely because of this constancy; in accordance with this lack of cultivation (which always presupposes cultivatability), he is hard, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, always suspicious, an unscrupulous person who seizes upon every means for making his opinion prevail because he simply cannot comprehend that there have to be any other opinions; in this regard, he may perhaps be a source of strength and even salutary in cultures that have become all too free and flaccid, yet only because he forcibly stimulates opposition to himself: for in this way, the more delicate creations of the new culture, which are forced to struggle with him, become strong themselves.
627 Living and experiencing. -If we consider how some individuals know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant daily experiences – so that these become a field that bears fruit three times a year; while others – and how many they are ! – though driven through the pounding waves of the most stimulating destinies and the most varied currents of ages and peoples, still remain like a cork, ever buoyant, ever on the surface: we are finally tempted to divide humanity into a minority (a minimality) of those who understand how to make a great deal out of very little and a majority of those who understand how to make very little out of a great deal; indeed, we encounter those reverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create a nothing out of the world.
To be aware means to be sensitive, alive to the things about one, to nature, to people, to colour, to trees, to the environment, to the social structure, the whole thing; to be aware outwardly of all that’s happening and to be aware of what is happening inside. Krishnamurti
618 Being philosophically minded. -We generally strive to acquire a single mental posture, a single class of opinions, for all the situations and events in life – that is what we are most likely to call being philosophically minded. But it may have a higher value for the enrichment of knowledge if we do not make ourselves uniform in this way, but instead listen to the soft voice of different situations in life; these bring their own particular views along with them. Thus, we take an attentive interest in the life and being of many things by not treating ourselves as fixed, stable, single individuals.
621 Love as a trick. -Anyone who really wants to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to quickly avert his eye from and even to forget everything in it that appears hostile, offensive, or false to him: so that, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as at a race, actually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By proceeding in this way, we press into the heart of the new thing, to the point that gives it motion: and this is precisely what getting to know it means. If we have gotten this far, the understanding can set its restrictions afterward; that overestimation, that temporary staying of the critical pendulum, was simply a trick for enticing the soul of the thing to come forth.
586 Of the hour hand of life. – Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals of time in which at best the shadowy images of those moments hover around us. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea- only once do all those things speak fully to the heart: if in fact they ever do find their way completely into words. For many people do not have any such moments and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.
574 Miraculous vanity. -Anyone who boldly prophesies the weather three times and does so successfully believes a little bit, deep down in his soul, in his prophetic gift. We give credit to miraculous and irrational things when it flatters our self-esteem.
“In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.”
Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
5 2 1 Greatness means: giving direction.-No river is made great and fertile by itself alone: but rather it is made so by absorbing and bearing onward so many tributaries. So it is, too, with all who are great in spirit. All that matters is that a single one provides the direction that the many tributaries then must follow; not whether he is at the beginning poorly or abundantly endowed.
488 Equanimity in action. -As a waterfall moves more slowly and floats more leisurely as it plunges downward, so a great man of action tends to act with more equanimity than his tempestuous desire prior to acting would have led us to expect.
489 Not too deep. -Those persons who grasp a thing in all its depth rarely remain true to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light: where there is always much that is terrible to see.
490 Delusion of idealists.– idealists.-All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are essentially better than everything else in the world and do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish, it will require exactly the same foul-smelling manure as is necessary for every other human undertaking.
38 The happiness of the individual in the state is subordinated to the common good: what does that mean? Not that the minorities are used for the good of the majorities. Rather that the individuals are subordinated to the good of the supreme individuals, the good of the supreme specimens. The supreme individuals are the creative men, be they the best in a moral sense or the best and most useful in some other important sense, that is, the purest types and improvers of mankind. The goal of the polity is not the existence of a state at all costs, but the possibility for the supreme specimens to live and work in it. This is also the foundation on which states come into being, although people have often had a wrong idea of who the supreme specimens were: often conquerors, etc., dynasts. Ifit is no longer possible to maintain the existence of a state in which the great individuals can live and work, a terrible state based on necessity and robbery comes into being: a state in which the strongest individuals take the place of the best. The task of the state is not to enable as many people as possible to lead good and moral lives in it. Numbers do not matter: what matters is that a good and beautiful life as such should be possible in a state; that the state should provide the foundation of a culture. In short: the goal of the state is a nobler humanity. The state’s goal is beyond the state: the state is a means to an end. Today the element that binds all the partial forces together is missing: and so we see that everything is hostile to everything else and all the noble forces are engaged in a mutually devastating war of annihilation. I will demonstrate this by means of philosophy, which destroys because it is bound by nothing. The philosopher has become a public menace. He annihilates happiness, virtue, culture, and finally himself. To avoid this, philosophy must be an ally of the binding force, a physician of culture
Nochrisis 