Being ironic and sincere is the exact same thing once you are powerful enough.

A puzzling thought just occurred to me: I've agreed for a while that there are stupid sages and smart fools, but now I'm wondering if wisdom and intelligence could be totally uncorrelated. Wisdom may be a capacity for wielding attention well, which I don't think IQ helps with.

"All passions seek their own annihilation" --- the intellect IS a passion, and thus its expansion makes its vessel HUNGRIER.

Only people with some strength of character can be truly gentle: usually, what seems like gentleness is mere weakness, which readily turns into bitterness.

The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures --- which can't be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man's sense of his own value.

The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think --- for the same reason --- that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment --- just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! --- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience --- or to fake --- a sense of self-esteem. Love is our response to our highest values --- and can be nothing else.

Even memories have memories, memories of it being remembered, misremembered, forgotten, abused, treasured, resuscitated, broken, adored, adorned, lied to, reunited with. You are their world as they are yours. Take care of them and they will take care of you.

I want to live a life committed to nothing, that achieves nothing, and passes through the world like a distant bird song, to make no money, and bear no children, to perfect the forgotten art of wasting a life.

Discipline is an outmoded patch for misalignment (incoherence) and alignment (coherence) renders it obsolete. Internal alignment renders discipline a functionless strategy. Discipline is an emergency strategy for dealing with internal misalignment when there is not time or capacity to achieve internal alignment.

Notice how you can do some things consistently and effortlessly without "discipline" and that's because there is internal alignment for those things. The feeling of needing discipline to do something is a compass that points to your misalignment. Resolve the misalignment and action will consistently and effortlessly flow with absolutely no need for discipline to maintain it.

By a sheer coincidence of stochastic motion all the thousands of satellites orbiting earth send microwaves converging precisely at my skull for 0.5 seconds and liquify my brain.

I have seen too many men willing, if not eager, to destroy their calm and happy lives for a single, lonely embrace with another man in a cold motel room, men with stable jobs, with wives and children, I have seen old women throw away their lives for the kiss of a young boy.

They are insuring and collateralizing a327ex's marital status and have created dozens of new securities. It's a gravy train. If he gets married the global economy collapses and everyone dies.

I'm not against introspection, I am against masturbation. I'm against edging. The critic wants to be able to contemplate, to go to therapy and discuss and introspect and what he will do there is talk about himself, think about himself, identify patterns in his life, things that have held him back --- and nothing will change. So then he will tell me that he has "a really good therapist, she really pushes me!"

The therapy becomes an elaborate narcissistic defense, the promise and appearance of progress while protecting an at best artificial and at worst non-existent identity. "I want to learn why I am this way." Then what? Will learning why you made those choices be what changes your choices? You're still eating junk food, aren't you? You're eating it while you're learning how bad it is.

"But... why am I this way?" That question is a narcissistic defense. It doesn't want an answer, it wants you to keep asking the question.

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.

The small dog likes the way the gun feels in its hands. The small dog for the first time in its life feels like his will extends into the world before him. He now knows that Potential is cold like metal and has a wooden grip. It pulls the small dog along in his pocket like a talisman and now held extended in front of him at the doorway it is a dousing rod leading him up, up the stairs quickly and into the bedroom. The small dog remembers the flash, then the trigger pull, then the noise. He knows this defies all logic but this is how it was catalogued in his mind. The moment the lion's head was rendered a not-head and the percentage of transition metals in his body became incompatible with life. The small dog knows also the temporal arrangement of the thing is irrelevant. The gun barked and the bullet raped the lion and that's all there was to it. He drops the gun into the river.

Faith is rational because statements about the future are undecidable: neither true nor false. Yet/and/but acting as if they were true --- can make them true, reflexively. "Believe, so that you may act, so that it becomes true."

Rational skepticism is self-defeating, then, because it refuses to consider the reasoning agent as part of the system it reasons about. Rational faith is, by contrast, self-justifying --- not via evidence from the past but via evidence from the future.