"It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever."

(Jack Kerouac)

"Fascinated by the glitter of gain, man gazes at the Medusa-like face of greed and stands petrified."
(Manly P. Hall)

"In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors."
(William Blake)

“I am here because I am here and not somewhere else…  I have found no serious reason for wanting to be elsewhere, though I might like to be elsewhere at times.  The fact remains that elsewhere is not where I am, or where I am likely to be…  The point is that it does not much matter where you are, as long as you can be at peace about it and live your life.  The place certainly will not live my life for me, I have found that out.  I have to live it for myself.”
(Thomas Merton)

"I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.
And of course I was right."
(Jack Kerouac)

"Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much."
(Jack Kerouac)

"The mission of the contemplative in this world of massive conflict and collective unreason is to seek the true way of unity and peace, without succumbing to the illusion of withdrawing into a realm of abstraction from which unpleasant realities are simply excluded by the force of will.  In facing the world with a totally different viewpoint, the contemplative maintains alive in the world the presence of a spiritual and intelligent consciousness which is the root of true peace and true unity…"
(Thomas Merton)

"The beauty of things must be that they end."
(Jack Kerouac)

• 
  

"This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is."
(Jack Kerouac)

"As early pioneers in the knowing, when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing."
(Jack Kerouac)

"No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat."
(Hunter S. Thompson)

"If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I
not attain highest perfect enlightenment."
(Gary Snyder)

"I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas."
(Charles Bukowski)

"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
(Charles Bukowski)

"The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering."
(Gary Snyder)

"The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow."
(Jack Kerouac)

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
(Charles Bukowski)

"There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for."
(Paulo Coelho)

'For the average man, the world is weird because if he's not bored with it, he's at odds with it. For a warrior, the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable.
A warrior must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous time.'
(Carlos Casteneda)

"In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone."
(Hunter S. Thompson)

"Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?"
(Jack Karouac)

Fate whispers to the warrior.
" You cannot withstand the storm"
And the warrior whispers back.
" I am the storm "

"What are you trying to do, Kerouac?" I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, "trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?" … "Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self … Take off your coat and crash wits." And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox."
(Jack Kerouac)

"I am a person living in the world, the world is angry so I can be angry, the world laughs so I can laugh. We are not brick Bhikkhus or cement Bhikkhus."
(Ajahn Maha Boowa)

"What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? What's earth? All in the mind."
(Jack Kerouac)

"Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume..."
(Jack Kerouac)

“In the area of the world, you have things that you have. In the area of the Dhamma, you have something you don’t have.”
(Ajahn Dune)

"One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls" .

(Jack Karouac “The Dharma Bums”)

"The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization."
(Joseph Campbell)

"I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions."
(Jack Kerouac)

"It is true, the Zen-man’s contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception."
(Thomas Merton)

"The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is."
(Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

"If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence."
(Charles Bukowski)

"There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories n them. Deliberately — to put a stop to the quietness."

(Aldous Huxley)

"You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you: it's with your six sense that you're fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn't for your eyes, you wouldn't see me. If it wasn't for your ears, you wouldn't hear that airplane. If it wasn't for your nose, you wouldn't smell that midnight mint. If it wasn't for your tongue taster, you wouldn't taste the difference between A and B. If it wasn't for your body, you wouldn't feel Princess. There is no me, no airplane, no mind, no Princess, no nothing, you for krissakes do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life?"
(Jack Kerouac)

"An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way."
(Charles Bukowski)

"HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity."
(Alice Walker)

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."
(Jack Kerouac)

"What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust."
(Salvador Dali)

"What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgements."
(Jack Kerouac)

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
(Jack Karouac)

   "Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."

(Hunter S. Thompson)

"'Crazy' is a term of art; 'Insane' is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble."
(Hunter S. Thompson)

"I am an addictive personality, they say. A natural slave to passion - and many doctors have warned me against it. I am a High-Risk patient."
(Hunter S. Thompson)

And I admit that I ain't no angel
I admit that I ain't no saint
I'm selfish and I'm cruel but you're blind
If I exorcise my devils
Well my angels may leave too
When they leave they're so hard to find.
(Tom Waits)

"I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born."
(Jack Kerouac)

"I bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink..."
(William S. Burroughs)

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see you.
...I only let him out at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
...he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die.
(Charles Bukowski)

"People are all alike, but not at all alike, but in the final analysis, all alike."
(Ajahn Mun)

"Every single one of us - be he a ruler or warrior, rich or poor - is subject to all sorts of physical and mental suffering, especially torments of the mind."
(Dalai Lama)