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The Lilliputians look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

#fraud #gulliver

Astrology provides a brilliant proof of the miserable subjectivity of human beings, as a result of which they relate everything to themselves and go from every thought in a straight line immediately back to themselves. It relates the course of the great celestial bodies to the pathetic I, as it also connects the comets in the sky with earthly quarrels and shabby tricks.

Arthur Schopenhauer

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#nietzsche #loneliness

From the moment of birth - you (the body), exist in a constant default state of deprivation and lack. This body is a 5-sensory composite of needs, wants and desires, which are not easily satisfied. Indeed, you can never be fully satisfied, for this is the nature of the mechanism we find ourselves in - ever craving, never filled. You spend all your conscious, waking hours attempting to fulfill these deficiencies and needs - mostly unsuccessfully. These needs and wants come in many forms; from craving various sensory pleasures to satiating biological needs such as hunger etc. Everything motivating and driving you, is due to you existing in a state of lack. Whether it be physical or psychological. For example - You are sick, so you seek relief. You are lonely, you search for company. You are bored, you crave mental stimuli/distractions. You feel inadequate, you yearn for recognition. You feel depressed, you seek serotonin and dopmaine hits. All action then, must stem from a deficiency - be it subtle or pronounced, for surely something that was "whole" would need for nothing? So, that is all life is. A chasing after sustenance. There is nothing to be gained from the whole affair - no profit whatsoever. It is a get-out-of debt system. A race to the start line. All "positives" are simply just the elimination of negatives and a successful satisfying of biological deprivations. All we are doing is striving to remove burdens and attempting to fulfill bodily needs/cravings which have been imposed upon us by our own biology. To make matters worse, the state of lack never goes away until the body dies, yet the means of fulfilling ones needs decrease as we weaken with age. We are essentially existing within a "deprivation chamber" and all we are doing, is struggling to get gasps of air. Fools will say they have "gained something", but the wise know better. The best one can hope for, is perhaps an excessive satisfying of deprivations and relief. But if that be the case, what merit was there in coming into existence? There was none. Better never to have been.

Michael Kelly

Objectivity is nothing more then agreed subjectivity.

Nero

People must have a tribe. It gives them a name, adding to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world. It makes the environment less disorienting and dangerous. The social world of each modern human is not a single tribe, but rather a system of interlocking tribes. People savor the company of like-minded friends, and they yearn to be in one of the best — perhaps an elite college or the executive committee of a company, a religious sect, a fraternity, a garden club. The goal is to belong to any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other competing groups of the same category. People around the world today have grown ever more cautious of war and are fearful of its consequences. They have turned increasingly to its moral equivalent in team sports. Their thirst for group membership and superiority of their group can be satisfied with victory by their warriors in clashes on ritualized battlefields.

E. O. Wilson

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

Vladimir Nabokov

We often try to banish the gloom and despondency of the present by speculating upon our chances of success in the future; a process which leads us to invent a great many chimerical hopes. Every one of them contains the germ of illusion, and disappointment is inevitable when our hopes are shattered by the hard facts of life.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

We must lift the veil from our eyes, we must face the facts. What are the facts? One is ashamed to put them into words: Life isn’t a pleasant game, occasionally interrupted by easily conquerable obstacles. Life is a losing fight, nature isn’t nice and neither are men. Civilization is a coping mechanism of limited value. That these trite truisms tend to meet with hostile denial and ad hominem attacks goes, in itself, a long way to illustrate my point.

Jacques Umbrac

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.

Joseph Brodsky

Nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals, and we must experience it before we can find out what value these ‘values’ really had.

Friederich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

Immanuel Kant

The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists.

Arthur Schopenhauer, On The Vanity Of Existence

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death.

Albert Camus (The Judge-Penitent, "The Fall")

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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