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1 " An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing. "
― , Dead Toad Scrolls
2 " Sex and love represent one of the numerous absurdities and hopeless incongruences demarking human nature. A person whom only seeks out sex and eschews love will live a barren existence. Sex without love is a brute display of physical reproductive capacity. Sex is not a worthless or stupid activity when it forms a cog in a loving and affectionate relationship. Sex and love might not make the world go round, but when joined they make it a better place to live in. "
3 " I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap! "
― Edith Wharton , The House of Mirth
4 " Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning. "
― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom
5 " No, it's human, Curran said. That's the problem. People, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think, you have no responsibility. You're just following orders. Doing as your told. "
― Ilona Andrews , Magic Slays (Kate Daniels, #5)
6 " Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they don't need this sort of thing any more? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love! "
― Morris L. West , The Devil's Advocate
7 " If we have a purpose in life beyond being a cog in the human machine, mine is to help inspire people and that's pretty cool. I would like to motivate the world. "
8 " I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society. "
