"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you"
About this Quote
Size here isnt about ego; its about bandwidth. Robert Anton Wilson, the countercultural writer who made a career out of prying open mental lockboxes, frames the self as a proportional equation: your inner life expands to the scale of your commitments, and it shrinks to the scale of your pet peeves. The line has the snap of a koan but the bite of a diagnosis. Love, in Wilsons usage, isnt soft-focus romance; its attention sustained over time, the willingness to be rearranged by something larger than your own reflexes. If you love widely, you live in a bigger psychological room.
The second half is where Wilson slips in the satirists knife. Annoyance is a tiny tyrant that feels righteous precisely because its small. A minor inconvenience, a strangers tone, a political headline: these are perfect hooks for the ego to cling to, because they demand no courage, only reaction. To "allow" annoyance is the key verb; Wilson treats irritation not as an inevitability but as a consent agreement you keep renewing. That aligns with his broader project: loosen the grip of automatic thought, notice the scripts running your perceptions, refuse to be puppeteered by them.
Contextually, it reads like a distilled piece of late-20th-century consciousness hacking: part stoicism, part psychedelic insight, part media-literacy warning. The subtext is blunt: your life is already being measured. The only question is what you keep feeding.
The second half is where Wilson slips in the satirists knife. Annoyance is a tiny tyrant that feels righteous precisely because its small. A minor inconvenience, a strangers tone, a political headline: these are perfect hooks for the ego to cling to, because they demand no courage, only reaction. To "allow" annoyance is the key verb; Wilson treats irritation not as an inevitability but as a consent agreement you keep renewing. That aligns with his broader project: loosen the grip of automatic thought, notice the scripts running your perceptions, refuse to be puppeteered by them.
Contextually, it reads like a distilled piece of late-20th-century consciousness hacking: part stoicism, part psychedelic insight, part media-literacy warning. The subtext is blunt: your life is already being measured. The only question is what you keep feeding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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