only the strong go crazy

“If one would make a thorough revolution, one must attack things and relationships, destroy property and the state. Then there would be no need to destroy men.”

““God does not work through the is.” God works through what Lao Tzu calls the weak, the empty; this is the same God.”

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”

“To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.”

“What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?”

“Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.”

“That, as of old, was the writer’s job, maybe his primary job. To show us the futures we didn’t want, and the futures we could have if we wanted.”

“Men are so simple, and so inclined to obey immediate needs, that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.”

“It is only up to a certain point that possessions make men more independent and free; one step further — and the possessions become master, the possessor becomes a slave: as which he must sacrifice to them his time and his thoughts and henceforth feel himself obligated to a society, nailed to a place and incorporated into a state none of which perhaps meets his inner and essential needs.”