“You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 17
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Nassim Nicholas Taleb196
Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former t… 1960Related quotes
Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
“The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer
Details, 2010
Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) Italian Dominican friar and preacher
Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 378
“Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone's saviour.”
Keigo Higashino The Devotion of Suspect X
Source: The Devotion of Suspect X
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
1920s, Truth is a Pathless Land (1929)
Context: Your prejudices, your fears, your authorities, your churches new and old – all these, I maintain, are a barrier to understanding. I cannot make myself clearer than this. I do not want you to agree with me, I do not want you to follow me, I want you to understand what I am saying. “This understanding is necessary because your belief has not transformed you but only complicated you, and because you are not willing to face things as they are. You want to have your own gods – new gods instead of the old, new religions instead of the old, new forms instead of the old – all equally valueless, all barriers, all limitations, all crutches. Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else; and although you have been preparing for me for eighteen years, when I say all these things are unnecessary, when I say that you must put them all away and look within yourselves for the enlightenment, for the glory, for the purification, and for the incorruptibility of the self, not one of you is willing to do it. There may be a few, but very, very few. So why have an organization?