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Epigraph:
"The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation." -Isaac D'Israeli (Curiosities of Literature)
"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste." -Susan Sontag (Melancholy Objects)
"Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait." -James Joyce (Ulysses)

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Michelangelo Antonioni:
-"We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, every reality."

Thomas Aquinas:
-"Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one's memory, and makes one feel one's love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant." (Summa Theologiae)
-"Beware the man of one book."

Augustine:
-"...Any sort of habit is bondage, even to a mind no longer feeding on deceitful words." (The Confessions)
-"...But you know, O light of my heart, that there was one thing and one only that brought me joy in the exhortation to wisdom: that by its call I was aroused and kindled and set on fire to love and seek and capture and hold fast and strongly cling not to this or that school, but to wisdom itself, whatever it might be." (The Confessions)
-"'...Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.'"
-"O justice and innocence, fair and lovely, it is on you that I want to gaze with eyes that see purely and find satiety in never being sated." (The Confessions)
"O Truth, Truth, how the deepest and innermost marrow of my mind ached for you..." (The Confessions)

Ernest Becker:
-"Only in this way, says Rank, only by surrendering to the bigness of nature on the highest, least-fetishized level, can man conquer death. In other words, the true heroic validation of one's life lies beyond sex, beyond the other, beyond the private religion - all these are makeshifts that pull man down or that hem him in, leaving him torn with ambiguity.... man has to look... beyond the consolations of others and of the things of this world." (The Denial of Death)
-"Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation. It can only come, as Rank saw, when we lay down our individuality, give it up, admit our creatureliness and helplessness." (The Denial of Death)
-"...The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man." (The Denial of Death)
-"The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." (The Denial of Death)
-"The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed." (The Denial of Death)
-"There is no way to experience all of life; each person must close off large portions of it, must 'partialize,' as Rank put it, in order to avoid being overwhelmed." (The Denial of Death)
-"This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression - and with all this yet to die." (The Denial of Death)

Samuel Beckett:
-"Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Others would meet the case equally if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not." (Waiting for Godot)
-"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." (Waiting for Godot)
-"Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals.... Habit then is the generic term for the countless treatises concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations... represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious, and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being." -Samuel Beckett

Daniel J. Boorstin:
-"And while the finding, the belief that we have found the Answer, can separate us and make us forget our humanity, it is the seeking that continues to bring us together, that makes and keeps us human." (The Seekers)

Albert Camus:
-"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting is properly the feeling of absurdity." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile not futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must image Sisyphus happy." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." (The Myth of Sisyphus)
-"Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment." (The Myth of Sisyphus)

Miguel de Cervantes:
-"To imagine that things in this life are always to remain as they are is to indulge in an idle dream. It would appear, rather, that everything moves in a circle, that is to say, around and around… thus does time continue to turn like a never-ceasing wheel. Human life alone hastens onward to its end, swifter than time's self and without hope of renewal, unless it be in that other life that has no bounds." (Don Quixote)
-"The road is always better than the inn."

Anton Chekhov:
-"...In reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence." (The Lady with the Dog)

Joseph Conrad:
-"Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The horror! The horror!'" (Heart of Darkness)
-"Drool thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose." (Heart of Darkness)
-"...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning-its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone...." (Heart of Darkness)
-"Watching a coast as its slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you - smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'" (Heart of Darkness)

Simone de Beauvoir:
-"But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on they way; if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once and for all; it is defined all along the road which leads to it. Vigilance alone can keep alive the validity of the goals and the genuine assertion of freedom." (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
-"...But morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning." (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
-"However, it must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness." (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
-"Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite." (The Ethics of Ambiguity)

René Descartes:
-"...It is good to have examined all things, even those most full of superstition and falsehood, in order that we may know their just value, and avoid being deceived by them." (Discourse on Method)
-"...There is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts."

Fyodor Dostoevsky :
-"'Dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!'" (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"'I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why.'" (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. Seek that rapture and ecstasy." (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"'Suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious.'" (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day." (The Brothers Karamazov)
-"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!" (Crime and Punishment)
-"...An intelligent man cannot possibly become anything in particular and... only a fool succeeds in becoming anything." (Notes from the Underground)
-"And who knows (it is impossible to be absolutely sure about it), perhaps the whole aim mankind is striving to achieve on earth merely lies in this incessant process of achievement, or (to put it differently) in life itself, and not really in the attainment of my goal, which, needless to say, a formula; but twice-two-makes-four is not life, gentlemen." (Notes from the Underground)
-"But, goodness gracious me, what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason or other I don't like those laws of twice-two?" (Notes from the Underground)
-"But man is so obsessed by systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to destroy the truth deliberately, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses, so long as he justifies his logic." (Notes from the Underground)
-"Consequently, as soon as these laws of nature are discovered, man will no longer have to answer for his actions and will find life exceedingly easy.... Of course, it is quire impossible to guarantee (it is I who am speaking now) that even then people will not be bored to tears (for what will they have to do when everything is calculated and tabulated), though, on the other hand, everything will be so splendidly rational." (Notes from the Underground)
-"...For it seems to me that the whole meaning of human life can be summed up in the one statement that man only exists for the purpose of proving to himself every minute that he is man and not an organ-stop!" (Notes from the Underground)
-"One look and the object disappears into thin air, your reasons evaporate, there is no guilty man, the injury is no longer an injury but just fate, something in the nature of toothache for which no one can be clamed, and consequently there is only one solution left, namely, knocking your head against the wall as hard as you can." (Notes from the Underground)
-"Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded." (Notes from the Underground)
-"To reach by way of the most irrefutable logical combinations the most hideous conclusions on the eternal theme that it is somehow your own fault if there is a stone wall, though again it is abundantly clear that it is not your fault at all, and therefore to abandon yourself sensuously to doing nothing, silently and gnashing your teeth impotently, hugging the illusion that there isn't really anyone you can be angry with; that there is really no object for your anger and that perhaps there never will be an object for it; that the whole thing is nothing but some imposition, some hocus-pocus, some card-sharping trick, or simply some frightful mess - no one knows what and no one knows who." (Notes from the Underground)
-"Heaven... lies hidden within all of us - it lies hidden in me now, and if I will it, it will be revealed to me tomorrow and for all time."
-"There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."

T.S. Eliot:
-"For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther."
-"...For the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them." (Knowledge and Experience)
-"Ideally, I should like to be able to hold the whole of a great symphony in my mind at once."
-"In the sense in which Liberalism is contrasted with Conservatism, both can be equally repellant: if the former can mean chaos, the latter can mean petrifaction."
-"Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss."

Gustave Flaubert:
-"Adultery, Emma was discovering, could be as banal as marriage." (Madame Bovary)
-"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words 'bliss,' 'passion,' and 'rapture' - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books." (Madame Bovary)
-"Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waste of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be - tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow." (Madame Bovary)
-"Everything appeared to her as though shrouded in vague, hovering blackness; and grief swirled into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in a deserted castle. She was prey to the brooding brought on by irrevocable partings, to the weariness that follows every consummation, to the pain caused by the breaking off of a confirmed habit or the brusque stopping of a prolonged vibration." (Madame Bovary)
-"It wasn't the first time in their lives that they had seen trees, blue sky and lawn, or heard the flowing of water or the rustle of the breeze in the branches, but never before, certainly, had they looked on it all with such wonder: it was as though nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful with the slaking of their desires." (Madame Bovary)
-"...The more flowery a person's speech... the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." (Madame Bovary)
-"Dark clouds scurried across the face of the moon. He gazed at it, thinking of the grandeur of space, the misery of life, the nothingness of all things." (Sentimental Education)
-"He traveled. He knew the melancholy of the steamboat; the cold awakening in the tent; the tedium of scenery and ruins; the bitterness of interrupted friendship." (Sentimental Education)
-"He loved her without reservation, without hope, unconditionally." (Sentimental Education)
-"'If only I'd had a woman to love me, I might have achieved something.... Love is the sustenance of genius - it is the very air it breathes. It is from passion that great works of art are born. But I've no intention of searching for my ideal mate. Besides, even if I find her, she will only turn me away. I belong to the tribe of the disinherited, and I shall go to my grave with a treasure hidden within me, and I shall never know if it is diamonds or paste!'" (Sentimental Education)
-"She was the focal point of light at which the totality of things converged..." (Sentimental Education)
-"'You have made me feel all the things that writers are supposed to exaggerate.'" (Sentimental Education)
-"'Your figure, your smallest movement seemed to me of more than human significance on earth. When you passed by, my heart lifted like dust after your footsteps. The effect you had on me was like a moonlit night in the summer, when the world is all perfume, soft shadows, milky paleness, and dim horizons; when I repeated your name, I tried to kiss it with my lips; for me it contained all the joys of the flesh and the soul. I could imagine nothing beyond you. I loved you just as you were, with your two children - tender, serious, dazzlingly beautiful, and so kind! That picture blotted out all others. And I possessed more than my thoughts of you - for always, in the depths of my being, I kept the music of your voice and the splendor of your eyes.'" (Sentimental Education)

Viktor Frankl:
-"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers at Auschwitz; however, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life." (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche, 'He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.'" (Man's Search for Meaning)
-"'What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.'" (Man's Search for Meaning)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
-"A new day invites me to new shores." (Faust)
-"Dreaming of this incomparable happiness, I now taste and enjoy the supreme moment." (Faust)
-"Everything perishable
Is merely an image.
The unfulfillable:
Here it becomes actuality.
The indescribable:
Here it is performed.
The eternal essence of womanhood
Leads us aloft." (Faust)
-"...Nothing we've ever known was worth knowing." (Faust)
-"The man who earns his freedom every day, alone deserves it, and no other does." (Faust)
-"What a sea of confusion and error we live in, finding no use for the knowledge we have and lacking the very knowledge we need." (Faust)
-"Words are just sound and smoke, bedimming the light of heaven." (Faust)
-"But he who humbly realizes what all this means, who sees with what pleasure the cheerful citizen converts his little garden into a paradise, and how patiently even the unhappy people pursue their weary way under their burden, and how all alike wish to behold the light of the sun a little longer; yes, such a man is at peace, and creates his world out of his own soul - happy, because he is a human being. And then, however confined he may be, he still preserves in his bosom the sweet feeling of liberty, and knows that he can quit this prison whenever he likes." (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"...But no one likes to think that grown-ups too wander about this earth like children, not knowing whence they come or whither they go..." (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"Everything is alive with an infinite variety of forms; mankind safeguards itself in little houses and settles and rules in its own way over the wide universe. Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little." (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"...I am proud of my heart alone. It is the sole source of everything - all our strength, happiness, and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own." (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"If you ask what the people here are like, I must answer, 'Much the same as everywhere.' The human race does not vary. Most people work the greater part of their time for a mere living; and the little freedom which remains to them so troubles them that they use every means of getting rid of it. Oh, the destiny of man!" (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"That the life of man is but a dream has been realized before; and I too am everywhere haunted by this feeling. When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and our contemplative faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are directed at little more than providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong our wretched existence; and then realize that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation amounts to nothing more than passive resignation, in which we paint our prison walls with bright figures and brilliant prospects; all this... makes me silent. I examine my own life and there find a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream my way through the world." (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
-"'To die! What does it mean? We are but dreaming when we speak of death. I have seen many people die; but, so limited is our nature that we have no clear conception of the beginning or the end of our life.'" (The Sorrows of Young Werther)

Thomas Hardy:
-"'All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.'" (Jude the Obscure)
-"But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small." (Jude the Obscure)
-"'...I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it.'" (Jude the Obscure)
-"The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles, lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan should be to move onward through good and ill-to avoid morbid sorrow even though he did see uglinesses in the world? Bene agere et lætari - to do good cheerfully - which he had heard to be the philosophy of on Spinoza, might be his own even now." (Jude the Obscure)
-"...The magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences." (Tess of the d'Urbervilles)

Mitch Hedberg:
-Click Here

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:
-"Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence, the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself." (Introduction to the Philosophy of History)
-"While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past - however extensive its periods - only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is not past, no future, but an essential now." (Introduction to the Philosophy of History)

Martin Heidegger:
-"But to project oneself upon one's ownmost potentiality of being means to be able to understand oneself in the being of the being thus revealed: to exist. Anticipation shows itself as the possibility of understanding one's ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence." (Being and Time)
-"Everyday taking care of things makes definite for itself the indefiniteness of certain death by interposing before it those manageable urgencies and possibilities of the everyday matters nearest to us." (Being and Time)
-"Thus the existential concept of dying is clarified as thrown being toward the ownmost nonrelational potentiality-of-being not to be bypassed." (Being and Time)

Henrik Ibsen:
-"You've never loved me, you've only found it pleasant to be in love with me." (A Doll's House)
-"...But sometimes I fell all of us are just ghosts. We're not living at all - just stumbling dead through life. Blindly hugging to our soul the same rotting judgments and standards, conventions and dead ideas, habits. It's not just the traditions we've inherited from our parents and our culture. I mean they have no validity at all but they hang on us like leaches and we can't seem to burn them off. But you won't pick up a newspaper without seeing them slithering between the lines. All over the country, thick as the sands on the beach; this death of thought just goes though our lives blowing out lamps. But it's so easy to sit in the dark and keep the shades drawn when we're all so deathly afraid of the light." (Ghosts)
-IRENE: Yes, only then do we learn what we have lost forever-
RUBEK: When?
IRENE: Only when we dead awaken.
RUBEK: And what do we see then?
IRENE: That we have never lived. (When We Dead Awaken)

William James:
-"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

James Joyce:
-"A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Free. Soulfree and fancyfree. Let the dead bury the dead. Ay. And let the dead marry the dead." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!" (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Lately some of their judgments had sounded a little childish in his ears and had made him feel a regret and pity as though he were slowly passing out of an accustomed world and were hearing its language for the last time." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"My soul frets in the shadow of his language." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand - that is art." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
-"Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable." (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Immanuel Kant:
-"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me." (Critique of Pure Reason)
-"Act only on a maxim by which you can will that it, at the same time, should become a general law." (Metaphysical Foundation of Morals)
-"Supere aude ['Dare to know']! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!" (What is Enlightenment?)
-"If beautiful art does not express moral ideas, ideas which unite people, then it is not art, but only entertainment. People need to be entertained in order to distance themselves from disappointment in their lives."
-"There is only one true religion, though there are many different faiths."

Thomas à Kempis:
-"If we had a spark of true charity within us we would surely perceive the emptiness of all earthly things." (The Imitation of Christ)

Søren Kierkegaard:
-"If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world's follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world's follies or weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world's follies or weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy." (Either/Or)
-"[Abraham's] faith was not that he should be happy sometime in the hereafter but that he should find blessed happiness here in this world.... He believed on the strength of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since been suspended." (Fear and Trembling)
-"Accordingly he admits the impossibility and at the same time believes the absurd; for were he to suppose that he had faith without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and with all his heart, he would be deceiving himself, and his testimony would carry weight nowhere, since he would not even have come as far as infinite resignation." (Fear and Trembling)
-"But what no one has the right to do is let others suppose that faith is something inferior or that it is an easy matter, when in fact it is the greatest and most difficult of all." (Fear and Trembling)
-"...Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off." (Fear and Trembling)
-"Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that it is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes that individual who, as the particular, stands in an absolute relation to the absolute." (Fear and Trembling)
-"For the movement of faith must be made continually on the strength of the absurd, though is such a way, be it noted, that one does not lose finitude but gains it all of a piece." (Fear and Trembling)
-"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches - how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!" (Fear and Trembling)
-"It goes against my nature to speak inhumanly of greatness, to let its grandeur fade into an indistinct outline at an immense distance, or represent it as great without the human element in it coming to the fore - whence it ceases to be the great; for it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do..." (Fear and Trembling)
-"...It is great to grasp hold of the eternal but greater to stick to the temporal after having given it up." (Fear and Trembling)
-"...It is much harder to receive than to give, that is if one has had the courage to go without and did not prove a coward in the hour of need." (Fear and Trembling)
-"Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing." (Fear and Trembling)
-"Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter didn't shirk its task and deceive itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which the one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor's, and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk." (Fear and Trembling)
-"And yet, in the final analysis, what [the self] understands by itself is a riddle; in the very moment when it seems that the self is closest to having the building completed, it can arbitrarily dissolve the whole thing into nothing." (The Sickness Unto Death)
-"...It would be a task for a poet to depict this solution to a demoniac's tormenting self-contradiction: not to be able to do without a confidant and not to be able to have a confidant." (The Sickness Unto Death)
-"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, or freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis." (The Sickness Unto Death)
-"The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into an instrument that clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human."

Krzysztof Kieslowski:
-"At this moment, in this cafe, we're sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go their own way, And then, they'll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time."

C.S. Lewis:
-"To love at all is to be vulnerable." (The Four Loves)

Gustav Mahler:
-"Tradition is slovenly."
-"What did you live for? Why did you suffer? Is it only a vast terrifying joke? We have to answer those questions somehow if we are to go on living - indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!"

J.S. Mill:
-"...A highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." (Utilitarianism)

Henry Miller:
-"Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a mircle, which will render life tolerable." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"For the moment I can think of nothing - except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings...." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space - space even more than time. The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me - its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end… all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, on with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd'hui!" (Tropic of Cancer)
-"It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, al last expiring dance. But a dance!" (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust - what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns?" (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down - the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Our Western world! - When I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies. Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"The world is a cancer eating itself away.... I am thinking that when the last great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be resorted and chaos is the score upon which reality is written." (Tropic of Cancer)
-"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing." (Tropic of Cancer)

John Milton:
-"A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." (Paradise Lost)
-"So much the rather thou celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight." (Paradise Lost)
-"Whoso prefers either Matrimony of other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee."

Giorgio Morandi:
-"One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see."

John Henry Newman:
-"Wrap not yourself round in the associations of years past; nor determine that to be truth which you wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipations. Time is short, eternity is long." (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine)
-"For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him? And who can recollect at the distance of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds, and that, during a portion of his life, when, even at the time, his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighted upon him, - when, in spite of the light given to him according to his need amid his darkness, yet a darkness it emphatically was?" (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable..." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"...Minds in different states and circumstances cannot understand one another, and... in all cases they must be instructed according to their capacity, and, if not taught step by step, they learn only so much the less...." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"...My own simple answer to my great difficulty had been, Do what your present state of opinion requires in the light of duty, and let that doing tell: speak by acts." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"The fundamental idea is consonant to that to which I had been so long attached: it is the denial of the existence of space except as a subjective idea of our mind." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"The habitual prejudice, the humour of the moment, is the turning-point which leads us to read a defense in a good sense or a bad. We interpret it by our antecedent impressions. The very same sentiments, according as our jealousy is or is not awake, or our aversion stimulated, are tokens of truth or of dissimulation and pretence." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
-"We have a vast inheritance, but no inventory of our treasures. All is given us in profusion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, select, harmonize, and complete." (Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

Friedrich Nietzsche:
-"He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you." (Beyond Good and Evil)
-"...We really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!" (Beyond Good and Evil)
-"Amor fati: that shall henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse - I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Let looking away be my only denial! And all in all and on the whole: I want someday to be purely and simply a Yes-sayer!" (The Gay Science)
-"Better to know nothing than to half-know many things! Better to be a fool on your own account than a wise man in someone else's eyes!" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"But even your best love is only an ecstatic allegory and a painful flame. It is a torch to light you to higher ways. Beyond yourselves you shall love one day! So first learn to love! And you must have had to drink the bitter cup of your love for that." (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"It is true: we love life not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"'Many a soul will never be discovered unless it is first invented.'" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"May your love of life be love for your highest hope: and may your highest hope be the highest thought of life!" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"O man! Take heed!
What words repeat deep midnight's creed?
'I sleep, I sleep-,
From deep dream I woke and perceived:-
The world is deep,
And deeper than the day conceived.
Deep is her woe-,
- deeper still than calamity:
Woe bids it: Go!
But all joy wants eternity-,
-Wants the deep, deep eternity!'" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
-"'Verily, there is absolutely no better mask you could wear, you present-day men, than your own faces! Who could - recognize you?'" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Blaise Pascal:
-"If he exalt himself, I humble him; if he humble himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, till he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster." (Thoughts)
-"It is not good to have too much liberty. It is not good to have all one wants." (Thoughts)
-"Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." (Thoughts)
-"Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same." (Thoughts)

Pablo Picasso:
-"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand."

Marcel Proust:
-"A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it." (In Search of Lost Time)
-"But happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess." (In Search of Lost Time)
-"In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity." (In Search of Lost Time)
-"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." (In Search of Lost Time)
-"To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it."
-"The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life - and therefore we judge it disparagingly."
-"We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute..."

Jean Jacques Rousseau:
-"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." (Social Contract)
-"The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves." (Social Contract)

Jean-Paul Sartre:
-"In irony a man nihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness." (Being and Nothingness)
-"In our introduction we defined consciousness as 'a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself.'" (Being and Nothingness)
-"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (Being and Nothingness)
-"There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might overflow and suddenly elude his condition." (Being and Nothingness)
-"Thus not only am I unable to know myself, but my very being escapes - although I am that very escape from my being - and I am absolutely nothing. There is nothing there but a pure nothingness encircling a certain objective complex and throwing it into relief upon the world, but this complex is a real system, a disposition of means in view of an end." (Being and Nothingness)
-"...A man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings." (Existentialism)
-"Before you come alive, life is nothing; it's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose." (Existentialism)
-"...Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown in the world, he is responsible for everything he does." (Existentialism)
-"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." (Existentialism)

Arthur Schopenhauer:
-"Intuitively or in concreto, every man is really conscious of all philosophical truths, but to bring them to abstract knowledge, to reflection, is the work of philosophy, which neither ought nor is able to do more than this." (The World as Will and Idea)
-"No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. Therefore, so long as out consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we can never have lasting happiness nor peace." (The World as Will and Idea)
-"...The activity of our mind is a constantly deferred ennui." (The World as Will and Idea)
-"Thus between desiring and attaining all human life flows on throughout. The wish is, in its nature, pain; possession takes away the charm; the wish, the need, presents itself under a new form; when it does not, then follows desolateness, emptiness, ennui, against which the conflict is just as painful as against want." (The World as Will and Idea)

William Shakespeare:
-"How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat! Dead!" (Hamlet)
-There is nothing either good or bad,
But thinking makes it so." (Hamlet)
-"To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die; to sleep;
To sleep? perchance to dream! Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffl'd off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And make us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action." (Hamlet)
-"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by and idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." (Macbeth)
-"A good moral, my lord: it is not enough to speak, but to speak true." (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
-"Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity." (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
-"The course of true love never did run smooth." (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
-"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." (Twelfth Night)
-"In time we hate that which we often fear."
-"Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none."

Socrates:
-"The unexamined life is not worth living for man." (Apology)

Baruch Spinoza:
-"But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare." (Ethics)
-"Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand."

Leo Tolstoy:
-"Knowledge is limitless. Therefore, there is a miniscule difference between those who know a lot and those who know very little." (A Calendar of Wisdom)
-"We live for ourselves only when we live for others." (A Calendar of Wisdom)
-"All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom." (War and Peace)
-"'If there were no suffering man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.'" (War and Peace)
-"'Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!'" (War and Peace)
-"'Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings.'" (War and Peace)
-"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." (War and Peace)
-"[Pierre] had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it." (War and Peace)
-"While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity." (War and Peace)
-"'While there is life there is happiness.'" (War and Peace)
-"'Art begins where that little bit begins,' said Briullov, expressing in these words the most characteristic feature of art." (What is Art?)
-"Art is that human activity which consists in one man's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them." (What is Art?)
-"The effect of the true work of art is to abolish in the consciousness of the perceiver the distinction between himself and the artist, and not only between himself and the artist, but also between himself and all who perceive the same work of art. It is this liberation of the person from his isolation from others, from his loneliness, this merging of the person with others, that constitutes the chief attractive force and property of art." (What is Art?)

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo:
-"Life must go on! And he taught me to live, he taught us to live, to feel life, to feel the meaning of life, to merge with the soul of the mountain, with the soul of the lake, with the soul of the village, to lose ourselves in them so as to remain in them forever." (Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr)
-"'"The truth? The truth… is perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!"'" (Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr)
-"'To be satisfied with life is of first importance.'" (Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr)
-"Truly, I do not know what is true and what is false, nor what I saw and what I merely dreamt - or rather, what I dreamt and what I merely saw - nor what I really knew or what I merely believed to be true." (Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr)
-"'We should concern ourselves less with what people are trying to tell us than with what they tell us without trying....'" (Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr)

Alfred North Whitehead:
-"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."

Ludwig Wittgenstein:
-"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push." (Culture and Values)
-"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." (Culture and Values)
-"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
-"The world is independent of my will." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
-"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

Last updated on May 17th, 2006