Any maxim that can be destroyed by insight must be. And that is every maxim. In our time, pithy quotes and phrases that sound wise live for their own dominance and survival. They pretend to dispense intelligence, but it is slavery they communicate, enforce, and recommend.

And we love nothing more than our slavery.

When you have stopped copying quotes and images to your friends in lieu of your own mind and spirit, perhaps then you may begin to understand why those who wrote them would ask us to surpass the insights with which they generated these phrases that we prefer to the impossible gifts we carry and inhibit through our habits.

They gave us a ladder, and instead of climbing, we started making copies of pictures of ladders. No one ever ascended even a single rung. Their ladders, intended to lift us, had the opposite effect — and imprisoned us in a flatness we cannot even detect, let alone amend. Now we are dying of ladders, and cannot remember what climbing is.