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
51 The ability to be small.– One has still to be as close to the flowers, the grass and the butterflies as is a child, who is not so very much bigger than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have grown up high above them and have to condescend to them; I believe the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. – He who wants to partake of all good things must know how to be small at times
1(61)Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! – Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a totalstate, a whole surface ofthe whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment – thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.
1 Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness — that means cynically and with innocence. 2 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism . This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. 3 He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer – bird spirit who looks back when relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself. 4 For one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this gospel of the future wants to bear. “The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values” — in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it. For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals — because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had. — We require, sometime, new values
194 The “openhearted.“- That person probably always acts in accordance with secret reasons. for he always has communicable reasons on his lips and practically in his open hand.
It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true. Piet Mondrian
Kick it Over magazine interview question in 1985: You’ve said in your writings that we are undergoing a change as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industry. Could you elaborate on this and talk a bit about why this is occurring now?
Murray Bookchin: The transformation I have in mind is cybernation, genetic engineering, nucleonics, and the sophistication of electronic technology in vast numbers of fields and the development of means of surveillance of a highly sophisticated form. The extent of the transformation is absolutely astonishing. What we find today is a totally immoral economy and society which has managed to unearth the secrets of matter and the secrets of life at the most fundamental level. This is a society that, in no sense, is capable of utilizing this knowledge in any way that will produce a social good. Obviously there are leavings from a banquet that fall from the table but my knowledge and my whole experience with capitalism and with hierarchical society generally is that almost every advance is as best a promise and at worst utterly devastating for the world.
16 All drives are connected with pleasure and displeasure there can be no drive for truth, i.e. for a pure truth entirely without any consequences or affects, because at that point pleasure and displeasure would cease, and there is no drive that has no premonition of pleasure in its own satisfaction. The pleasure of thinking does not indicate a desire for truth. The pleasure of all sensory perceptions derives from the fact that they are brought into being through inferences. To that extent man is always swimming in a sea of pleasure. But to what extent can inference, a logical operation, give pleasure?
not the messenger who speaks differently another way not from heaven but from earth
Krishnamurti
Chapter I
Education and the Significance of Life
When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mold, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.
Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort—this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.
All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. Hermann Goering
It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise. Joseph Goebbels
Every educated person is a future enemy. Martin Bormann
There’s an old German proverb to the effect that “fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” and that is true. Donald Trump,
Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s need to think. Adolf Eichmann
And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.
Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
Nochrisis 