Tolle
- The "Now" is all there ever is.
A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: it is the power of your presence.
Stephen King
- Tom Cullen's prayer, from "The Stand"
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.
Herman Melville
- 'Mermaids Song'; Moby Dick, Chapter 112: The Blacksmith
Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!
Herman Melville
- Moby Dick, Chapter 107: The Carpenter
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
Algernon Blackwood
- Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity.. forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
unknown
- Verse 5, Surat At-Tawbah (9), The Quran
And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them go on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.
Steven Pressfield
- Freedom, from "The War of Art"
It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe. The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
Steven Pressfield
- Fundamentalism and Art, from "The War of Art"
Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art. This does not mean that the fundamentalist is not creative. Rather, his creativity is inverted. He creates destruction. Even the structures he builds, his schools and networks of organization, are dedicated to annihilation, of his enemies and of himself.
Ragnar Redbeard
- The Book of Satan, Chapter 3, Verse 1, 3
"Love one another" it has been said is the supreme law, but what power made it so? Upon what rational authority does the gospel of love rest? Why should I not hate mine enemies - if I "love" them does that not place me at their mercy? Can the torn and bloody victim "love" the blood-splashed jaws that rend him limb from limb?
