- No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Eleanor Roosevelt
- The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. Hunter S. Thompson from Hell’s Angels
- In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act. Unknown
- I have no plans, no prospects; I cannot step into the future; I can crash into the future, grind into the future, stumble into the future, this I can do; but best of all I can lie still. Franz Kafka from Letters To Felice
- I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds…I have survived so far… I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yann Martel from Life of Pi
- Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you. Léa Seydoux
- I let go. My life is in perfect flow. Unknown
- Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” —- and find that there is no death. Eckhart Tolle
- What I saw wasn’t a ghost. It was simply—myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think? Haruki Murakami from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
- I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. Vladimir Nabokov from Gods
- Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living, and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing. Your soul cares only about what you’re BEING while you’re doing whatever you’re doing. It is a state of BEINGNESS the soul is after, not a state of doingness. Neale Donald Walsch
- Most people are satisfied at just like a ten or something. It’s not to stop at ten; ten is ground zero. Perfection is ground zero. We need to take things to a genius level. Kanye West from BTS GQ Magazine Shoot
- Dear casting directors. Fuck your opinion on my looks. Unknown from Graffiti outside the Balenciaga studio
- Whatever exists at the earth’s center will get me sooner or later. Sooner. Than I think. Margaret Atwood from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986
- There’s a monster at the end of this book. It’s the blank page where the story ends and you’re left alone with yourself and your thoughts. from Welcome to Night Vale
- Of course I’ll forgive her. I have forgiven her. Without forgiveness we’re savages. You’re drowning. from Closer
- Just do what you feel when you feel like it, if you feel like it. Grace Jones from An interview in 1985
- I'll let my hair grow and I'll stumble into 2 am coffee shops with red lipstains on porcelain coffee mugs. The neon lights feel like home. Take my order and add another round of caffeine. I have so much living to do; there is no time for sleep. Unknown from Twelve odd months
- When it feels scary to jump, that is exactly when you jump. Otherwise you end up staying in the same place your whole life. And that I can’t do. from A Most Violent Year
- Getting no message is also a message. Unknown
- Only the maximum state of tension keeps me alive. Virginia Woolf from a diary entry
- You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean. Alan Watts
- And make death proud to take us. William Shakespeare from Anthony and Cleopatra
- If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before. Unknown
- Identity changes but spirit does not. Unknown
- All truths are for me soaked in blood. Friedrich Nietsche
- Always believe in your soul/You've got the power to know/You're indestructible/'Cause you are gold. Spandau Ballet from Gold
- ‘Don’t wait for it,’ I said. ‘Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened up to me.’ Anais Nin
- If everything on earth were rational, nothing would ever happen. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less. Maya Angelou
- Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not. Mooji
- I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated. Toni Morrison
- Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final. Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Hours
- All I know is that I’m off. Which is to say that I move away from myself. I move away from the interior in the interior, I move away from my limits, and I take to the open sea. Hélène Cixous from an interview
- I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. Eavan Boland from In a Time of Violence; Poems: A Woman Painted on a Leaf
- I just woke up one day and decided I didn’t want to feel like that anymore, so I changed. Unknown
- The people you meet at the wrong time are just the wrong people. Unknown
- If they act like they don't care about you, you should believe them. Unknown
- If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again. Thich Nhat Hanh
- The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours. It is an amazing journey, and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins. Bob Moawad
- Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. Eckhart Tolle
- You are never off your path, because you are never on a path. A path is what you are! You cannot be off yourself. Everything you do – everything, everything! – is an opportunity to decide what you prefer. Everything. You can learn from everything. Bashar
- Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Don’t stop until you’re satisfied. You want an explanation? Ask. You want to be successful? Work. Don’t settle for results you don’t want. Don’t stop until you’re satisfied. Unknown
- I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are. Do not go around asking for honesty in what people think; much of what they perceive as thinking is empty anyway because it’s thought out again and again and comes out refined and muddy. The ones who know how to feel might have to say to you a couple of interesting things or not and when they do that, you ought to know how to listen. So learn how to listen. You can’t make someone open up about their feelings in case they don’t want to. But you can remain open yourself through listening deeply and completely; they might want to talk about the weather and keep it simple — allow them to feel the simplicity…Emotion pours out directly or indirectly each time people engage themselves in the process of genuine interaction. Albert Camus
- Life is continuing, life is continuing and what's important to me may be totally unimportant to you, though everything eventually passes, except this very, this very very moment, and the next second we are in another moment and something else happens and everything else is gone, is past, but some of the memories, no, they never really go away, nothing really goes away, it's always here. Unknown
- You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. Fyodor Dostoyevsky from The Brothers Karamazov
- I don’t know anything about the soul. All I know is some things have happened that I don’t understand and they are the most true things I’ve ever known. Marie Howe from an interview c. 1999
- Say nothing behind another's back you'd be unwilling to say in the exact same tone and language to his face. Never assume the motives are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. John Perry Barlow from The Principles of Adult Behavior
- I have an endless scream in me. Rainer Maria Rilke from The Song the Blind Man Sings
- Things are not what they once were to me. What a terrible realization. Anna Kamienska from a diary entry featured in “In That Great River: A Notebook"
- I’m sunk in melancholy or pathos — but always on the edge of tears or beyond. Simone de Beauvoir from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre
- What matters most of all in life is being able to make that contact with another human. Otherwise you are dead, like so many people today are dead. But if you can take that first step toward communication, toward understanding, toward love, then no matter how difficult the future may be–and have no illusions, even with all the love in the world, living can be hellishly difficult–then you are saved. This is all that really matters, isn’t it? Ingmar Bergman from an interview conducted c. October 1964
- All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.” Hermann Hesse from The Complete Fairy Tales; “A Dream Sequence,”
- Both were speechless, because the moment was one of those solemn ones, so rare and so brief in this world, when the soul seems to feel something of celestial bliss. These instants when two souls thus converse in a language understood by no other are not to be described; then all that is human is hushed, and the two immaterial beings become mysteriously united for life in this world and eternity in the next. Victor Hugo from The Man Who Laughs published c. April 1869
- I suffer from a chronic nausea—after I’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened. Susan Sontag from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks
- She’s listening to this: this transformation in herself. Which is still new, mobile, momentary. She doesn’t know who, shortly, she’ll be. Hélène Cixous from Stigmata: Escaping Texts, Bathsheba, Interior Bible
- It’s that I couldn’t bear to be half in this world; I went after Poetry as after the love of my life, as though from one to the other I might not die. I cried in front of waves and saw in poems the clear sky. I took pleasure and revenge. Odysseus Elytis from First Things First
aug 1 2015 ∞
mar 5 2020 +