Sivaganesh > Sivaganesh's Quotes

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
― Socrates

“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
― Socrates

“If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”
― Socrates

“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”
― Socrates

“Know thyself.”
― Socrates

“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“As a survival-happy species, our successes are calculated in the number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of suffering being only incidental to this aim. To stay alive under almost any circumstances is a sickness with us. Nothing could be more unhealthy than to “watch one’s health” as a means of stalling death. The lengths we will go as procrastinators of that last gasp only demonstrate a morbid dread of that event. By contrast, our fear of suffering is deficient.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.7”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“If your opponent is of choleric temper,  seek to irritate him.  Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche