"Sex-negative messages don’t keep people from having sex. They keep people from having good sex. They keep people from having pride in their sexuality, from sexual self-awareness. They keep people from asking questions about sex, and communicating with their partners. They discourage experimentation. They blur the lines between consensual sex and rape by framing all sex as an undifferentiated mass of “bad."

- Sex-Negative Education and the Spectre of Rape « Sex Positive Activism 

"You cannot squeeze life; you have to surrender to it. You cannot conquer life. You have to be courageous enough to be defeated by life. The very effort to achieve happiness is absurd because happiness is here: you can’t achieve it. Nothing has to be done about it, you have simply to allow it."

- Osho 

"People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence."

— Inayat Khan 

"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."

— Alain de Botton 

"And the time will come when you see we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you."

- Within You, Without You, The Beatles

Holding on to anything is like holding on to your breath. You will suffocate. The only way to get anything in the physical universe is by letting go of it. Let go and it will be yours forever.

- Deepak Chopra

"The moment you feel you are no longer dependent on anyone, a deep coolness and a deep silence settles inside, a relaxed let-go. It does not mean you stop loving. On the contrary, for the first time you know a new quality, a new dimension of love—a love that is no longer biological, a love that is closer to friendliness than any relationship. That’s why I am not even using the word friendship, because that “ship” has drowned so many people."

— Osho

The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers and rapists makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)

- Sam Harris

"I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry."

Wasted, Marya Hornbache

I want people to know that almost everything that concerns them in their daily lives is of no consequence whatsoever.Nothing and nobody is really important, so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race ‘round the supermarket and steal Mars bars and, y’know, kiss kittens and sit on the back of bread vans. Whatever makes people happy they should just do it, ‘cos time is a mere scratch and life is nothing

- Morrissey

“Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth, I’ll look at the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I’m not even particularly good at being myself.”
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I wanted to be with him. Or anyone. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved him, but I’ve loved not being alone. 

—JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

“I would challenge anyone here to think of a question 

upon which we once had scientific answer, however inadequate,

but for which now the best answer is a religious one.”

-Sam Harris

“Instead of being overwhelmed by the universe, I think that perhaps one of the deepest experiences a scientist can have, almost approaching a religious awakening, is to realize that we are children of the stars, and that our minds are capable of understanding the universal laws that they obey. The atoms within our bodies were forged on the anvil of nucleosynthesis within an exploding star eons before the birth of the solar system. Our atoms are older than the mountains. We are literally made of star dust. Now these atoms, in turn, have coalesced into intelligent beings capable of understanding the universal laws governing that event.” 

— Michio Kaku

"[Hating America] would be as silly as loving it,” I said. “It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night 

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. Or the realization that everything else is more important than fear. Fear is, in fact, merely an illusion."

— Ambrose Redmoon