Carapace

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

...the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf


Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.

Chinatown


Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.

Franz Kafka, The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel



The primary nature of consciousness is not to remain constant. Objects keep on changing, when the mind stops, there is no-mind. The very nature of consciousness is to change, but you think one thing, then the very next second, something different, if consciousness becomes steady it will be awareness.

Nisargadatta Maharaj