preface

Nietzsche: No longer chained down by hatred and love, one lives without Yes, without No, voluntarily near, voluntarily far, most preferably slipping away, avoiding, fluttering on, gone again, flying upward again; one is spoiled, like any one who has ever seen an enormous multiplicity beneath him--and one becomes the antithesis of those who trouble themselves about things that do not concern them. --"Human, all to Human"

GOD: If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter. If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience--one that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don’t want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong--so you deny your own experience in favor of what you have been told to think. --"Conversations With God"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, nor any company left me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest. With all the ingenuity of hate they have sought out the cruelest torture for my sensitive soul, and have violently broken all the threads that have bound me to them. I would have loved my fellow-men in spite of themselves. It was only by ceasing to be human that they could forfeit my affection. So now they are strangers and foreigners to me; they no longer exist for me, since such is their will. But I, detached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry. Unfortunately, before setting out on this quest, I must glance rapidly at my present situation, for this is a necessary stage that leads from them to myself. --"Reveries of the Solitary Walker"