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“The sun is the width of a human foot.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“We observe in this torrent of incoherence a lack of regularity in the subject himself; the "I" has fallen to pieces after struggling for three centuries against the great objective institutions and dissolving them with its subjectivism and rejecting in them any law that was sacred and binding on itself.

There is no reason to think that Decadence - obviously an historical phenomenon of great inevitability and significance � has confined itself to poetry; we should expect in the more or less distant future the Decadence of philosophy and finally the Decadence of morality, politics, and forms of communal life. To a certain extent Nietzsche can already be considered the Decadent of human thought � at least to the extent that Maupassant, in certain "final touches" of his art, can be considered the Decadent of human emotion. Like Maupassant, Nietzsche ended in madness; and in Nietzsche, just as in Maupassant, the cult of the "I" loses all restraining limits: the world, history, and the human being with his toils and legitimate demands have disappeared equally from the works of both; both were "mystic males" to a considerable degree, only one of them preferred to "flutter " above "quivering orchids," whereas the other liked to sit inside a cave or upon a mountaintop and proclaim a new religion to mankind in his capacity as the reborn "Zarathustra." The religion of the "superman," he explained. But all of them, including Maupassant, were already "supermen" in that they had absolutely no need of mankind and mankind had absolutely no need of them. On this new type of nisus formativus of human culture, so to speak, we should expect to see great oddities, great hideousness, and perhaps great calamities and dangers.

("On Symbolists And Decadents")”
― Vasily Rozanov, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“Reason and logic are a force for unity. People can rally around the objective, absolute Truth. All of these are undermined by the Dunning-Kruger effect, by the rise of irrationalism. Today, the world is full of subjectivists and relativists who actively sneer at the Truth and proclaim that everyone has their own truth. When you start believing your own truth, your own propaganda, your own bullshit, you become a narcissist. You think you are a god, and that no one is allowed to contradict you. After all, who are they to challenge your truth?”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“I don't know how your Pangloss would be able to weigh up the misfortunes of different men and take the measure of their hardship. All I can say is that I suspect that there are millions of men on earth who deserve a hundred times more pity than your King Charles Edward, Tsar Ivan, or Sultan Ahmed.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“There is a leap of faith with any conclusion the mind can conceive.”
― H. Mortara

“Ach panenkomarjá, ten život je stejnÄ› k zešílení krásnej. Ne že by byl, ale já to tak vidím.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and t hus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of â€� all truths â€� = â€� all lies â€� . There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations . This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason an d logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it . Instead, t hey have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“Make no mistake, the war between Illuminists and Discordians is the war between intelligent people and stupid people, rationalists and irrationalists, Logos and Mythos, evolution and dinosaurs, order and chaos, understanding and incomprehension, Truth and “all truthsâ€� (= no truths), objectivity and subjectivity, absolutism and relativism, knowledge and ignorance ("Humans know nothing"), answers and no answers. Which side are you on?! Discordians don’t want to “knowâ€�. They want to not know and to sneer at all Gnostics, scientists and mathematicians (knowers and l earners), and call them liars or deluded. We, however â€� using the motto of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason â€� resoundingly reply ... Sapere Aude (“Dare to Knowâ€�)”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“Make no mistake, the war between Illuminists and Discordians is the war between intelligent people and stupid people, rationalists and irrationalists, Logos and Mythos, evolution and dinosaurs, order and chaos, understanding and incomprehension, Truth and “all truthsâ€� (= no truths), objectivity and subjectivity, absolutism and relativism, knowledge and ignorance ("Humans know nothing"), answers and no answers. Which side are you on?! Discordians don’t want to “knowâ€�. They want to not know and to sneer at all Gnostics, scientists and mathematicians (knowers and learners), and call them liars or deluded. We, however â€� using the motto of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason â€� resoundingly reply ... Sapere Aude (“Dare to Knowâ€�)”
― Brother Cato

“All truthsâ€� = “no truthsâ€� = “all liesâ€�. All three conditions become indistinguishable since people believe whatever they like; truth content is abolished!”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“People with no qualifications whatsoever in mathematics, science and philosophy continuously proclaim, “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.â€� In fact, one of their tactics is to attempt to demolish knowledge by claiming that whatever anyone says is just “subjectiveâ€�. Are science and math as “subjectiveâ€� as Eastern religion? Science and math objectively landed men on the moon!”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“A word to the unwise â€� you cannot use a system that denies Truth to say anything at all about the Truth. Any belief system that rejects Truth has no relevance whatsoever to Truth, and you cannot use such as system to validly address any Truth at all.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Contra Mundum

“All of those that say that everyone has their own truth might as well say that everyone has their own lie since if there are as many truths as there are souls then there is no truth at all. You might as well believe anything you like, which is of course what so many people now do.”
― Thomas Stark, Castalia: The Citadel of Reason

“Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar’d to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“The recent rise of so-called 'populism' is seen by some to represent a backlash against globalization and liberal capitalism. It actually presents some interesting philosophical questions as it seems to derive its power from emotive anger, soundbites and slogans that often don't stand up to scrutiny; opinions presented as fact -- a form of extreme subjectivism.”
― Alain Stephen, Philosophy for Busy People: Everything You Really Should Know