“It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.”
~ David Emile Durkheim; french sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher.
“True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.”
~ Ronald David Laing; scottish psychiatrist.
“The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art.”
~ David Cronenberg; canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor.
“Poets are like proverbs, you can always find one to contradict another.”
~ Jules Verne; french novelist, poet and playwright.
“Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off.”
~ Luis Bunuel; spanish-mexican filmmaker, artist and iconoclastic revolutionary of Surrealism.
“The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.”
~ Mary Wollstonecraft; british author, philosopher and women’s rights advocate.
“Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.”
~ Lillian Hellman; american dramatist and screenwriter.
“All relationships change the brain – but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.”
~ Diane Ackerman; american author, poet and naturalist.
“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”
~ Hannah Arendt; german-american political theorist and philosopher.
“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”
~ Susan Sontag; american author, filmmaker, teacher and activist.