Schuld en Boete, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Men is nog tot geen enkele waarheid doorgedrongen zonder eerst veertien maal of zelfs honderdveertien maal onzin te hebben gebazeld, en als die onzin maar op een eigen, op persoonlijke manier tot stand komt, dan verdient dat gebazel ten slotte nog alle waardering. Maar wij spelen niet eens klaar, met ons eigen verstand en op onze eigen manier onzin te bazelen!”

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Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Er is maar één reden, maar één, waarom de mens opzettelijk, welbewust iets kan wensen dat zelfs schadelijk is, iets stoms, zelfs iets ontzettend stoms, en wel om het recht te hebben zichzelf iets ontzettends stoms toe te wensen en niet gebonden te zijn door de verplichting alleen verstandige dingen te willen. [...] omdat het in ieder geval in stand houdt wat het voornaamste en dierbaarste voor ons is, namelijk onze persoonlijkheid en onze individualiteit."

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Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, Terrence McKenna

Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing - a golem. And, indeed this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

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Awareness through Movement, Moshe Feldenkrais

Individuals tend to identify their self-images with their value to society. [...] In this way society comes to be made of persons increasingly alike in their ways, behaviors, and aims. [...] there are few individuals who view themselves without reference to the value attributed to them by society. [...] so the individual tries to smooth out his biological peculiarities by alienating himself from his inherent needs. He strains to fit himself into the round hole that he now actively desires to fill.

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Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski

to whom it may concern: please phone me for appointments when you want to see me. I will not answer unsolicited knocks upon the door. I need time to do my work. please understand that what keeps me alive will make me a better person toward and for you when we finally meet under easy and unstrained conditions.

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Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot

The normal, natural state of men should be wisdom, for wisdom is nothing more than the vision of things as they are, the vision of the cosmos as it is in the light of reason, and wisdom is also nothing more than the mode of being and living that should correspond to this vision.

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Wisdom of the Heart, Henry Miller

"Normality is the paradise of escapeologists, for it is a fixation concept, pure and simple. It is better to stand alone and to feel quite normal about our abnormality, doing nothing whatever about it, except what needs to be done in order to be oneself."

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The Discourses of Epictetus

If there is anyone who renounces externals and attends instead to their character, cultivating and perfecting it so that it agrees with nature, making it honest and trustworthy, elevated, free, unchecked and undeterred; and if they've learned that whoever desires or avoids things outside their control cannot be free or faithful, and if from the moment they get up in the morning they adhere to their ideals, eating and bathing like a person of integrity, putting their principles into practice every situation they face - that is where you will see true progress embodied, and find someone who has not wasted their time making the journey here from home.

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