We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. . . We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Kindness in ourselves is the honey that blunts the sting of unkindness in another.
Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there.
It is our duty not to not only hold fast, but to hold forth the Word of life; not only to hold fast for our own benefit, but to hold it forth for the benefit of others, to hold it forth as the candlestick holds forth the candle, which makes it appear to advantage all around, or as the luminaries of the heavens, which shed their influences far and wide.
But if you have a point of view and you're an artist or a writer, it's kind of crazy to not take advantage of that, especially if you can do something that's entertaining as well. I've done a number of things like that over the years.