Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
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The world is the mirror of myself dying.
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A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
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Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
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Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
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I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
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Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
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The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
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There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
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It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
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What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
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If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
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Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
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It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
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To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
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The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life.
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Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
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A man of good will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a deep, tranquil, rich life -- provided he go his own way. He need not and should not think of making a good living, but rather of creating a good life for himself. To live one's own life is still the best way of life, always was, and always will be.
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Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
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Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...
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The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth.
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Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
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Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
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Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
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One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
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In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
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The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
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The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
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When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.
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Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
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