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One Journey Through
A World of Stories
"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
- Joseph Campbell
Empire City
The city was everything and nothing,
lonely and invigorating, public, yet private,
and the buildings reflected this...
- Nick Knoke
"You have been conditioned to think of yourselves merely as breadwinners with no higher purpose than to earn your fees and the means of your own existence. Isn’t it time, my friends, to pause and to redefine your position in society?"
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"What tension? I feel completely natural only when im working"
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
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"He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life—and none had been offered to him anywhere."
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"Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness?"
"the business man who hated business—the worker who hated his work—the intellectual who hated everybody—all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves"
As the sun rose, and the city began to thaw, I watched store windows fill with baked goods and merchandise, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow this was all a fake: that the city had to go to sleep each night so that everything could be put back in its place, and so everyone could wake up and seamlessly continue their routine of consumption.
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"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
"This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it’s only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here’s one more spot that can’t hold me."
"Only when you can feel contempt for your own priceless little ego, only then can you achieve the true, broad peace of selflessness, the merging of your spirit with the vast collective spirit of mankind. There is no room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a private ego. Be empty in order to be filled."
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"What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable? Kindness being more important than justice, of course."
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