- “Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” E.E Cummings
- “Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.” - James Dean
- “There is nothing that cannot happen today.” - Mark Twain
- “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” - E.E Cummings
- "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something." - Henry David Thoreau
- “I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?” - John Lennon
- “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” - Horace Walpole
- "Soft glow: people are in their houses, they have undoubtedly turned on the lights too. They read, they watch the sky from the window. For them it means something different. They have aged differently. They live in the midst of legacies, gifts, each piece of furniture holds a memory. Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paperweights, screens, shawls. They have closets full of bottles, stuffs, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything. The past is a landlord’s luxury. Where shall I keep mine? You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free." - Jean-Paul Sartre
- "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." - Alan Watts
- "Reason is the most naive of all superstitions." - Ayn Rand
- “Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.” - Euripides
- “It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.” - W. Somerset Maugham
- “He who does not enjoy solitude does not love freedom.” Schopenhauer
- “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty, men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” - John Steinbeck
- “Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.” - Henry Miller
- “Everything I do is full of death. Every step brings her closer, every moment, every breath, aids and abets her hateful work. Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do contains death. In fact, living is dying!” - Guy de Maupassant
- "There was a time in my demented youth, when somehow I suspected that the truth about survival after death was known to every human being: I alone knew nothing, and a great conspiracy of books and people hid the truth from me. There was the day when I began to doubt man’s sanity: How could he live without knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom awaited consciousness beyond the tomb? And finally there was the sleepless night when I decided to explore and fight the foul, the inadmissible abyss, devoting all my twisted life to this" - Vladimir Nabokov
- "What moment in the gradual decay does resurrection choose? What year? What day? Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape? Are some less lucky, or do all escape? A syllogism: other men die, but I am not another, therefore I’ll not die. Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time, a singing in the ears. In this hive I’m locked up. Yet, if prior to life we had been able to imagine life, what mad, impossible, unutterably weird, wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!" - Vladimir Nabokov
- "It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants; that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all." - John Donne
- "To be capable of everything and do justice to everything, one certainly does not need less spiritual force and èlan and warmth, but more. What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. But I assure you, they are nevertheless burning with subdued fires." - Herman Hesse
- “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.” - George Bernard Shaw
- “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.” - Aldous Huxley
- “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it.” - Gandhi
- “We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.” - Chuck Palahniuk
- “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose A family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else.” - Irvine Welsh
- “With every farewell, a new memory is born.” - Salvador Dali
- "Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to male it logical; don’t edit you own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." - Franz Kafka
- “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” - Franz Kafka
- “I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?” - Charles Bukowski
- "Death is always waiting for you at the end of it all. I can see death now so close to me that I often feel I must push it off with my hand. It covers the earth and occupies the whole of space. I see it whichever way I turn. Tiny animals run over on the or, falling leaves, a white hair in a friend's beard, anything like that terrifies me because they seem to be screaming at me: "Take a look, that's death!" It poisons everything I do, everything I see, everything I eat and drink, everything I love, moonlight, sunrise, the open sea, a lovely river and the gentle breeze of a summer evening. And nobody ever comes back, ever… You can keep copies of statues, moulds which can reproduce the same objects; but my body, my face, my thoughts, my desires, will never return. And yet there'll be millions and millions of people with a few square inches of face, a nose, eyes, forehead, cheeks, a mouth like me and a soul, too, yet I shall never come back, nothing recognizably me will ever reappear amongst all those countless different creatures, indefinably different even though more or less the same." - Guy de Maupassant
dec 26 2011 ∞
mar 1 2016 +