Quotes from Laurence Gane

Q. Why do you write? A. I have found no other way of getting rid of my thoughts.

Will is seen as the source of all suffering, since willing never brings contentment, but only further desire!

I will never again read an author of whom I suspect that he wanted to make a book, but only those whose thoughts unexpectedly became a book.

In another letter, he suggests that writing the book was "purchased so dearly and with such hardship that nobody who had the choice would have written it at that price".

Politics may one day be found to be so vulgar as to be described, along with all party and daily journalism, under the heading: 'Prostitution of the Intel lect'.

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.

We moderns have no culture to call our own. We fill ourselves with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias." (Use and Abuse of History) The point is to assimilate the past, to use it in the making of our own life and culture. History is a dead weight on the present.

Indeed, "All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline." The energy required for politics on a large scale, or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or in military interest, usually reduces the level of culture of a people.

Nietzsche tells us that modern consciousness is sick: "Art is reduced to mere amusement, and governed by empty concepts.

surest remedy for the male disease of self-contempt is the love of a sensible woman.