Michael Bowman

"Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a magnificent mustache and a peculiar relationship with animals. On the one hand, he pitied animals because, as he wrote in Untimely Meditations, they “cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim...with all the perverted desire of the fool.” (Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal)

Motivation is thus, as Schopenhauer puts it, ‘causality seen from within

"I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.”

—Charles Bukowski

"As Steven Weinberg famously summarized modern cosmology, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”" (Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche)

"“Human nature likes order,” wrote the economist Burton Malkiel in his seminal book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. “People find it hard to accept the notion of randomness.”" (Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal)

‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.’ Picasso

"Nietzsche’s statement ‘God is dead’ had said the unsayable to an age unwilling to go so far as to acknowledge the obvious: that without belief in the divine there was no longer any moral authority for the laws that had persisted throughout the civilisation built over the last two thousand years." (Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!)