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"If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution."
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"God takes the weak and makes them strong. He takes the vile and makes them clean. He takes the worthless and makes them worthwhile. He takes the sinful and makes them sinless."

"Reality is what people who lack vision see."

"Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking."

"You can't go home again — it’s not necessarily that places change, but that people do."

"How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!"

"When we are able to break free from the imprisonment of our little, small self-thinking and dare to face the essence of life, we recognize we are never at home with ourselves. We are always on the road. By challenging the unknown and the unidentified we are capable of opening our skyline. ['Transcendental journey']"

"Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who weimagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me."

"When questioning ourselves, we must identify, where we are heading to. Do we prefer our life to remain untitled. Will we stand bare and naked without dressing any expectations or do we decide to interact with the world around. Will we play a part on the stage of life or do we choose to remain simply a chapter without heading, an episode without caption, an untitled interval. ['Life untitled']"

"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."

"There is no distinction between means and ends. There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. There is no way to enlightenment, enlightenment is the way."
Explore more quotes by William S. Burroughs

"Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him."

"No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought."

"How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven."

"For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty."

"Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function."

"I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact."

"The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set-up by the non-dreamers."

"All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him."

"Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning."
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