"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)