Common sense is nonsense.

 Common sense is nonsense.

― Atrona Grizel

Even people who call themselves “social critics” are trapped in what I see as “cultural assimilation,” and they don’t even notice it. Even the fact that they smoke cigars is enough to prove this, because that habit is rarely an individual choice. It reflects imitation—in other words, social influence. On top of that, they turn this into their “style” and identify themselves with cigars, as in figures like Freud and Sartre. Most likely, they also embrace the “courtesy of offering a cigarette,” that is, the absurdity of mistaking poison for a friend. Do they really think they look “cool” by doing this? This lack of compatibility between philosophy and life exists in Schopenhauer as well: although he used Buddhist rhetoric, he lived a comfortable, pleasure-seeking life in practice and even referred to this by saying, “I do not have to live my philosophy; not everyone is obliged to.” Even if I can find such people intellectually justified, I can never warm to them emotionally. The people around them are also the same. They have all grown desensitized. That is why they are the most dangerous ones. In my youth, before I understood them, I assumed they were “enlightened,” so I tried to align myself with their ideas. I tried to prune myself to fit their mold, not out of shallow imitation but because I had accepted them as truth. And I accepted them as truth because I was desperate. I was completely alone in my pain, so I clung to anything that looked like a path to salvation. In that sense, I was hunted too. They hunted me the way someone might offer poisoned food to a penniless, starving homeless person, exploiting his misery to get rid of him. I ate that food as well, but I did not die, and years later its effects were purged from me. The answer to how I survived is simple: I was free from culture. For example, culture sees solitude as “shameful,” but because I did not carry that view, I could take pride in it. Being alone became my revenge. Even the most reclusive people spoke of loneliness as something negative, and to free myself from all of them, I forbade myself from thinking that way. Perhaps it was out of stubbornness, but it doesn’t matter. By merely existing, I would invalidate all their views. Later on, I began doing to them what they had done to me, though not by offering poisoned food, but by giving them nothing at all and keeping them under constant intellectual bombardment.

― Atrona Grizel

I felt such a deep anger toward humanity that I refused to be angry.

― Atrona Grizel

Sometimes I feel like a dog being fed. People simply put food in front of me and leave. They don’t even do it so that my stomach will be full; they do it just so they can relax and go back to themselves. And the only reason they get angry and glare at me when I don’t eat is this: because in their eyes I am a being that has lost its humanity—or rather, was never human to begin with—and naturally they react that way only because they haven’t been able to get rid of me, not because I’m hungry. It’s like they feed me out of obligation, as if I were an animal they were forced to adopt. Sometimes, for this reason alone, I wonder why the thing called “family” even exists, and I can’t explain why they fed me in the first place. It’s as if my family exists only to feed and clothe me, and I can’t even expect anything beyond that, because that’s how the concept of family has settled in my mind. Because why would someone pour money into a child for a lifetime, especially without showing any love? Why did they create such an obligation for themselves? A momentary hormonal interaction for a brief time produced an unwanted life for an entire existence, but why?

― Atrona Grizel

It’s me who created humans. Because they are not things that exist on their own; they are things that exist in my mind. Simply put, if the thing that allows me to perceive them were to disappear, they too might “disappear.” So if I did not have the consciousness that makes it possible for me to recognize humans, they would vanish. This means I created all of humanity by myself, and when I interact with it, I am in fact only interacting with myself again, because there is no one else.

― Atrona Grizel

Being close to suicidal thoughts usually distances a philosopher from the act itself rather than bringing them closer, because suicide becomes something familiar and thus loses its force. For an ordinary person, however, the opposite is often true, largely due to reactivity prevailing over reflexivity.

― Atrona Grizel

People who admire me resemble the small moons trapped in the orbit of giant and majestic Jupiter, held there by its immense magnetic pull.

― Atrona Grizel

Not every human deserves love.

― Atrona Grizel

Of course there is no institution that helps make it possible for someone to withdraw alone into the forest. Because institutions exist not to let individuals live independently of society but to imprison them in it. Otherwise, where would states find the masses they can exploit in order to survive?

― Atrona Grizel

The existence of slang, meaning regional, sexual, or occupational variations, leaves language defenceless against cultural imperialism, because it has too many versions and can therefore be easily bent. Foreign cultures take over a culture in exactly this way, and they do it so skillfully that the culture can even continue believing that this is its own. But if the language is sterilized, meaning if there is a single uniform language used by everyone everywhere, that language becomes a shield protecting its original identity, and it becomes an invincible soldier cleansing the culture of the contamination of globalism.

― Atrona Grizel

Young adults begin to show the real signs of aging when they start to feel that childhood and youth, which once seemed like the entire universe, actually occupy only a tiny space in a long stretch of time, and that the world they once thought was the center of everything is not a center at all.

― Atrona Grizel

A person’s personality in writing and in speech is almost always different, and neither alone fully reflects them. It is misleading to imagine a writer or philosopher who has many writings but no recorded interviews as being just as they appear in their texts.

― Atrona Grizel

The walls I built around myself eventually imprisoned me, and this only shows how skilled I am at architecture. I’m so skilled that I couldn’t stay ahead of my own talent, and by making something “too effective” when I meant it merely to be useful, I ruined it. The prison of a masterpiece.

― Atrona Grizel

I sacrificed my soul for the sake of my philosophy. If I were a living human rather than a living myth, I wouldn’t be writing these words now, because I would have vanished. My soul could not be saved, so it would either die or evolve. The disappearance of my philosophy would set my soul free, but that soul would not be able to hold on to life in an ugly existence like this; it would be like a fish thrashing on land trying to breathe. That is why I turned my mind into an overworking kind of serial thought-production machine and began systematically producing drops of water, just so I could breathe a little.

― Atrona Grizel

One who is his or her own god has no need to borrow a god from outside.

― Atrona Grizel

If one pays enough attention and possesses a strong capacity for observation, it is actually possible to sense which category a person belongs to merely by looking at their appearance. Not “lookism”; perceptiveness.

― Atrona Grizel

The greatest pain is not the pain that cannot be endured but the pain one does not want or is unable to want to endure. A person may be strong and perfectly capable of managing it, yet they feel no desire to do so, nor can such desire be instilled in them. What hurts them is precisely this, not “weakness” or anything of the sort. One can speak loosely about all other kinds of pain, but this one stands alone as an exception.

― Atrona Grizel

In cartoons, there are clearly absurd scenes designed for children, such as this: the main character hides in some bushes to escape an enemy chasing them. But instead of fully getting behind the bushes or covering themselves completely, the character mockingly drapes a few leaves around their body from the neck down in a halfhearted disguise. When the enemy looks their way, they pass by because the character is motionless and “green,” mistaking them for a “bush,” allowing the character to escape. This also exists widely in daily life; it is not something that sprang from an imaginary world but has seeped into ordinary reality as well. The enemy character who cannot distinguish the character from a shrub can be a perfect allegory for any person whose thinking and feeling have become mechanical and flat. Even a person’s tone of voice alone may be enough to understand what kind of person they are, yet these robotic beings have let their minds rust for so long that the only filter through which they interpret events is habit. Forget noticing the subtle detail in a voice; because they grew up within society and have become accustomed to its shape, they do not even perceive it. Their overly social minds do not register it, seeing it merely as background noise. The ignorant fail to detect the ignorance of other ignorant people for precisely this reason, and just like the character in the cartoon, they see someone who is clearly a figure as nothing more than a collection of branches and leaves. They don’t even mind that the person’s skin shows between the leaves or that their head is sticking out entirely, because their minds have been carved out by the very relationships that bind them to humanity, leaving them without the sensitivity required to notice detail.

― Atrona Grizel

It is not the dead but the perfect that does not change, because it has no need to. To change is a sign of weakness and frailty; gods never change in essence. Yet whether perfection itself is death is a more complex matter.

― Atrona Grizel

I have not suffered from the complete absence of meaning but from its extreme scarcity, which in turn magnified even the smallest experiences. Even a simple accidental touch is enough to satisfy my need for physical contact for a week, yet I doubt I could endure a hug because of the intensity of my internal reaction. My mind would become a ship’s deck with walls full of holes, taking on water from every side and desperately rushing from place to place in an attempt to seal them. Whether the ship would sink or merge back into the sea itself, I cannot say.

― Atrona Grizel

Defend the self at all costs.

― Atrona Grizel

Society is gaseous; the unawakened are liquid; the awakened are solid. Those who remain water will always evaporate into the air; those who are diamonds will always remain themselves.

― Atrona Grizel