Philosophy

"Our philosophy… reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other."

"The universal Intellect is the intimate, most real, peculiar and powerful part of the soul of the world. This is the single whole which filleth the whole, illumineth the universe and directeth nature to the production of natural things, as our intellect with the congruous production of natural kinds."

"It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it."

"Cause, Principle, and One eternal From whom being, life, and movement are suspended, And which extends itself in length, breadth, and depth, To whatever is in Heaven, on Earth, and Hell; With sense, with reason, with mind, I discern, That there is no act, measure, nor calculation, which can comprehend That force, that vastness and that number, Which exceeds whatever is inferior, middle, and highest; Blind error, avaricious time, adverse fortune, Deaf envy, vile madness, jealous iniquity, Crude heart, perverse spirit, insane audacity, Will not be sufficient to obscure the air for me, Will not place the veil before my eyes, Will never bring it about that I shall not Contemplate my beautiful Sun."

"Similar to a person who is not attached to external pleasures but enjoys happiness in the Atman (soul), the person who perceives Brahman in everything feels everlasting joy."

"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

"The Sea Will be the Sea Whatever the drop's philosophy."

"Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism."

"Satan: There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities."

"I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair.""

"The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!"

"Anarchy had been here all the nineteenth century, with its sinister offspring Nihilism, and it is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed."

"Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo — or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?"

"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect … the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself. For one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this gospel of the future wants to bear. "The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values" — in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it. For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals — because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had. — We require, sometime, new values."

"Quite apart from the fact that it conflicts with the demands and the content of the word of God, nihilism is a denial of the humanity and of the very identity of the human being. It should never be forgotten that the neglect of being inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of human dignity."

"The human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore."

"Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there’s nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best."

"Nihilists are not kind; They believe in nothing. The Stranger is not kind, He drifts where the wind catches him. Nihilists are like a bellows Empty, yet full of hot air, The more they threaten, the more cowardly they seem; The Stranger also rambles and loses his train of thought But tells a purty good story."

"Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

"al-Qaeda and its allies have no clear demands for the middle east. The only common thread in their approach is a violent and destructive opposition to democracy in any form. … al-Qaeda's methods, too, are different. It recognises no common bonds with people who have different beliefs and its members are prepared to kill indiscriminately. Indeed, mass murder is their explicit objective — the measure of success in their terms. Their methods of recruitment bear more comparison to self-destructive cults than political movements. However, we must acknowledge that their modern nihilism is innovative, flexible and cunning. al-Qaeda and the networks that are inspired by it approach the task with all the resources of modern technology and all the focus of modern zealotry. The most important conclusion to draw from this analysis is that there is no particular Government policy decision, or even an overall policy stance, which we could change in order somehow to remove our society from the al-Qaeda firing line. Its nihilism means that our societies would cease to be a target only if we were to renounce all the values of freedom and liberty that we have fought to extend over so many years."

"The new religious consciousness rises up against the nihilistic attitude towards the world and mankind. If a religious rebirth be possible, only then on this soil will there be the revealing of the religious meaning of secular culture and earthly liberation, the revealing of the truth about mankind. For the new religious consciousness the declaration of the will of God is together with this a declaration of the rights of man, a revealing of the Divine within mankind."

"Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority."

"What I do is more of a thought experiment which tries to explore an unknown field by other rules. This doesn’t mean it’s nihilistic in the sense in which nihilism means there are no longer any values, no longer any reality, but only signs: the accusation of nihilism and imposture always relates to that point. But if you take nihilism in the strong sense, the sense of a nothing-based thinking, a thinking which might start out from the axiom ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ – overturning the fundamental philosophical question, the question of being: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ – then I don’t mind being called a nihilist. [sic]"

"The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so — all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century."

"What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionary thinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy."

"People who intuitively perceive 2,500-year-old Chinese and Greek concepts, while nodding to California's detached hippie philosophy and quoting droll lines from The Big Lebowski, which turns 15 this year, are joining a revelatory religion that has illuminated its U.S. founder in northern Thailand. Dubbed "Church of the Latter-Day Dude," the group also invites "mellow, unflashy chicks who hang around in their bathrobes and take baths with candles and whale sounds," says the religion's Dudely Lama, Oliver Benjamin."

"The Dude is an extreme case, but he provides an ideal which can help you to bring a little more "Dude" into your life, without giving up on the rat race entirely. … I grew up in the 1980s, which was a very ambitious and materialistic time — the era of the Yuppies. Even as a youth, I found it frightening and false. … The reason I embarked on a 10-year backpacking journey was so I could avoid being brainwashed by the machine of industry, and find the space and freedom to indulge my imagination."

"Dudeism is non-theistic. We don't see anything as a kind of God figure. That's not to say we're not religious. We do think there's some far out shit out there, but it's not some old guy with a moustache. Anyway, The Stranger is probably more like a mirror of ourselves. He also may be the ghost of America's past — taking stock of what's become of the nation's integrity."

"We believe that the Dudeist tradition started as a response to the excesses of civilization. That was Lao Tzu's deal anyway. Lots of similar traditions dealt with issues of work and status and anxiety and nature the same way. But they were all, pretty much, taken over by fascists and real reactionaries. Even Taoism was taken over by charlatans and phonies. But the pure undogmatic centre of lots of traditions (Christianity, Vedism, Buddhism etc) is all the same. And that's Dudeism."

"Great coitus incurs great expense, And great wealth incurs great goldbricking, But great abidement incurs no loss. Therefore: He who knows when to take it easy Can’t be worried about that shit, And may long endure both strikes and gutters."

"Bullshit money or basic freedom: which is dearer? Contentment or competition: which is more valuable? Compensation or employment: which is more painful?"

"Those who wish to threaten the Dude Because they want ze money Cannot succeed. The World is shaped by taking it easy; It cannot be shaped by undudeness. If one tries to steer it, the plane crashes into the mountain; When one works in shifts, promising, uh, uh, leads will not be found."

"The tumbleweeds do not last long, Nor does the Dude. If the Stranger’s words do not last Why should those of man, man? To follow the Dude, become the Dude; the Dude will abide you."

"The people are busy, as I know you are, Whereas I am unemployed. Let me explain something about the Dude: He is sustained by the Tree of Life, As the ex used to say."

"When Dudeness is forgotten, League bylaws and rules arise; Then political advocacy and pornography are joined, And standards fall regrettably."

"The best Achievers are scarcely known by the Bums; The next best are compensated and given beepers; The next are real reactionaries; The next, human paraquat: They have no faith in the Bums, So the Bums reveal them for the phonies they are. When the best achievers achieve their purpose, The bums leave them alone, mister."

"Looked at but cannot be seen — it is a worthy fucking adversary; Listened to but cannot be heard — it is a stonewalling little brat; Grasped at but cannot be touched — it floats off across the sky. There is no bottom, nor the proper nomenclature, All these strands make it a very complicated case."

"The Dude said: “You can’t be worried about that shit. Life goes on.” “Would you just take it easy, man!? You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.”"

"There never was any fucking money; What in God’s holy name are you blathering about?"

"This is a natural, zesty enterprise. Oh. Yes."

"When a plan gets too complex, everything can go wrong; You see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?"

"Bowling is everlasting because it does not have a point. In this way, the Dude: Makes his point at the end and finds he made it at the beginning; Rolls casually down the lane, and endures through strikes and gutters. Because he does not put himself over the line, he does not enter a world of pain."

"Nihilists are not kind; They believe in nothing. The Stranger is not kind, He drifts where the wind catches him. Nihilists are like a bellows Empty, yet full of hot air, The more they threaten, the more cowardly they seem; The Stranger also rambles and loses his train of thought But tells a purty good story."

"Let me tell you somethin’ about The Dude. He would never dream of taking your bullshit money; You will not cut off his Johnson, even if you throw a marmot into his bath; His mind is limber, and he fits right in there; What the fuck are you talking about? I lost my train of thought here."

"If people aren’t privy to the new shit that has come to light, Cowards among them will threaten castration; If no action is taken, There will only be pee-stains on the rug."

"Not achieving prevents having to overcome obstacles; Not keeping the money prevents theft; Not flaunting beauty prevents thousand-dollar blowjobs. This is not ‘Nam. This is bowling."

"The Stranger controls without authority, And teaches without cuss words; He lets all things take ‘er easy, Watches the semifinals, but does not interfere, Drinks sarsaparilla without demanding, And takes comfort where he can."

"When the Dude is recognized in the World Undudeness is seen everywhere; When Pacifism is hidden behind Aggression will go unchecked. Am I wrong?"

"The Dude digs the style of the Stranger, and the Stranger, the style of the Dude; They are distinct only in front of the bar. Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes he eats you Which is infinitely greater and more subtle than the fucking TOE!"

"Dudeness that can be known is not Dude. The substance of the World is only a name for what Abides. The tumbling of tumbleweeds is all that exists and may exist; The rug is only a fabrication which ties the room together. One experiences without being uptight, or enters a World of Pain, And investigates complicated cases in order to understand the World."