"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

"Life is too short to remain unnoticed." Salvador Dali

"Once group politics trumps the politics of social solidarity, the foundations of further injustice are laid for everyone. Massive inequality and falling social mobility result as it becomes impossible to articulate any sense of a social contract or common purpose once group rights overwhelm the belief in collective efforts and collective responsibilities... you cannot create a fair society without a common civic culture committed to some notion of liberal egalitarianism. Lose that, and we are on the road to perdition - legitimising alike the noxious politics of the British National Front and the separatist Asian groups protesting that their own subcultures have equal worth whatever their values - and however they obstruct the creation of wider solidarities... A society can hold together only if it stands by universal egalitarian values and a universal infrastructure of justice..." Will Hutton, The State We're In

"A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanisation of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organisation of resources." Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

"Skin does not have roots, it peels away easy as paper." Sylvia Plath

"Any youngster watching with drugs, just say no to your parents if they ask if you do them." Can't remember

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth." Katherine Mansfield

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation." Tibetan Saying

"The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed." Sufi Proverb

"Being has not been given its due." Jean-Paul Sartre

"The nature of mind is the nature of everything." Dudjon Rinpoche

"Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect." Nagel

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states - outwardly so contradictory - which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality." Breton

"If God did not exist, everything would be permitted." Dostoievsky

"God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it." Unknown

"In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones." Sufi Proverb

"All the joy of love for everything good is in me, though I can see all the bad things in the world; in fact this twentieth century urban blues music derides and illustrates them more sharply than ever. Yet I'm not scared and I'm not down about it: I can see what needs to be done to get away from them. It is the party: I feel that you have to party, you have to party harder than ever. It is the only way. It is your duty to show that you are still alive. Political sloganeering and posturing mean nothing; you have to celebrate the joy of life in the face of all those grey forces and dead spirits who control everything, who fuck with your head and livelihood anyway, if you aren't one of them. You have to let them know that in spite of their best efforts to make you like them, to make you dead, you are still alive. This isn't the complete answer, because it will all still be there when you stop, but it is the best show in town right now. It is certainly the one I want to be at." Irving Welsh

"Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness." Simone de Beauvoir

"Only the paradox comes anywhere near to the comprehending fullness of life." C.G. Jung

"Anyone who wants to pursue this goal correctly must begin by turning to physical beauty, and then if he gets the right guidance fall in love with a particular individual and with him produce thoughts of beauty. He must then perceive that the beauty in one individual is similar to that in another, and that if beauty of form is what he is pursuing it is stupid not to recognise that the beauty exhibited by all individuals is the same. With that recognition he becomes the lover of all physical beauty, and his passion for a single individual slackens as something of small account. The next stage is for him to reckon beauty of mind more valuable than beauty of body, and if he meets someone who has an attractive mind but little bodily charm, to be content to love and care for him and produce thoughts which improve the young; this again will compel him to look for beauty in habits of life and customs and to recognise that here again all beauty is akin, and that bodily beauty is a poor thing in comparison. From ways of life he must proceed to forms of knowledge and see their beauty too, and look to the fullness of beauty as a whole, giving up the slavish and small-minded devotion to individual examples, whether a boy or man or way of life, and turning instead to the great sea of beauty now before his eyes. He can then in his generous philosophic love beget great and beautiful words and thoughts, and be strengthened to glimpse the one supreme form of knowledge, whose object is the beauty of which I will now speak... For anyone, who has been guided so far in his pursuit of love, and surveyed these beauties in right and due order, will at this final stage of love suddenly have revealed to him a beauty whose nature is marvellous indeed, which is the culmination of all his efforts." Plato

"Each moment is a place you've never been." Mark Strand

"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." John Keats

"To fall into habit is to cease to be." Miguel De Unamuno

"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." Noam Chomsky

"Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains, seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous, but how serenely all things lie in the light, how freely one breathes; how much one feels, lies beneath oneself." Friedrich Nietzsche

"She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a little team of atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep:
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider's web;
The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coach-makers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream;
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice;
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes;
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night;
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes;
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she-"
William Shakespeare

"What are you doing here?
What do you want?
Is it music?
We can play music.

But you want more.
You want something and someone new
Am I right?
Of course I am.
I know what you want.

You want ecstasy
Desire and dreams.
Things not exactly what they seem.
I lead you this way, he pulls that way.

I'm not singing to an imaginary girl.
I'm talking to you, my self.
Let's recreate the world."
Jim Morrison

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