• "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime."

– The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, pg.47

• "Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word."

– The Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

• "I pledge Allegiance / To the Earth / And all the LIFE which it supports / ONE PLANET / In our Care / Irreplaceable / With SUSTENANCE / And RESPECT / For ALL."

― Unknown (found on a poster)

• "So little do we prize common mercies when we have them to the full."

– The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by Mary Rowlandson

• "Just remember: Sometimes loneliness is God's cry for friendship time with you."

– The Dare - 30 Days To Change Everything By Josh Mayo

• "Be very careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man's rib. Not from his feet to be walked on. Not from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal. Under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved."

– The Talmud (central text of Rabbinic Judaism)

• “Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.”

– Hermione Granger (Harry Potter and the Half Prince)

• "This was very pleasant; there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort."

– Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (pg.284)

• "To be in the centre of such a circle, loved by so many, and more loved by all than she had ever been before; to feel affection without fear or restraint; to feel herself the equal of those who surrounded her..."

– Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (Chpt. 37)

• "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..."

– The Tempest by Shakespeare (Scene 4, Act 1, Line 146)

• "Infortunate condition of kings, / Seated amidst so many helpless doubts!"

– The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd

• "Ideas mattered—not because they were interesting but because they had power."

– Arthur Krystal (from Article: Neuroscience is Ruining the Humanities)

• "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference."

– The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

• "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

― Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• "True change cannot be made if it is bound by laws and limitations, predictions and imagination."

― Uchiha Itachi (Naruto, Chapter 222)

• "In this world like meets with like. It is because your husband is himself fraudulent and dishonest that we pair so well together. Between you and him there are chasms. He and I are closer than friends. We are enemies linked together. The same sin binds us."

– An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

• "So, Lizzy," said he one day, "your sister is crossed in love I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions."

– Mr. Bennet (Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen)

• "Where we are interested, we see what is going on and we remember it because we make a clean-cut picture of it in our minds. Where we are not interested, we see very little or nothing of the object, although we pass it and look at it a hundred times a day."

– Materials and Their Handling; pt. I by Joseph W. Roe, pt. II by Harry Tipper; Book II

• "All that is gold does not glitter, / Not all those who wander are lost; / The old that is strong does not wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost. / From the ashes a fire shall be woken, / A light from the shadows shall spring; / Renewed shall be blade that was broken, / The crownless again shall be king."

– The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

• "Then out spake brave Horatius, / The Captain of the Gate: / 'To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late. / And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers, / And the temples of his gods, / And for the tender mother / Who dandled him to rest, / And for the wife who nurses / His baby at her breast?'"

– Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay

• "Men and women have the same emotions, but at a different tempo: that is why men and women never cease to misunderstand one another.

- Friedrich Nietzsche (from his written work "Beyond Good and Evil", aphorism 85)

• "Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!" ("He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!"

- Goethe (Zahme Xenien IX)

• "And tho’ they are all thus naked, if one lives for ever among ’em, there is not to be seen an indecent Action, or Glance: and being continually us’d to see one another so unadorn’d, so like our first Parents before the Fall, it seems as if they had no Wishes, there being nothing to heighten Curiosity: but all you can see, you see at once, and every Moment see; and where there is no Novelty, there can be no Curiosity."

– Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

• "I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer."

– La Fin de Chéri (The Last of Cheri) (1926) by Colette

• As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow."

– "The South of France", Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps by Colette

• Toby-Dog: "It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling."
• Kiki-The-Demure: "A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand."
• Toby-Dog: "That's wrong. It's indiscreet."
• Kiki-The-Demure: "Not at all. I have a right to everything."
• Toby-Dog: "To everything? And I?"
• Kiki-The-Demure: "I don't imagine you lack anything, do you?"
• Toby-Dog: "Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come..."
• Kiki-The-Demure: "And then what dreadful thing happens?"
• Toby-Dog: "You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!"
• Kiki-The-Demure: "Once when I was little she tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic."
• Toby-Dog: "I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath."

– Barks and Purrs (translated by Maire Kelly) by Colette

• “It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth. You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything. […] Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.”

— David Cain (from “Procrastination Is Not Laziness”)

• "We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. (...) The average job now is done by someone who is stationary in front of some kind of screen. Someone who has just one overriding interest is tunnel-visioned, a bore, but also a specialist, an expert. Welcome to the monopathic world, a place where only the single-minded can thrive. Of course, the rest of us are very adept at pretending to be specialists. We doctor our CVs to make it look as if all we ever wanted to do was sell mobile homes or Nespresso machines. It’s common sense, isn’t it, to try to create the impression that we are entirely focused on the job we want? And wasn’t it ever thus? (...) I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster. / The fact that I succeeded where others were failing also gave me an important key to the secret of learning. There was nothing special about me, but I worked at it and I got it. One reason many people shy away from polymathic activity is that they think they can’t learn new skills. I believe we all can — and at any age too — but only if we keep learning. ‘Use it or lose it’ is the watchword of brain plasticity."

– Robert Twigger [https://aeon.co/essays/we-live-in-a-one-track-world-but-anyone-can-become-a-polymath]

• "Men always say that as the defining compliment: the Cool Girl. She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means that I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. / Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see these men - friends, coworkers, strangers - giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much - no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version - maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’) / I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to like cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. / But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed - she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you.”

– Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

• "Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other."
• "Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships to the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself."
• "The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one - intoxication. [...] it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses."
• "Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido [...] One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist's joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist's in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem 'finer and higher'. But their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our physical being. And the weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts which are far from being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable armour against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when the source of suffering is a person's own body.
• "The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love."

- Sigmund Freud (excerpt from Chpt.2 of his written work, "Civilization and Its Discontents")