“Convince a man that he is an animal, that his own dignity and self-respect are delusions, that there is no 'beyond' to aspire to, no higher potential self to achieve, and you have a slave. Let a man know he is himself, a spiritual being, that he is capable of the power of choice and has the right to aspire to greater wisdom and you have started him up a higher road.”
“There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and that's live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. That's living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, it's fast, it's often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions. If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But it's one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said.”
“To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is.”
“The best way to know any future is to cause one. And that’s why, you see, when you start consulting the oracle at Delphi, you’ve taken a step downhill. You have assigned cause for the future elsewhere... So one predicts the future as much as one is cause. The future isn’t a pattern laid out to abuse and bully you. The future is a beautiful playground that nobody happen to be combining. You talk about virgin territory – the most virgin territory there is, is the future. You can do anything you want with it.”
