“Our vanity is the hardest to wound when our pride has just been wounded.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §111.

Firenze, Loggia dei Lanzi.

“There is an innocence in admiration.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §118 (excerpt).

Chance governs all.

Grant Wood, American gothic

Miami Vice star Don Johnson once asked Hunter S. Thompson to answer old Zen philosophical question: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' Hunter S. Thompson answered by reaching up and slapping Johnson upside his head.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

De Dodendraad op de Belgisch-Nederlandse Grens (The Deathwire on the Belgian-Dutch Border) by Albert Hahn (1915)

“The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §117.

Arlene Tiger (née Arlene Sue Farber) in Female Animal, 1970