- "Ces temps sont durs pour les rêveurs." - Amélie
- "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "Your heart felt good / It was drippin' pitch and made of wood." - Modest Mouse
- "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all." - Andre Breton
- "Float on, baby" - Modest Mouse
- "I would close my eyes to daydream... But those silent companions who watch over me from the insides of my eyelids are too brilliant for me to meet face to face." - James Wright
- "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis
- "Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing." - Jack Handey
- "Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease." - Jerry Fodor
- "No," said the Rosebush. "I was just happy to blossom because I couldn't do anything else. The sun was warm and the air so refreshing. I drank of the clear dew and the strong rain; I breathed, I lived. A power rose in me from out of the earth; a strength came down from up above; I felt an increasing happiness, always new, always great, so I had to blossom over and over again. That was my life; I couldn't do anything else." - Hans Christian Andersen
- "Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them." — Gregory David Roberts
- "Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." — Franz Kafka
- "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." — Mark Twain
- "At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it." - Arthur Golden
- "You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else." - Hermann Hesse
- "Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs." - Donna Tartt
- "We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The “waste howling wilderness” of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied “only” by wild animals. Places not used by us are “wastes.” Areas not occupied by us are “desolate.” Could the desolation be in the soul of man?" - John A. Livingston
- "What is to give light must endure burning." - Viktor Frankl
- "Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had trouble with transitions. I don’t mean the usual life transitions of birth, death, divorce, moving — everyone has trouble with those. No, I mean the little transitions, like the one between waking up and putting my feet on the floor. Or between turning off the car and going into the house. Or between getting out of the shower and getting dressed. You can see why life has been very, very hard for me." - Alison Luterman
- "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." - A. A. Milne
- "Tu me fais pitié, toi si faible, sur cette Terre de granit. Je puis t'aider un jour si tu regrettes trop ta planète." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- "For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again." - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer." - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." - Rainer Maria Rilke
- "Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God; oh God!" - William James (under the influence of nitrous oxide)
- "I have long found it impossible to visit anywhere; the novelty and excitement would annihilate me." - Charles Darwin
- "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." - Walter Pater
- "And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper / oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two / beautiful bodies of your lungs." - Mary Oliver
- "You have a life - just imagine that! / You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe / still another." - Mary Oliver
- "Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world." - Mary Oliver
- "Thus we act: and perhaps action itself is the Anatole's Curlicue of our era. It is high time to recognize that action, and action alone, will be the agent that transmutes the flowery barrier of unutterability into an arbitrary but sacred iota of purposefulness, which cannot help but penetrate into an otherwise nameless and universally spaghettified lack of meaning, which smears and beclouds the crab-lit hopes of half-beings begging for deliverance from their own private, yet strangely tuberculine maelstroms that begat, and begotten were from, a howling sea of ribosomal plagiarism." - Y. Serm Clacoxia
- "I felt only very strange and small. Like I was sitting inside myself in little pieces. As though I could, if I wished, take myself apart like a Russian doll and find myself in layers there, each one smaller, and more hollowed than the last." - Johanna Skibsrud
- "You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." - The Grand Budapest Hotel
- "How can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet - for me, anyway - all that's worth living for lies in that charm?" - Donna Tartt
- "When the heart is broken, it is also open." - Dale Smith
- "I can't go on, I'll go on." - Samuel Beckett
- "Show me a garden that's bursting into life." - Snow Patrol
- "We're the heirs to the glimmering world." - The National
- "We gaze into the night / as if remembering the bright unbroken planet / we once came from, / to which we will never / be permitted to return. / We are amazed how hurt we are. / We would give anything for what we have." - Tony Hoagland
- "I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human." - David Bowie
- "Le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivre." - Paul Valéry
- "Love is not a symptom of time. Time is just a symptom of love." - Joanna Newsom
- "We must travel in the direction of our fear." - John Berryman
- "Listen to music you do not understand. Dance to it."
- "To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome". Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around." - Warren Sharpe
- "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- "I believe that human beings are spiritual beings in that they can create something in their minds--and then reify it. That's a power typically ascribed to God. And, of course, there is beauty and our response to it. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is the ineffable, subjective experience of consciousness, as if looking through a window upon the physical world and transcending it. What greater mystery do we need?" - lek844
- "I believe there are some people who really do want, if only subconsciously, an end to the world. They want to be spared the responsibilities of maintaining that world, to be spared the effort of imagination needed to realize...a future." - Watchmen
- "I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth." - Simone de Beauvoir
- "Perhaps you will think I'm ridiculous but I would be ashamed of myself if I never dared to be." - Simone de Beauvoir
- "And yet I loved life passionately. It needed very little to restore my confidence in it, and in myself: a letter from one of my pupils at Berck, the smile of a Belleville working girl, the confidence of a fellow-student at Neuilly, a look from Zaza, a thank-you, a kind word. As soon as I felt I was useful and loved, the horizon brightened and again I would begin to make fresh resolutions: 'Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.' I was more and more certain that I had 'masses of things to say': and I would say them. On my nineteenth birthday I wrote in the library at the Sorbonne a long dialogue between two voices, both of which were mine: one spoke of the vanity of all things, of disgust and weariness; the other affirmed that life, even a sterile existence, was beautiful. From day to day, from one hour to the next I would pass from depression to exaltation. But all through that autumn and winter the dominating thing in me was an anguished fear that one day I would again find myself 'broken by life.'" - Simone de Beauvoir
- "Oh, I have a medical condition alright. It's called caring too much - and it's incurable!" - Parks and Rec
- "Of course, you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and you must be indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed; for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another." - Rainer Maria Rilke
- "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." - Rumi
- "To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline
- "And then it occurred to me...that those might be the three most beautiful words in the English language. 'We have time.'" - Ransom Riggs
- "It may seem like an uphill battle, but beauty is completely in you." - Sufjan Stevens
- "L'amour vers soi-même est le début du roman qui dure toute la vie."
- “You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.” - Hunter S Thompson
- "If someone does not want me it is not the end of the world. But if I do not want me, the world is nothing but endings." - Nayyirah Waheed
- "All night I rose and fell, as if in water, / grappling with a luminous doom. By morning / I had vanished at least a dozen times / into something better." - Mary Oliver
- "There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite." - Jorge Luis Borges
- "You don't become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master." - Nassim Taleb
sep 13 2011 ∞
jul 2 2021 +