Friday, September 21, 2012

Potent Quotables: Question Everything

Escher in Italy (1987) by István Orosz

"The universe contains a maybe" 
- Robert Anton Wilson

"Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing." 
- Euripedes

"I do not pretend to tell what is absolutely true, but what I think is true."
- Robert Ingersoll

Inspired by this quote from Rob Breszny's excellent book Pronoia:


"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology." So proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. Note well that he used the adjective "joyous" to describe distrust, not "cynical" or "grumbling" or "sour." The key to remaining vital and strong while questioning every so-called absolute is to cultivate a cheerful, buoyant mood as you do it. 
This is a key point in Robert Anton Wilson's book Quantum Psychology for which there is currently an online reading group going on over at Tom Jackson's excellent blog RAWillumination.net, check it out.

2 comments:

  1. Love this post, and I almost missed it.I think we forget sometimes that we make our own thoughts smaller than than the laws of the universe require.

    Have we already talked about Rob Brezsny as a Santa Cruz dude? Not that he lives here now, but once...

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  2. We did indeed discuss Brezsny as a Santa Cruz dude. And then another commenter introduced professor Norman O. Brown into the mix---he taught in Santa Cruz, Brezsny took his class, and also wrote a lot about Finnegans Wake, particularly in his book "Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis" which I still haven't been able to get my hands on.

    Thanks for reading.

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