[qingdom]

"I forgot what I was going to say...", basically any and all absent minded professors in existence.

[permanentfacade]

'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god' - Kurt Vonnegut.

Whenever someone asks me to do anything out of the ordinary i hear this in my head and say fuck it, let's go. It's a good excuse for being reckless. I also like the quote in my signature -look down - it's from the Unbearable Lightness of Being, a brilliant book i think most INTP's would enjoy.

[Promethea]

I am God, and all other gods are my imagery. I gave birth to myself.
I am millions of forms excreating; eternal; and nothing exists except through me; yet I am not them they serve me.
- Austin Osman Spare

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery
-always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud.
And why? What's this passion for?
- Virginia Woolf

I liked the shifiting of colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next.
They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of,
maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports.
Where could I find a place were my world connected to theirs?
-White Oleander

Now my heart, paining my bosom, Pants with desire as a maenad Mad for the orgiac revel.
- Sapphos

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
- C.G. Jung

Accumulated feelings of anger, resentment, and hurt become toxic in the body.
These emotions have to go somewhere, especially if they are repressed or suppressed.
- Michael Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation, 193

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
- Jack Kerouac

My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
- John Green

Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking,
‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that.
We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform.
I get so tired of communicating.
- Anneli Rufus

Man: Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
- The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity

‎In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
- The Society of the Spectacle By Guy Debord

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. In an evolving universe, who stands still moves backwards.
Robert Anton Wilson

Dance, as though no one is watching,
Love, as though you've never been hurt before,
Sing, as though no one can hear you,
Work, as though you don't need the money,
Live, as though heaven is on earth.
Rumi

We are not to worship the Khu, to fall in love with our magical image (bodies). To do this--we have all done it--is to forget our truth. If we adore form, it becomes opaque to being and may soon prove false to itself.
Crowley

Maybe I'm too young to know what the world should be, but I know it shouldn't be this. It can't be this.
Huey Freeman (Boondocks)

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?
Buddha

I knew a lady very like your sister - the same impulsive sweetness of temper - who was forced into, as you put it, a better acquaintance with the world. The result was only ruination and despair. Do not desire it, Miss Dashwood.
(Sense and Sensibility)

We live in an intensely complicated personal world that we each possess so intimately that it's seemingly indescribable to others, so that when something makes the distance and creates a bridge, and the complications between these personal worlds seem thin and a connection is formed even between two strangers, like an impossible tear in a sheet of iron, a piece of someone else's secret world will come to view, and speak to your own psyche. this is where I find that understanding may very well be the strongest connection between souls. It's when I find this unexpected view into another's microcosm that I can comfort myself and know that I am not entirely alone, that there are others whose minds may be so intense that they would do almost anything to escape at times.
"Anne"

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers. The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.
Guy Debord

She finished the drink, hefted the sword over one shoulder, and looked around at the puzzled factions, who now encircled her completely... The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn't want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
(Good Omens)

"God (aka Douglas Adams) is the protagonist of the Bible, a book which has somehow sold moar copies than Harry Potter, making it the most successful work of fiction evar. The Bible, the chronology of God's Adventures, is a volume of pornography, rape, incest, and other sorts of epic win. It is believed that God created the universe with no other reason than to play a game of The Sims against Satan. Christians reject basic scientific facts due to skepticism, yet in a stunning twist, they believe fucking everything written in any book labeled "The Bible", regardless of how unbelievable it is."
- Anonymous.

[CowboyBarry]

"It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again."
-Parmenides

“The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it,neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses”
-Xenophanes of Colophon

"Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever."
-From the Daodejing

"At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older life is totally about losing everything."
-Mike Tyson

[Minerva1]

Another favorite - "Absurdity is the only reality." - Zappa

More random Zappa quotes...

"May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face."

"You know today the church is in a terrible state. The bucks just aren't rollin' in
like they used to. And when the bucks don't come in, the church comes up
with a new gimmick to make you spend to go to heaven.
Now I know you don't know what I'm talking about, but what the fuck. But
anyway, listen to this ladies and gentlemen, when the church wants to get
your money they remind you about hell.
If you commit a sin you're gonna go to hell. Oui, oui.
Sometimes people say that if you fuck somebody, oh lord, its a sin,
Oui, oui. This may or may not be true.
This boy not only fucked somebody with his organ, but he also fucked a girl
with a guitar, with an umbrella, with a zuchinni, with a shoe, with an enema
bag. What else did you do? A vibrato bar. A vibrato bar!
Some people would say this is a sin. And if you sin you're gonna go to hell.
Well ladies and gentlemen:
There aint no hell. - Oui.
There is no such thing as hell. - Oui.
There is no hell, there is only France! - Oui.
Oui, oui!"

"You drank beer, you played golf, you watched football, WE EVOLVED!"

[downsowf]

Quotes from one of my favorite novels: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow.

“External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.”

“We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They’re just the way we plead or ague with ourselves about it, but it’s only light from the outside that we’re supposed to take inside. If we can. There’s a regular warehouse of fine suggestions and if we’re not better it isn’t because there aren’t plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together.”

“Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.”

“Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?”

“Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent."

“Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.”

[Ista]

"Specificity is the soul of all good communication"

- The Middleman via Ormazd (INTJ) signature.

[ChairmanMeow]

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing all mankind." - John Stuart Mill

"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations." - John von Newmann

"Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same [patterns]." - Machiavelli

"All warfare is based on deception." - Sun Tzu

"If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say." - H.L. Mencken

"Valid criticism is doing you a favor." - Carl Sagan

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little ... who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours." - John Locke

[antahon]

Only entropy comes easy.
-Anton Chekhov

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

And a favorite,

We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy … Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent … it is our job to create them. One of those purposes — among many — stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.
Sean Carroll

[Ista]

"We are all things, all the time. What makes the difference is when you decide to press the shutter button.." - Adriana (@Lady Nurture)