#1
Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you must do and say. Not what you care about and wish to be. Make it about the work and not the principles behind it, not about a glorious vision that makes a good headline.
#2
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Our work embodies a higher purpose. Whether we know it or not, we’re a conduit for the universe. Material is allowed through us. If we are a clear channel, our intention reflects the intention of the cosmos.
#3
Apology by Plato
Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or as men say there is a change in migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is disturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.
#4
Candide by Voltaire
This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?
#5
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the “outside world.” Its object thereby is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the assortment of new things in the old arrangements — in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power — is its object. This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its “digestive power,” to speak figuratively (and in fact “the spirit” resembles a stomach more than anything else).
#6
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
And then black night. That blackness was sublime I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand 160 Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
#7
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon, and save “Your friend, “H. J.”
#8
Cruising by Alex Espinoza
It is thus a testament to the act of survival that sodomy, cottaging, hooking up, or cruising continues now, that it has evolved from the public baths of antiquity to the molly houses of London to parks and public restrooms across college campuses and major department stores, adult bookstores and porno theaters, rest stops and freeway underpasses. It happens, it continues to happen, because it simply can’t not happen. So urgent, so necessary, is our desire to connect, to engage in this act of intimacy, that we would do almost anything for it, even risk exposure, arrest, our very lives in some parts of the world. It takes patience and time, I was once told. And dedication. Sometimes you have to sit there on the toilet of a restroom for hours, listening to Celine Dion being piped in through the little mesh speakers, just waiting for a stranger to come into the stall next to yours, to tap his foot and reach his hand out. It is one of the oldest practices, this person explained. A part of our legacy, a way we push past the darkness and into something resembling light.
#9
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell
The dreamboats of Ramrod still live in the devastated city. They have lost their muscle tone and their faces, without make-up, show deep wrinkles. Their hair is thin and wispy. They crave stimuli and so are always in public places. The dreamboats used to walk among the faggots, never allowing the faggots to touch them, taunting them with their hard male beauty. But they no longer go among the faggots. The faggots no longer want them. They laugh at the dreamboats and call each of them “Mister Bullshit.”* So now they must loiter uptown, in the men’s bars. The men, with cruelty in their hearts, taunt the dreamboats about the old days when every mommy and daddy in the world wanted them and all the faggots loved them with their imaginations and the other men were jealous of their golden hair and bulging biceps. The men talk to them about the present where there are no mommies and daddies and no panting faggots to desire them and their biceps have collapsed. ‘When the bar closes, as it must, they each go home alone to try to get it up. Most nights they fall asleep before anything to remember happens.
#10
The Guest by Emma Cline
The club looked sparse, almost military, but no matter. It didn’t make a difference what was behind a rope, really, it just mattered that there was a rope. The people on the terrace needed the people walking past, just as the people walking past needed the people on the terrace.
#11
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
What enables you to acquire a state, is to be master of the art
#12
Spare by Prince Harry
The fonder the memory, the deeper the ache.
#13
Brain Energy by Christopher M. Palmer MD
Fathers might be passing on their traumatic experience through epigenetic mechanisms in sperm, such as micro-RNA (miRNA) molecules, which are known to modify gene expression. Studies have now shown that sperm in both mice and men have miRNAs that get transmitted to offspring. Levels of specific miRNAs (449 and 34) have been shown to be directly affected by levels of stress dating all the way back to early childhood experiences of the fathers.! In mice who are exposed to early stressful lie events, these levels were dramatically reduced in sperm cells, and their make offspring also had these same low levels in their sperm cells, demonstrating transgenerational transmission of stress. In human studies, men were gives the ACEs questionnaire, and it turned out that men with the highest lends of stressful life events had the lowest levels of these exact same miRNAsh to a three-hundredfold reduction.
#14
Mother thing by Ainslie Hogarth
Suffering makes a person special, fills a soul with angular gems of transcendent knowledge, so many perspectives contained within each one.
#15
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Understand; everyone is wrapped up in their own narcissistic shell. When you try to impose your own ego on them, a wall goes up. Resistance is increased. By mirroring them however you seduce them into a kind of narcissistic rapture. They are gazing at a double of their own soul. This double is actually manufactured in its entirety by you. Once you have used this mirror to seduce them you have great power over them.
#16
Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke MD
I suspect something similar is going on with social media apps, where the response of others is so capricious and unpredictable that the uncertainty of getting a “like” or some equivalent is as reinforcing as the “like” itself.
#17
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant
For all the actions he has to perform with this end in view, and the whole s rule of his behaviour, would have been mapped out for him far more accurately by instinct; and the end in question could have been maintained far more surely by instinct than it ever can be by reason. If reason should have been imparted to this favoured creature as well, it would have had to serve him only for contemplating the happy disposition of his nature, for admiring it, for enjoying it, and for being grateful to its beneficent Cause — not for subjecting his power of appetition to such feeble and defective guidance or for meddling incompetently with the purposes of nature.
#18
Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings by Rene Descartes
Is there not some God, or whatever I might call him, who puts these very thoughts into me? Why should I think that, when I myself may perhaps be the author of those thoughts? Is it not true then, at the very least, that I myself am something? However, I have already denied that I have any senses or any body. I still cannot make any progress, for what follows from that? Am I so tied to a body and senses that I am incapable of existing without them? Nonetheless 1 convinced myself that there is nothing at all in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies; is it not therefore also true that I do not exist However, I certainly did exist, if I convinced myself of something There is some unidentified deceiver, however, all powerful and cunning, who is dedicated to deceiving me constantly. Therefore, it is indubitable that I also exist, if he deceives me. And let him deceive me as much as he wishes, he will still never bring it about that I am nothing as long as I think I am something. Thus, having weighed up everything adequately, it must finally be stated that this proposition ‘I am, I exist is necessarily true whenever it is stated by me or conceived in my mind.
#19
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way.. death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its end: it puts an end to it, it is its ultimate point: but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. … Numbered among its other duties included under the general and principal heading, How to Live, there is the sub-section, How to Die.
#20
The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet
We tend to think that humans distinguish themselves from animals by greater knowledge and awareness, but the most typical difference is that, unlike animals, we are almost constantly tormented by a lack of knowledge. Therefore, the central questions in a human’s life, those that relate to his position in the desire of the Other, never receive a definitive answer. What does the Other think about me? Does he love me? Does he find me attractive? Do I mean something to her? What does the Other expect from me? What does he want from me? It is around these questions that every human encounter and, by extension, the whole of human existence, gravitates. There is no indication whatsoever of this in the animal world: You will never see an animal sitting on a couch worrying about the meaning of its life or about what it means to another animal.
#21
A New Stoicism by Lawrence C. Becker
As we “advance” from health through fitness toward ideal agency, we get no “better” at all, because the benefits we reap by developing our agency are offset by the increasing damage its remaining imperfections can do. So only ideal agency (virtue) will do. Short of that, we are all equal, equally wretched, equally subject to drowning in our circumstances, but from different causes. For some of us, the cause is weak agency; for others, the cause is strong but defective agency. We prefer strong to weak, then, not because one is better than the other, but because it gets us closer to the only thing that is good — virtue.
#22
In the dust of this Planet by Eugene Thacker
Horror be understood not as dealing with human fear in a human world (the world-for-us), but that horror be understood as being about the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without us). This also means that horror is not simply about fear, but instead about the enigmatic thought of the unknown.
#23
Rationality by Steven Pinker
Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is noone alive who is youer than you.
